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I’m a blogger fellow with Brave New Films on their 16 Deaths Per Day campaign for worker safety. Join us on Facebook.
It’s hard to find a tougher job in America than harvesting in the fields. Throughout California, known as the nation’s salad bowl, farmworkers, frequently migrants with little knowledge of their rights as workers or even the English language, toil in triple-digit heat, often without shade or water breaks. Needless to say, this dangerous work has resulted in serious injury and even deaths.
Jose Rosario Valencia started feeling nauseated just after 9 a.m. on July 17. His heart rate sped up and his knees buckled.
Valencia was scared. He’d heard of other farmworkers dying of heat stroke in the fields.
“I thought about my family and how they would suffer,” said Valencia, 46, who moves irrigation pipes in the onion fields.
Even though California passed a groundbreaking law in 2005 to protect farmworkers from heat illness and death, there have been as many as 10 heat-related fatalities in the years since. Among the victims in 2008 were a pregnant teenager who died when her body temperature climbed to 108 degrees after working in a Lodi vineyard and a 37-year-old man who suffered heat stroke after loading table grapes near Bakersfield. The state has confirmed heat as the cause of six of the deaths and said it may have been a factor in the others.
Farmworkers get paid by the piece, based on how much they load, and their employers set quotas that they are expected to cover. They have every incentive to avoid breaks and work as hard as possible; in some cases, the water is simply out there for display. As a result, farmworkers skip bathroom breaks. They skip water breaks. They stay out in the fields under 100-degree heat with the fear that they would be fired if they did not. And as a result, workers die.
The most celebrated case in recent years was that of Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, a 17 year-old farmworker who died of heat strike in the fields in the summer of 2008. She was pregnant at the time.
Maria collapsed while working for Merced Farm Labor in a vineyard owned by West Coast Grape Farming outside of Stockton, CA. Maria worked for nine hours in temperatures that reached 101 degrees. There was no water nearby. There was no shade.
After about 2 hours of delays, Maria was finally taken to a clinic. Her temperature upon arrival was 108.4 degrees. Maria’s heart stopped six times in the next two days before she passed away. Doctors said if emergency medical help had been summoned or she had been taken to the hospital sooner, she might have survived.
In 2009, Cal-OSHA, the state occupational safety board, delivered regulations to combat heat-stress related injuries and deaths. The employers first tried to amend the regulations, trying to classify the vines in the vineyard as “shade.” But they failed, as Cal-OSHA refused to rewrite the laws.
However, lobbying for changes in the law is only one way that employers evade oversight. Under the Schwarzenegger Administration and during the historic budget crisis in the state, funding for Cal-OSHA has shrunk. Only two HUNDRED inspectors monitor all the worksites in the nation’s most populous state, including the 35,000 farms. There are more fish and game wardens in California than worksite inspectors.
And if an employer is cited, they can use a favorable appeals process to reduce the fines or dismiss the violations, something which has been done repeatedly in recent years. All violations can be appealed to a judge, appointed by the appeals board. Then the appeals board can vacate the judge’s ruling. This offers many opportunities to game the system.
The head of the state Senate’s Labor Committee accused a workplace safety board Wednesday of being biased toward employers and ignoring a law that requires fines for failing to report on-the-job injuries.
After a hearing, Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) said he might introduce legislation that could lead to criminal charges against board members if they continue to disregard the law that calls for a $5,000 fine for employers’ failing to report accidents in a timely manner.
The hearing came after a Times investigation last fall that found that the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health appeals board repeatedly dismissed and reduced the penalties levied by division inspectors, even in situations in which workers had died or were seriously injured.
One recent case was dismissed based on a spelling typo in one document. And this is more about ideology than budget problems: for example, Cal-OSHA received stimulus money to hire more inspectors, but has so far declined to do so.
Despite all of these obstacles, the new emphasis on worker safety by Cal-OSHA in the last growing season did pay some dividends. Last year, more vigorous training and enforcement efforts did serve to reduce heat-related illnesses and deaths. But already Cal-OSHA is talking about backing off, content that the media storm over the plight of the farmworkers has largely ended.
Rising compliance and awareness, Welsh said, may allow his agency to relax its inspection efforts in 2010.
“The 3,400 inspections we did last year was a little more than we can sustain,” he said.
This is why we need HR 2067, the Protecting America’s Workers Act (PAWA). A fully resourced OSHA could fill in the gaps where the state-level agencies often fail. They could deliver larger penalties without the byzantine appeals process at agencies like Cal-OSHA. They could provide the ability for families to seek justice from employers through the courts. Simply put they could restore the promise of a safe and health workplace for everybody in America.
Even in the fields.
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Thanks for this enlightening report.
I’ve always wondered how much of this problem is related to fear and hatred of the Mexican farmworkers themselves. Would such working conditions be allowed if the workers were Anglos?
I would support this in every way, I have witnessed similar tragedy my years working in the medical field. Laws should be enforced and technology should be mandated for assisting the people who touch your edible plants and animals.
Thank you dday – important work.
When I was a kid, I worked on farms around home putting up hay and weeding tobacco. It was then hard work, minimum salary, and at least one time, I almost had a heat stroke.
Thanks for highlighting this David.
i wish all the farmworkers would go on strike
our food supply would come to a screeching halt and we’d have to bargain with them
This is a really horrible situation, and farmworkers are not the only undocumented workers who deal with very bad workplace and living issues. The basic issue is that the costs of many products and services (including food production and service) are kept much lower by using these workers in the lowest-cost manner possible, circumventing regular labor laws and customs. These workers are sufficiently hungry for wages (campesinos in rural Mexico and Central America have even worse wages than the effective sub-minimum-wage earned here) that they will try to persevere through anything. The employers can all then provide the service at a cost affordable to their various consumers and still make a lot of profit.
Fundamentally, the issues may come down to the expectations that Americans all have of artificially low costs for food and many other products and services. Every time we eat we are eating something that in whole or in its parts passed through the hands of undocumented workers in all likelihood.
If the workers are protected, their employers will pass all raised costs on to us in order to keep their profits high, so to address the issue, we all need to think about things like expensive food and services in exchange for protecting the safety and dignity of the people producing the food and services …
I’m sure there are more than a few owners of these large agri-business concerns who do not hesitate to bitch about the “illegal aliens comin’ to take over Amurrican jobs.” I’m also inclined to believe that these same individuals look the other way when harvest time arrives. Easier to pay slave wages and treat the workers like shit when you can threaten them with deportation.
Any bets they just go in the fields? Ok now I’m feeling sick I was about to have lunch.
As a former steelworker, I can tell you that all steelworkers are aware that the only thing that stands between them and the many accidents-waiting-to-happen in the industry is OSHA. The word among workers was that if anything happens, when the company investigates, the findings will always blame the victim. Anyone who works in a job that involves danger and believes that most companies care more about their workers than about money (and they will surely use their responsibilities to their stockholder as an excuse)is living in a fools paradise. Maybe your immediate supervisor cares since s/he sees their workers face to face daily, but go up the ladder and that turns around quite quickly. There may be some exceptions, but workers should operate on the premise that most large corporations consider their relationship to employees as an adversarial one, and therein lies the problem. Thanks, Dday, for bringing attention to this problem.
Good post.
Also,
[snip]
- from ‘It Turns Out The Irish Are The “New Irish” ‘ ( http://www.alternet.org/immigration/145938/it_turns_out_the_irish_are_the_%E2%80%9Cnew_irish%E2%80%9D?page=entire )
George Will needs a month in the fields lets see what he says about global warming being a myth then.
You would win that bet, TCU. That’s exactly what happens — and one reason why washing your store-bought veggies is so essential.
Ok the obvious solution is higher pay and lower quotas for harvesting crops to get paid. Is there anyone in Congress talking about this and is there any chance it will pass?
Raise the wages sell it as a first step to Ron’s people for hiring Americans to do the job. Lets have all the GOP Tea Bagger supporters argue against paying Americans more money to do immigrant labor.
Divide and Conquer!
Don’t remind me last two days I ate 2 frozen pizzas with veggies I did not feel good at all.
Worker safety is good but if the quota is still to high then people still have to work to get paid right?
Lower the food quota and workers will have time for bathroom and water breaks.
Lots of Irish support for the immigration rights marches lots of Irish and Polish Immigrants in Chicago Obama should know that!
As a Union Worker I’ve been on jobs were the employer would not have water on the job. All I needed to do was to complain and the water was there. For someone that works in fear of being deported to complain about having water on the job is inhumane!
Book Salon up at the Mothership with Moby and Miyun Park’s Gristle: Why You Should Think Twice About Meat hosted by Jill Richardson
This is why we need HR 2067, the Protecting America’s Workers Act (PAWA). A fully resourced OSHA could fill in the gaps where the state-level agencies often fail.
If you haven’t read it already, you should check out the NY Times phenomenal series When Workers Die. It won the Pulitzer Prize 6 years ago. One of the points the Times reporter, David Barstow, makes is that California is the only state that prosecutes safety violation-related deaths as homicides. OSHA and the other state agencies merely levy fines. I see that HR 2067 would bring federal law in line with California’s. .
Years later, I still remember feeling sick when I read the first article in the series and saw the photo with this caption– The body of Patrick Walters as it was removed from the trench that collapsed and killed him in 2002. His family’s lawyers provided the photograph.