Source: Coalitoin of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida
Climate change represents one of the biggest threats to farmworkers’ safety today, and with each year that passes, that threat only grows more dangerous. In many ways, farmworkers represent the canary in the coalmine for climate change’s impact on humanity, as studies show that agricultural workers are 35 times more likely to die due to heat-related illness than workers in other industries.
For farmworkers everywhere, the expansion of the Fair Food Program is an urgent matter of life or death, since the FFP’s groundbreaking Code of Conduct includes a set of rigorously enforced heat stress protections that were recently heralded as “America’s strongest workplace heat rules” on the front page of the Washington Post.
To highlight the impact of the FFP, we want to share with you the firsthand account of Cruz Salucio, a senior member of the CIW staff and farmworker whose experience with heat illustrates the fatal combination that heat stress and powerlessness can have on workers, as well as how the groundbreaking partnerships at the heart of the FFP save farmworkers’ lives every single day:
My name is Cruz Salucio and I am part of the staff of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
For many years I worked in the fields, especially in tomato, blueberry, and also watermelon harvesting for nine years. So when we talk about heat, it’s a real worry that one has as a worker because every year it gets hotter.
From my point of view, workers often don’t immediately feel that climate change is happening. We feel the need to adapt to whatever temperature it is, because we need to fill the buckets, and so we’re focusing on how many buckets we need to finish the day. At the same time my experience with watermelon for many years was that you had to bring your own water to work and if you wanted something more, like Gatorade, you had to buy it. My experience was very difficult, very tiring, the work is tough, it’s tough work in the fields. We would get very hot around 1 to 3 in the afternoon–those are the heaviest hours we had to face in the fields. That’s when one would suddenly feel cramps, and for me, my hands would become very stiff. I couldn’t move them; it was like pulling a muscle and it stayed that way, or all of a sudden in your feet you’d feel a cramp and we’d scream because of the pain but we had to continue going because of so much pressure to continue working.
There were moments where if I ran out of water, well, I had to endure it. Before the Fair Food Program, growers, most of the time, didn’t give water to those who worked, and if you wanted to rest in the field, normally there was no shade so a lot of times you had to go under the bus or go far away to get below a tree if there was one. Or simply stay under the sun. So, those were the situations I saw for a long time.
After a long day of work you would get so thirsty, you would wake up with your mouth so dry in the morning, but we had to keep working and a lot of coworkers we worked with sadly would lose consciousness in the fields. That’s what comes to mind when you talk about the heat. Nowadays it’s getting hotter and that’s very worrying for one’s health as a farmworker.
That’s why I got involved here with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to fight; to better those situations in the workplace.
Now, I believe the Fair Food Program is improving the conditions of the workers. I believe it has changed a lot because the FFP is focused on preventing someone from losing their life in the fields. In the beginning of my experience I would have liked to work under the Fair Food Program with those protections but it didn’t exist.
Recently I went to Georgia and South Carolina to conduct worker-to-worker education on farms within the Program, and the farms were bringing out packets of electrolytes and giving to the workers to drink water. Seeing all of these things, you couldn’t imagine it before, they didn’t exist. The only thing you received is the demand from the boss telling you to put more effort into getting more tomatoes and to run, and if you wanted to drink water he would say, “There’s water in the ditch.” That’s something I remember hearing.
But now with the Fair Food Program, those things have changed and as a worker I can take a break without the crew leader, the dumper, or whoever is higher up in my work to tell me “Don’t do that.”
I think an important part of the Fair Food Program is the power it has given to the worker. The power to speak without the fear of retaliation, the power to stop working when needed, and the power to drink water and take a break. Those are a few of the many things that power has given to the workers, and the most important is now when I go to the farms to speak with the workers, I can directly see there is a tent carried around for shade. There are clean bathrooms, and there is clean water for the workers. It is beautiful and important to see the power of the Fair Food Program in having consumers tell companies what needs to be done and those companies actually doing it.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers makes sure that all of those rights are working for everyone.
That is the power that now exists for the workers, the confidence to speak out. And something very important about the Fair Food Program is that now mandatory breaks are established on farms participating in the Program from April 15th to November 15th. Those are the months with a lot of heat, the temperature overwhelmingly increases. So every grower, every two hours or two and a half hours the workers take a 10 minute break, or sometimes more, for everyone involved in operations–not just those who pick the produce, So the workers can rest a moment, breathe a moment, and then continue working. It’s beautiful. These protections didn’t exist before, but with the power of the Fair Food Program and thanks to collaboration of participating buyers and growers with the CIW, now protections are given to the workers.
