‘They want to keep denying us our rights’: workers in Vermont’s $5.4bn dairy industry fight for basic labor protections

Migrant labor fuels much of Vermont’s dairy industry, but workers are exempt from minimum wage rules, overtime protections and the right to unionize

Hilario’s work shift on a Vermont dairy farm began at 10.30pm when he lifted a red fleece blanket and rose from a makeshift bed next to the kitchen sink.

The 65-year-old pushed aside a lace curtain that covered his apartment door, dividing his room from the dairy’s sour-smelling milking parlor. In the barn, a horseshoe-shaped milking platform hummed awake. Super-producer black-and-white Holstein cows, twice Hilario’s size, peered out from vinyl curtains.