A killer heat wave, the latest manifestation of global warming, made its away across the United States in July and August 2006, causing temperatures to soar well into the triple digits in some areas. Hundreds died in the suffocating heat, including many elderly city dwellers who couldn’t afford air conditioning or whose air conditioning failed because of power outages.
While those who work in offices, stores, or restaurants often have air-conditioning on the job, many other workers toil
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Currently, while the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration issues advisories, it has no national regulations regarding heat stress on the job, according to spokesperson Elizabeth Todd. (The New Standard, June 22)
Until recently, there have been no such regulations on the state level either, except on a temporary emergency basis.
In California, thanks to the efforts of the United Farm Workers and other labor organizations, permanent regulations were adopted on June 15 by the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board, requiring employers to provide farm workers, construction workers, and others laboring in the hot sun access to shade and water.
The new rules require that workers get:
- Access to one quart of water per employee per hour for an entire shift.
- A right to a break in the shade of at least five minutes as a preventative measure or when suffering from heat illness.
- Training on preventative measures.
Fines can reach $25,000 per violation. The rules will be in place year-round, as opposed to the previous emergency rules, which went into effect only in hot weather. (Contra Costa Times, June 17)
The UFW has launched a campaign to educate farm workers throughout California about their rights under the new rules—developed after five farm workers died of heat-related causes last year.
Rules too soft
The new rules might be too soft, cautioned Dr. Robert Harrison, a former member of the Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board. “This standard is a first step but still might place workers at risk in the fields this summer,” he said.
The rules place the burden on the workers to ask for breaks, and “by the time workers get symptoms of heat illness, it can be too late,” said Harrison, a professor of occupational medicine at University of Calif. San Francisco, whose term on the standards board Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger chose not to renew.
Harrison said he was in favor of additional requirements, such as mandatory rest breaks at specified intervals. It’s “risky … to always rely on workers to ask for rest breaks,” he said.
Fran Schreiberg, executive director of Worksafe, a coalition of labor and community groups, pointed out that workers who get paid at piece rates might not ask for breaks, for fear of losing money. Under piece rate systems, pay is based on how much work gets done, not how long you work.
UFW spokesperson Marc Grossman said the union supports the measure as the most politically feasible step to protect outdoor workers, but said expecting workers to file complaints is an ineffective cushion against employer abuse.
“The great majority of the force is undocumented [immigrants],” he said. “Those folks are much less likely to go to the government for help.”
Juana Carbajal, a grape harvester at Giumarra Vineyards in Edison, California, said that even when workers know they have the right to take a break, many still feel they should not.
“When the grape harvest starts, sometimes its 100 and 101 [degrees],” she told the New Standard. “Out there in the fields, it gets really hot. They’re always rushing you. When we’re working, we don’t have time to drink water the way we should.”
Carbajal, who is a member of the UFW and has been a harvester for Giumarra for ten years, said that when packing produce, those working at a below-average speed are sometimes temporarily taken off the clock and docked pay. “If you miss one of the boxes you get punished. They tell you to stop working for a few hours,” she said.
Carbajal said she supports the new regulations as a good first step, but said states should do more to protect workers from heat stress, such as requiring paid sick leave and raising the minimum shade time.
“I recall from last year that the heat was terrible and a lot of people [got] sick,” she said. “And if you got sick they would send you home without pay.”
Agribusiness doesn’t want to provide shade
Meanwhile, despite the inadequacies of the new rules, California growers are trying to avoid complying with them.
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In a recent issue of the agricultural newspaper Capital Press, cited in a UFW website report, Carl Borden, counsel for the California Farm Bureau, a leading voice of California agribusiness, said the new rule requiring access to shade could potentially cause problems. The newspaper quoted Borden: “That could pose compliance issues for employers in certain situations where you may have dozens [and] dozens of employees out there working (and asking for shade) and essentially it requires the erection of a number of shade canopies, for example. … That can be somewhat daunting if we’re talking about a field situation.”
The UFW website points out, “Farm workers do not need to die to save growers an inconvenience. Come on, how hard is it to put up a canopy?” The website urges farm workers and their supporters to e-mail the California Farm Bureau demanding that it “tell its members to obey the new regulations to their fullest ability.”
More militant tactics such as those that were required to get greedy growers to provide portable toilets in the fields may have to be adopted to get them to comply with the much-needed new rules for shade, breaks and water and to strengthen those requirements down the road.
In the meantime, weather forecasters say that most of the United States will see “above normal temperatures” for the rest of August. And, scientists say, for the long-term future, the world will see more and worse heat waves because of global warming.
