Two farms in Northern California, where a disgruntled employee killed seven immigrants They owe workers thousands of dollars in 2023 and failed to provide them with safe and decent housing, the U.S. Department of Labor said Tuesday.

Concord Farms Inc. and California Terra Gardens, located in Half Moon Bay, They will have to pay more than 450 thousand dollars. 62 employees are facing wage arrears and more than 71 thousand are facing fines.

On both farms, workers and their families They were overcrowded in dirty conditionsMany lived in illegal housing built from shipping containers and dilapidated trailers, the Department of Labor (DOL) said in a statement.

Investigators found that 39 California Terra Gardens workers They were forced to sleep on dirty mattresses and exposed to insects and garbage.. In addition, the owners of Xianming Guan and his wife Liming Zhu also illegally withheld money from workers’ salaries for renting these houses.

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Workers at Concord Farm They were placed in makeshift rooms. and moldy plants in an insect-infested greenhouse, and farm owner Grace Tung did not pay the immigrants overtime.

Alberto Raymond, deputy director of the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor in San Francisco, California, said in a statement that authorities are “committed to holding employers accountable when they ignore their legal obligations to provide adequate housing and pay employees all legally earned wages for the hard work they do in difficult conditions.”

The investigation began after Chunli Zhao, 67, shot and killed his colleagues on January 23, 2023, killing seven, all immigrants. three of them are Mexican.

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Zhao, who is still awaiting trial, I worked at Terra Gardens at the time of the shooting and was previously employed at Concord Farms.

Authorities said the fatal shooting occurred after a supervisor told Zhao that I would have to pay $100 per team were damaged, according to the newspaper Los Angeles Times. (EFE)