Street Roots • Aug. 3-9, 2018
FARMWORKERS, from page 4
News
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we re not going to have agricultural workers,”
said Arturo Rodriguez, who’s served as
president of United Farm Workers since Cesar
Chavez’s passing in 1993. He spoke with Street
Roots in advance of visiting Hood River to give
a keynote speech at the Farmworker Housing
Conference on July 25.
He said that while farmworker families
continue to be one of the lowest paid groups of
workers, many agricultural centers, such as
Oregon’s Willamette Valley and Napa Valley’s
wine region, have become unaffordable.
“At the same time,” said Rodriguez, “Not
everybody can work in agriculture. It requires
somebody that knows how to do it; that can
tolerate the working conditions that you have to
work in.”
n ironic side effect of the federal
government making life in the United
States more difficult for immigrants is that
farmers are being forced to make concessions
that immigrant workers have been fighting for
decades to achieve.
In the past, farmers had a surplus of labor, so
wages stayed low and working conditions didn’t
improve. They could easily replace disgruntled
workers.
Now, said Rodriguez, because farmers have
grown frustrated with leaving millions of dollars
out in their fields because they don’t have
bodies to harvest their crops, farmworkers are
starting to see their wages and benefits
ipqrease as their employers compete for their
labor.
Some growers have reached out to
Rodriguez’s union - a longtime adversary - in
an attempt to learn how they can make
conditions more desirable to workers, he said.
“A lot of major growers are coming to us in
confidence, saying, ‘look; we gotta figure out a
better solution here,’” he said.
Through collective bargaining and other
programming, his union is helping growers find
ways to improve working conditions for farmers
and to ensure people being brought across the
border as part of the federal guest-worker
program are not being exploited by Mexican
cartels - a growing problem.
In June, United Farm Workers secured a
contract through collective bargaining for the
employees of one of the country’s largest
vegetable producers, D’Arrigo Brothers. In a
huge win for the farmworkers’ union, the
California-based grower now offers fully paid
health insurance to its employees and their
families, as well as higher wages.
On the West Coast, lawmakers have begun to
pass legislation and adopt rules aimed at
improving the lives of farmworkers as well.
In 2016, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed
into law a bill that included agricultural workers
under minimum wage and overtime laws
afforded under the Fair Labor Standards Act,
making California the first, and still the only,
state in the nation to do so.
When the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency updated its Agricultural Worker
Protection Standard, Oregon Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), after
a long and often contentious rulemaking
process, passed pesticide protection laws more
strict than the EPA’s for agriculture workers,
taking effect in January, 2019 (see “After
unprecedented input, Oregon OSHA adopts new
farmworker protection standards” at news.
A
streetroots.org).
In recent years, Washington and California
have passed regulations to combat heat-stress
injuries among outdoor workers.
To catalyze the heat-stress legislation in
California, United Farm Workers elevated the
death of 17-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez
Jimenez. She was two months pregnant and
working in a vineyard near Stockton, Calif., in
2008 when she collapsed on the job in
95-degree heat with no access to water. Her
employer put her in the back of a work van with
no air conditioning. When she was finally taken
to the hospital at the end of the workday, her
body temperature had reached 108 degrees and
she was in a coma. She died two days later.
California’s heat-stress law, requiring that
workers have access to water and shade among
other provisions, has made a tangible
difference, Rodriguez said. Now,
when he drives along Highway
99 through the agriculturally-
rich San Joaquin Valley, he sees
trailer sites where farmworkers
are able to sit on chairs around
tables in the shade to eat
their lunch and
drink water. A vast,
improvement from
sitting on the ground,
he said.
Additionally,
he said, safety
inspections are up
and heat-related deaths are
down. Through educational
efforts, workers know the sijgjs of
heat stress and they know their
employers are required to provide
access to drinkable water and
medical assistance in cases of injury.
“This has been an extremely hot
summer already,” he said. “With a
summer like this, we’d probably
already experienced, one, two, three
different deaths.”
While California hasn’t seen a
heat-related death among
farmworkers so far this
season, United
Farm Workers is
examining recent
heat-caused
fatalities on farms
in Georgia and Arizona.
ince last summer,
Oregon OSHA has
been collecting data
related to heat-stress
violations and injuries as
part of its “heat stress
emphasis program,” said
the agency’s
spokesperson, Aaron
Corvin.
S
See
FARMWORKERS,
page 7
Page 5