Sanitation Rule for Farm Workers Rejected by U.S.

The Labor Department announced Friday that it will not issue a rule requiring farm employers to provide toilets, drinking water and other sanitary facilities for field workers, saying the proposal was unnecessary and could override tougher state laws already in place.

The rejection--the third since the rule was proposed in 1972--was immediately condemned by organized labor groups as “totally irresponsible.” They promised to fight the decision in the federal court system, where a bitter battle over the need for such a standard already has lasted for more than a decade.

The Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration had been ordered by a federal appeals court to decide by next week whether a sanitation rule for farm workers should be issued. In the last year alone, the agency held five public hearings that produced thousands of pages of testimony on the issue.

About 2.5 million laborers, 115,000 of them migrants, worked on farms in 1981, the last year for which figures are available. The proposed federal rule would have extended protection to more than 500,000 workers in states without sanitation laws.

In announcing Friday’s decision, OSHA administrator Robert Rowland said farm health problems are not serious enough to merit federal action and had been “traditionally and properly” left to the states.

13 States Have Laws

Thirteen states, including California and other major agriculture states, have farm sanitation laws that are generally as strict as the rule rejected by OSHA. Rowland said a federal sanitation standard would have preempted laws in 11 of those states.

Many of those laws cover all farms, instead of those with 11 or more field workers that the federal rule would have covered, Rowland said.

“OSHA’s resources are best utilized when OSHA sends inspectors to chemical plants and high-hazard locations where there are frequent and documented threats to life and limb,” he said. “Field sanitation, though an important public health concern, generally does not involve that kind of lethal and irreversible occupational hazard.”

But Margaret Seminario, a health expert with the AFL-CIO, called Rowland’s reasoning “just an excuse they’re using not to take action to protect farm workers.”

“The whole notion (that) someone has to die before OSHA will act is totally irresponsible,” she said. “If that’s what this Administration’s burden of proof is, they have no understanding or comprehension of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.”

“We don’t know of any legal, medical or humane basis for OSHA to reach the decision it has,” said Mark Schacht, executive director of the Farm Workers Justice Fund, based in Washington, D.C. “But, in any event, we’re confident the court of appeals here isn’t going to accept this result.”

The proposed federal standard would have required farms with 11 or more employees to provide drinking and hand-washing water and a toilet within a quarter-mile of every 20 employees.

OSHA had exempted farms from industrywide “general” sanitation rules that were issued when the agency was created in 1970. Despite mounting political and legal pressure, the agency has resisted efforts to set farm standards three times since then, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Labor groups have contended that many states do not enforce their own agricultural sanitation laws and that health problems among field laborers are far more serious than OSHA acknowledges.

In testimony this year, one health consultant hired by OSHA to review evidence argued that the rule was justified by studies showing that parasitic diseases among migrant field workers were more common than among children in Guatemala.

The political crusade for a federal standard has been led by the 13-member Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which last week warned incoming Labor Secretary William E. Brock III that another rejection would be “a grievous political mistake.”

A spokesman for the caucus said Friday that members were disappointed by OSHA’s action.