Farmworkers in the US cultivate their own heat safety standards

Washington | Thomson Reuters Foundation—Heat records have repeatedly been toppled in recent weeks, just when farms in some of the hottest parts of United States are at their busiest.

That has Lupe Gonzalo worried.

“A lot of places in the field, you don’t have access to shade, to clean and fresh drinking water,” said Gonzalo, a senior staff member with the non-profit Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), who works with farmworkers across several southern states.

For years Gonzalo picked tomatoes, berries, sweet potatoes and other produce, and the heat was always an issue. But her concerns are mounting.

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“It’s getting hotter and hotter as climate change continues, and it will continue to be an issue for workers,” Gonzalo, 43, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“We’ve already seen far too many people become ill and even lose their lives. So this is truly an urgent issue,” she said.

While regulations to protect agricultural workers from the heat have been held up by political wrangling, Gonzalo and her colleagues have spearheaded an alternate strategy.

They seek to sidestep the slow and increasingly politicized government machinery and instead appeal directly to consumers and large brands.

Gonzalo and others in the CIW set up the Fair Food Program to strike deals directly with large companies.

The companies pledge to pay fair wages, eliminate sexual harassment and other issues – including increasingly stringent heat protections – in return for Fair Food Program certification for their products.

The heat-related measures include providing shade, having required breaks, training for workers and supervisors, electrolyte-infused water, and the ability to seek care without fear of retaliation.

‘Sourced for good’

The program currently covers tens of thousands of workers in 10 states, through agreements with companies such as Walmart, McDonald’s, Subway and others.

The group also works with farmworkers in Chile and South Africa, and is seeking to expand to other countries.

At national grocery store Whole Foods, for instance, consumers can purchase Fair Food Program-certified sweet potatoes and cut flowers labelled as “Sourced for Good”.

Now the program’s reach is about to expand significantly, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) highlighted its approach for special acknowledgement under a new program aimed at addressing human rights and worker retention on farms.

Last month, the first-ever pilot awards were made under the program, which the Fair Food Program said would see it expand to 13 new states, nearly doubling the number of farms covered.

Tomato grower Jon Esformes, whose company received one of the awards, has implemented the Fair Food Program guidelines on his operations across the United States and Mexico. He said he took the steps after sitting down for the first time to simply talk with his workers about their concerns.

“I found very quickly a group of people that were interested in the same things I was interested in,” he said. “We want to provide a safe and fair workplace, we want to have transparency, we need our workers to feel like it is their farm.”

Protection decades overdue

The U.S. government has dragged its feet on worker heat protections for decades, said Juanita Constible, a senior advocate with the heat solutions program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

About 51 million U.S. workers are at high risk to heat, with less than a fifth of those covered by standards, the think tank has found.

The federal government is only now updating 1970s rules, last week releasing a proposal that would offer heat protections for indoor and outdoor workers, including requiring employers to provide workers with water and shaded or air-conditioned areas above certain temperatures.

Still, a final rule could take years, with recent moves by the Supreme Court potentially further threatening such efforts.

While business associations said they were still reviewing the new proposal, farming and construction lobby groups have criticized early steps in the new process, warning of burdens to businesses.

Yet, Constible said, “the research has kept piling up that heat is not only potentially deadly to workers, but also drastically affects their productivity – billions of work hours lost in the U.S. and around the world because it’s too darn hot.”

The probability of work-related accidents rises by nearly six per cent when temperatures pass 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius), according to research from the Workers Compensation Research Institute published in May.

In the absence of federal action, five states have passed their own laws with a sixth on the horizon, though these vary significantly in scope.

Cities have also taken proactive steps, including in June in Tucson, Arizona, but such efforts have run into political resistance, with new local rules in Florida and Texas halted by state officials.

Constible worries such politicization could continue, which she says underscores the importance of the Fair Food Program’s strategy of appealing to brands and consumers.

“I’m a huge fan. I think it’s been amazingly significant for those workers,” she said.

Farms that can ensure workers feel safe and have access to the tools to keep them healthy have found it easier to entice prospective workers, a UDSA spokesperson said.

That is what Esformes, the CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers, has found amid recent worker shortages.

“When the rest of North America was reeling with lack of workers, we did not have enough jobs for the people who wanted to work for us. And the reason is we’ve created a workplace-of-choice environment,” said Esformes, 61.

He said May saw the hottest temperatures ever recorded in parts of Florida, just as farms were in full harvest, but that Fair Food Program heat guidelines were in operation for the nearly 3,500 workers on the company’s 15,000 acres (6,070 hectares).

“There’s definitely a cost associated with it. Electrolyte powder is not cheap; breaks aren’t cheap,” Esformes said. “But you know what also is not cheap? People getting sick and people feeling like they’re not safe.”

—The Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters.