Farmworkers arrive to work before the sun lights the fields. For upwards of nine hours a day, they bend, pick produce, fill their baskets, stand and repeat. Often, they leave the fields long after nightfall.

 

Despite their crucial tasks, picking and packaging the food that feeds America, farmworkers have fewer labor protections than any other worker in the United States and receive poverty-level pay.

 

“Farmworkers historically have been excluded from most major protective laws,“ said Greg Schell, deputy director of Southern Migrant Legal Services. “As a result, they have very low wages and bad living conditions.”

 

Every day, farmworkers face deadly levels of heat, dehydration, toxic chemicals, physical strain from repetitive motions and heavy lifting, insects and snakes. Yet, they are excluded from the Fair Labor Standard Act and the National Labor Relations Act that ensure protections for U.S. workers. These exclusions leave farmworkers without the legal protections for overtime pay, unemployment insurance, and collective organizing and bargaining.

 

“So, the person putting the lettuce on the bun at McDonald’s gets overtime, but the person harvesting it doesn’t,” Schell said.

 

Agricultural labor has been excluded from these protections since the 1930s when President Franklin Roosevelt created labor laws as part of the New Deal. At the time, Southern Democrats held the majority in Congress and their states were still dependent on a large African-American work force for their plantation economies.

 

“The Democrats in the South made it known that they were okay with the minimum wage as long as it exempted the African Americans. They couldn't have the right to organize or overtime,” Schell said.

 

In addition to being excluded from labor protections, farmworkers do not receive equal protections under the Occupational Safety & Health Act. Under OSHA, farmworkers are exempt from worker’s compensation and are excluded from 19 out of 26 general protections such as protection from hazardous chemicals or the right to proper protective equipment.

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Instead, farm workers receive protection from pesticides through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Worker Protection Standard, which has not been updated in more than 20 years.

 

“There were no real regulations to protect farmworkers from pesticides until 1992, and even those regulations were not implemented until 1995,” said Jeannie Economos, pesticide safety and environmental health project coordinator at the Farmworkers Association of Florida. “And there were very bare minimal standards to protect farmworkers from pesticides, which did not even give farmworkers the same protections from the same toxic chemicals that almost all workers have under OSHA.”

 

Economos said that while the WPS requires training for farmworkers, certification from applicators, and personal protective equipment, it suffers from poor enforcement. The United States Department of Agriculture states there are 47,100 farms in Florida. According to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, there are 56 inspectors across the state responsible for inspecting thousands of farms.

 

“We have lots of farmworkers tell us that a grower or supervisor or an applicator will give them a backpack sprayer and say go out and spray this area with little to no knowledge or training, it happens all too frequently,” Economos said. “We also have people tell us that they are told to mix pesticides or handle pesticides with virtually no training and in even too often with no personal protective equipment.”

 

In 2010, former farmworker Yessica Ramirez was told to mix pesticides for two months while pregnant. She was not given any protective equipment and received minimal training.

 

“En el trabajo, te ponen el video pero en el video no te explican. Nada más te explican como que tienes que protegerte y cómo puedes protegerte pero no te dicen que pasa si no te proteges,” Ramirez said, “Pero tampoco no te dan el material suficiente para protegerte entonces muchas veces la gente tienen que comprar su propio material para poder, si es que tu quieres protegerte, pero a veces la gente no toman la importanza porque no saben que son los efectos si tú estás expuesta a los pesticidas.” (At work, they play you the video but the video doesn’t explain anything. It only tells you to protect yourself and how to protect yourself, but it doesn’t tell you what happens if you don’t protect yourself. But also, they don’t provide you enough material to protect yourself, so often times people have to buy their own material to be able to, and that’s if you want. But sometimes people don’t see the importance because they don’t know what the effects are of pesticide exposure.)

       

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

       

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

       

The WPS was revised in 2015 by the EPA to include annual mandatory training for farmworkers about their rights and responsibilities, mandatory record-keeping to improve enforcement of rules, and suspending applications when people came within 100 feet of application equipment.

 

The revisions were supposed to go into effect March 2017, but in May 2017, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt put the revisions on hold. Pruitt also overturned the decision to cease the commercial use of Chlopyrifos, a pesticide which has been linked to inhibited brain development in children by researchers from Columbia University, the University of California-Davis, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

 

Because farm work is arduous with limited labor protections, it has historically been done by vulnerable populations, Schell said.

 

“When I first started, most of the farmworkers were African Americans. They’ve been replaced, first by the Chicanos, Hispanic-Americans, then undocumented Hispanics,” he said. “There’s always a group more desperate.”

 

According to the National Agricultural Workers Study, 73 percent of farmworkers in the U.S. today are immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America. Workers sometimes choose to stay quiet about labor violations because of fear of deportation, losing their jobs, and not being able to provide for their family, Ramirez said.

 

Considering a population that lives in fear of reporting violations, Schell believes a solution isn’t possible without better inspections, enforcement of regulations and clear consequences for violating the laws.

 

“At a minimum, farmworkers should have the same rights as everybody else when they’re working,” he said.