Improved Sanitation for Farm Workers Ordered

A federal appeals court Friday ordered the Labor Department to draft requirements promptly that farm workers in the fields be provided with drinking water and toilets, saying that they have suffered through a “disgraceful chapter of legal neglect.”

In a sharply worded 2-1 ruling, the court gave officials 30 days to set field sanitation standards, which long have been available to workers in factories and offices. The rules will apply to farms that employ more than 10 workers.

Ends Years of Inaction

The opinion by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia climaxed more than 14 years of inaction by the Labor Department through Republican and Democratic administrations. A spokesman for Labor Secretary William E. Brock III said he will decide within the legal limit of 45 days whether to seek a rehearing from the panel. Seven days after that, the court said, it will order sanitation rules issued within 30 days.

Brock generally has been sympathetic to the longstanding protests of migrant farm workers. Last February, for example, he criticized state governments for failing to enact laws of their own to upgrade sanitation standards for migrant workers, and pledged that he would issue federal standards by this April if the states failed to act.

California and 18 other states have their own field sanitation standards, but these rules could be preempted by new federal regulations if the U.S. rules are more effective, officials said. Federal standards would also apply in states that have not acted on their own.

George Mernick III, who brought the suit on behalf of the Farmworker Justice Fund and other groups, including El Congreso, an organization representing many Latino fieldworkers, praised the court’s decision.

“It means that, finally, after 14 years of delay, farm workers at least get the basic essentials all of us are entitled to, such as toilets and clean drinking water--just the basic human necessities we’ve all come to expect in our daily lives,” Mernick said.

Since the suit was filed in September, 1972, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has called many public hearings and has come close to issuing field sanitation standards from time to time, only to back off in favor of further delays.

Some OSHA officials have contended that farm health problems are not serious enough to merit federal action and should be left to the states. Some growers and owners of large farms have adopted the same position, arguing that the link between field sanitation and disease is unproved.

However, a panel of public health experts commissioned by the Labor Department reported two years ago that more than 500,000 American farm workers suffer rates of infection comparable to those of Third World peasants. The panel attributed this to employers’ refusal to provide them with drinking water, toilets or a place to wash their hands.

Sided With Health Experts

In writing the majority opinion, Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald sided with the public health experts.

“The rule-making record demonstrates beyond dispute that lack of drinking water and toilets causes the spread of contagion, bladder disease and heat prostration among farm workers,” she said. “Yet resistance to issuing the standard, a counterpart of which is already in place for every other OSHA-covered type of employment, has been intractable.”

She charged that OSHA has used “an arsenal of administrative law doctrines . . . for ricocheting the case between the agency and the courts for over a decade.”

Wald said that, even though Brock has contended that public health issues have been traditionally a local concern, rather than a federal one, “Congress in adopting the Occupational Safety and Health Act decided that the federal government would take the lead in regulating the field of occupational health.”

Judge Hubert L. Will of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, who was designated a member of the panel, concurred with the Wald opinion, while Judge Stephen Williams dissented.