Bill Requiring Pesticide Notices in Fields Gains

California farm workers won a hard-fought victory Wednesday when the Assembly Labor Committee defied influential farming interests and approved legislation requiring growers to post warning signs in their fields whenever they use dangerous pesticides.

The measure, already approved by the Senate, was sent to the Ways and Means Committee on a 7-4 vote after urban liberal Democrats clashed with growers and officials of the Department of Food and Agriculture, who contend that the measure is unnecessary and burdensome.

After the vote, Hans Van Nes, deputy director of the Department of Food and Agriculture, pledged to defeat the measure or seek a veto from Gov. George Deukmejian unless hearings into the issue, recently scheduled by the department, produce strong evidence that the health of farm workers is being jeopardized.

“It is going to be expensive for us to enforce and expensive for farmers to enforce,” Van Nes said of the bill by state Sen. Nicholas C. Petris (D-Oakland). The action was the latest skirmish in a legislative battle that has raged for almost two decades, pitting influential growers and state agriculture officials against farm workers and various public interest groups.

Only last week, rural Democrats in the Assembly Agriculture Committee rammed through an amendment that, in effect, stripped the bill of the requirement to post warning signs and substituted criminal penalties against growers who intentionally endanger farm workers.

On Wednesday, the Labor Committee restored the requirement for posting signs, violation of which would be a misdemeanor. The provision imposing criminal penalties for intentionally endangering workers was retained as well.

Under the amended bill, Food and Agriculture Director Clare Berryhill will be permitted to exempt certain pesticides as well as some crops that are not considered labor-intensive. But in general, the measure requires warning signs to be posted around fields from the first day that heavy-duty toxic pesticides are applied. Existing law requires posting of warning signs only in cases where a field has been contaminated for seven days or longer.

“This is a major step forward in protecting farm workers,” said Ralph Lightstone, lobbyist for the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, which contends that the occupational disease rate of farm workers is about three times the average for all industries.

Van Nes acknowledged several incidents last year of farm workers’ apparently being poisoned after straying into contaminated fields. But, he insisted, previous investigations into hundreds of incidents showed no evidence that posting of signs would have prevented farm worker illness.

Lightstone, however, said state investigations into farm worker illness “are a mess” and that the “causes of most of the poisonings have never been determined.”

Assemblyman Bill Jones (R-Fresno), a rancher who will take over as chairman of the Assembly Rural Caucus next year, conceded that a posting law is inevitable. But he suggested that the Legislature wait until it can address related problems such as contamination of roads and cities near farm areas.