The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor
Taylor Farms, the agricultural company widely believed responsible for a cyclospora parasite outbreak currently spreading through shredded lettuce in US grocery stores and fast food outlets, has also been linked to modern-day forced prison labor in Arizona, according to resurfaced 2023 reporting from Prison Legal News. The publication found that Taylor Farms contracted labor from the Arizona Department of Correction, Rehabilitation, and Reentry for just $4.75 an hour, far below federal minimum wage, though the incarcerated workers themselves were reportedly paid only up to $1.50 an hour, with the state’s for-profit arm, Arizona Correctional Industries, pocketing the difference by selling prisoner labor-hours to private companies.
Taylor Farms is far from alone in this arrangement, as other companies including Hickman’s Egg Farms, NatureSweet, and Televerde have similarly contracted incarcerated labor through the same state program.
Most troubling, Prison Legal News found that at least 26 prisoners employed by these companies had previously been detained by ICE, meaning their labor arrangement would have been illegal outside of incarceration, since their status as prisoners was the only thing that legally permitted the low-wage work. Arizona’s DCRR told the publication it had hired out 15,700 “Mexican nationals” between 2008 and 2023 but could not say how many were undocumented immigrants, prompting American Immigration Lawyers Association director Ruben Reyes to say, “I’m venturing a guess that a large majority of the people who are labeled a Mexican national by [DCRR] are unauthorized to work here.”
The revelations tie back to a constitutional loophole in the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” a carve-out that has allowed prison labor to persist as a major industry, generating $11 billion worth of goods in 2022 alone. Taylor Farms did not respond to a request for comment on either the labor allegations or the ongoing cyclospora outbreak.
The exploitation angle here is particularly damning because it reveals a legal architecture specifically designed to profit off a workforce that has no real bargaining power or ability to walk away, workers who couldn’t legally be employed in these same roles if they weren’t incarcerated. Combined with the cyclospora outbreak, this story paints a picture of a supply chain built on cutting corners at every level, from underpaying and exploiting vulnerable labor to apparently inadequate food safety practices that are now sickening consumers nationwide.
