From fields to litigation: farmworker illness and transnational infrastructures of care in Austrian agriculture

Abstract While scholarship has extensively documented the prevalence of farmworker injury and illness at the point of production, less is known about what happens afterward and how harm is managed within farmworker communities. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with Romanian worker households in Austria and Romania, we closely analyse three illness trajectories — a stroke, a lung infection, and haemorrhoids — to examine how harm is produced in agrifood work and how its consequences are handled over time. Through a social reproduction lens, we argue that these illness trajectories cannot be understood as individual medical events because they are shaped by labour regimes that externalise the costs of production onto workers’ bodies and households. Importantly, moments of illness make visible otherwise hidden transnational everyday infrastructures — networks of care, support, and obligation that sustain workers when institutions and employers withdraw. These infrastructures not only absorb the costs of injury but also provide openings to contest harm and translate it into claims for legal accountability.