Gerardo Reyes Chávez, CIW, in Civil Eats: “[Farmworkers in the FFP] don’t feel pressure to keep working under conditions that are placing their lives and their health at risk. And that’s fundamentally different from what happens outside of the program.”

Civil Eats: “This model pioneered by FFP, known as Worker-Driven Social Responsibility, has been adopted by other industries long plagued by abuse. It inspired Bangladesh’s garment industry to form a similar partnership between brands and trade unions, protecting over 2 million factory workers with a legally binding accord.”

As the US gears up for another scorching summer harvest season, experts and advocates are sounding the alarm that more farmworkers deaths due to heat stress are inevitable without enforceable protections. Facing this acute crisis, the Florida legislature responded in the most inhumane way imaginable: by passing a bill that actively blocks local governments from establishing and enforcing protections for outdoor workers. 

For hundreds of thousands of outdoor workers, the lack of effective heat protections is literally a matter of life and death: As Gerardo Reyes told the online food journal “Civil Eats,” we cannot afford to wait for the Florida legislature to find its conscience.

That’s why the CIW is laser focused on expanding the life-saving provisions of the Fair Food Program — which include rigorously enforced heat stress protections that empower workers themselves to monitor those protections in the workplace — to as many farms as possible. And with the support of more consumers, producers, and buyers of good faith, we can provide those best-in-class protections to all farmworkers in this state.

Civil Eats’ Grey Moran wrote an excellent report this week documenting the Florida legislature’s actions, and how the Fair Food Program provides a novel way forward for farmworkers seeking to guarantee their basic human rights via an innovative partnership with buyers and growers. The piece also illustrates how the FFP serves as a blueprint for workers in other industries, including key Florida industries from construction to landscaping, to protect themselves from the myriad dangers at work. 

We’re excited to share that piece with you in full today, as well as a brief excerpt from a related Miami Herald piece, which rounds out how critical programs like the FFP become as climate change accelerates and the need for responsive, dynamic, and enforceable solutions become all-the-more urgent. 

 

Florida to Ban Farmworker Heat Protections. A Groundbreaking Partnership Offers a Solution.

By Grey Moran, March 20, 2024

In this week’s Field Report, the Fair Food Program offers the strongest, legally binding protocols to keep people safe when politicians fall short…

Earlier this month, Florida’s Senate passed a bill banning local jurisdictions from passing measures protecting workers from heat exposure, the latest of a series of draconian laws targeting immigrants and workers in Florida. This bill, which awaits the approval of governor Ron DeSantis, prohibits governments from requiring that employers provide water, shade, and breaks to workers—relatively small measures that can mean the difference between life and death for workers laboring under Florida’s hot sun. This law precedes what is expected to be another record-breaking summer of extreme heat.

“It’s morally repulsive, and it will kill farmworkers,” said Erik Nicholson, a farmworker advocate and the former vice president of United Farm Workers. “I have accompanied the families of too many farmworkers who have needlessly died due to heat stress.”

But Nicholson also highlighted the promise of another avenue to bring strong heat standards to Florida farms: The Fair Food Program (FFP), a groundbreaking partnership between retailers, farmers, and farmworkers that has implemented the strongest, legally binding heat protocols in the nation on Florida’s farms, while bypassing the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.

Originating in Florida’s tomato industry, the program now operates across eleven states and four countries. With the support of a new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) award, it is anticipated to expand this year to protect farmworkers in 25 states.

“We as workers can’t afford to wait for the Florida legislature to find its conscience,” said Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a former farmworker and organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, in a statement. “That’s why we are focused on our partnership with many of the state’s largest growers and on expanding the Fair Food Program.”

The FFP was established in 2011 by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a worker-based human rights organization with a long history of community-based farmworker organizing in Florida. The program is a unique partnership between farmers, farmworkers, and 14 major food retailers—including Subway, Whole Foods, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Taco Bell—that guarantees a set of legally binding farmworker protections for heat and other workplace conditions, which were drafted by workers. An independent, trilingual council operates a 24/7 worker complaint line and audits the participating farms.

“[Farmworkers in the FFP] don’t feel pressure to keep working under conditions that are placing their lives and their health at risk. And that’s fundamentally different from what happens outside of the program,” said Chavez.

Between April and November, Florida’s hottest months, the program’s heat protocol mandates shade on fields, water with electrolytes, and a rest break every two hours. The addition of electrolytes, explained Chavez, was based on “scientific research about the need to incorporate those so that workers can be protected long term in regards to kidney failure.”

The shade is provided by a portable structure attached to a pick-up truck that accompanies workers as they move through the field, he said. Whenever workers need to take a break, the shade structure is nearby. Crew leaders also monitor for signs of heat illness, trained to especially look out for new farmworkers still acclimating to the temperature.

And if a worker does develop symptoms of heat illness, they have the right to stop working and take a break or receive medical attention if necessary. The federal government and state of Florida do not mandate any of these worker protections, which means that participating farms have heat protocols that surpass any regulatory requirements.

Currently, only a handful of states—Washington, California, Oregon, and Colorado—have passed heat protections that extend to outdoor workers. In October 2021, the Biden Administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) initiated a rulemaking process to develop a federal standard to regulate heat exposure. Yet, after over two years, the regulation has yet to be finalized as global temperatures tick upwards.

“It’s been a pretty substantial amount of time for OSHA not to have actually created a regulation for heat stress,” said Laurie Beyranevand, the director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School. “In the absence of federal regulation, people are concerned about the health of farmworkers.”

If the standard isn’t finalized by 2025, she adds, another Trump Administration would be in a position to keep the heat standard pending without ever finalizing it, deferring a promise that farmworkers and advocates have long fought to establish for decades.

Last week, Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, launched a project in which federal health leaders commit to better protect farmworkers from heat and smoke. In the past, the agency has recommended that OSHA finalize standards.

The FFP, however, offers a more immediate avenue of protection for retailers who are willing to come to the table and collaborate with farmworkers and farmers. Beyond concern for the health of farmworkers, major retailers are incentivized to join the program because it guarantees a level of transparency in their supply chain, eliminating the social liability of contracting with farms rife with labor abuse. And farmers sign onto the agreement because it gives them preferential purchasing from the major purchasers, while also ensuring that their workplace practices are ethical and often helping retain employees.

“[The Fair Food Program] is not designed to magically erase the problems and risks of harm. It is designed to respond appropriately, and by doing so in a really effective way, reduce the amount and the types of abuse that take place,” said Chavez. “In the case of a heat illness, it’s the most powerful tool that there is in the country.”

FFP has been quickly expanding beyond Florida’s tomato fields to operate across many crops: flowers, sweet potatoes, onions, corn, peaches, melons, and squash. The program recently added international farms that grow flowers in southern Chile, South Africa, and Mexico, with support from the USDA. The agency also recently launched a pilot to support farms in addressing labor abuses, recognizing the worker-driven social responsibility model as a pathway for achieving the highest human rights standards. This development has incentivized more farms to join the FFP, Chavez said. Based on the applications submitted so far, it could lead to the program launching in as many as 15 new states.

This model pioneered by FFP, known as Worker-Driven Social Responsibility, has been adopted by other industries long plagued by abuse. It inspired Bangladesh’s garment industry to form a similar partnership between brands and trade unions, protecting over 2 million factory workers with a legally binding accord. A similar program, known as Milk with Dignity, has been adopted by Vermont’s dairy industry. The United Kingdom’s fishing industry has been in conversation with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as they build their own version of this model.

“We see this as the blueprint for workers in other realities,” said Chavez. Even after Florida’s move to ban heat protections, he remains hopeful about the promise of this model to support workers when the government fails. “We are in a great moment in history where there is a cure for many of the abuses that have plagued not just our work but many industries.”

Finally, we want to be sure you check out this Miami Herald piece, which covers the same legislative efforts and ends on a hopeful note.

Miami-Dade’s push to protect outdoor workers dies after state ban. What’s next?

By Ashley Miznazi

…The years-long effort from WeCount, a worker-advocacy group, to pass heat protection legislation came to a head this summer — the hottest year on record. For 46 days, Miami’s heat index topped 100 degrees every afternoon. It’s a problem that climate change is only making worse. 

Esteban Wood, the policy director of WeCount, said their fight doesn’t end here.

“WeCount is going to regroup; the issue is not going away. Extreme heat is getting worse as summer approaches and the county has a responsibility to protect outdoor workers from extreme heat,” Wood said.

…But despite academic research showing the toll that extreme heat takes on outdoor workers and anecdotal stories from Miami-Dade’s farm workers, the proposed policy was unpopular with employers, who voiced their concerns with commissioners. Miami-Dade’s failed bill was watered down from its original intention of ensuring water and mandated breaks for half the year to only be effective for five days a year on average, with no fines, after a concerted lobbying effort from Florida’s politically influential agriculture and real estate industry.

Wood said WeCount is committed to finding “bold solutions” at all levels, including exploring protections outside of the legislative process.

This month, WeCount went to Palm Beach for a farmworker festival rallying support for the Fair Food Program – a legal contract between outdoor workers and fast-food restaurants and grocers to buy from farms that follow a strict code of conduct.

In 2021, the Fair Food Program’s code of conduct was revised to include protections from rising temperatures.

As part of the Fair Food Program, growers must provide 10-minute breaks every two hours where every single worker has to stop what they are doing. Workers also are required to get electrolyte drinks during those hotter months. That’s largely what workers were initially seeking in the Miami-Dade ordinance that failed.