Labor Dept. OKs Farm Worker Facilities

The Labor Department on Monday agreed to require that farms provide 500,000 workers with drinking water and toilets, complying with an order by a federal appeals court.

At the same time, the department, asserting that the court order violated the department’s “executive authority” to make decisions, asked the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to rehear the case. On Feb. 6 the court had ordered the department to set the standards.

The proposed regulations would require employers with 10 or more farm workers to provide them with drinking water, hand-washing facilities and toilets, officials said, adding that effective enforcement programs must also be created.

In announcing his decision to go ahead with the new sanitation regulations, Labor Secretary William E. Brock III said: “Basic human decency demands that farm workers have access to sanitation facilities available to other working Americans, and we plan to move as expeditiously as possible to get a federal standard in place.”

Inaction of States Cited

In October, 1985, Brock requested that states adopt field sanitation regulations, but not enough have done so, he said Monday in explaining the need for federal standards. Labor Department officials said that 22 states, including California, have adopted field sanitation rules since the secretary’s request but that only 14 states meet federal standards.

Brock had given the states 18 months to comply, setting a deadline of April 21. That is when the new federal regulations could be in effect, becoming final after a 20-day public comment period that begins with their publication in the Federal Register this week.

National sanitation standards had been sought for years. In 1972, a suit was filed on behalf of Farmworker Justice Fund and other groups, including El Congreso, which represents many Latino farm workers. Since then, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration had asserted that health problems were not serious enough to warrant federal standards.

‘Spread of Contagion’

However, public health experts contradicted this assessment, and in her majority opinion last month Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald castigated OSHA for dragging its feet. “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 wrote.

Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), chairman of the Labor and Human Resources subcommittee on labor, hailed Brock’s action Monday, saying the federal standard “can bring to an end a shameful period of human rights abuses in the growing fields of America.”

Advocates for farm workers also applauded the announcement, but more cautiously. Shelley Davis, a staff attorney for the Migrant Legal Action Program, said: “After 14 years of Department of Labor inaction, we don’t want to prejudge their actions.”

Many Unprotected

She said the law leaves many of the nation’s estimated 3 million farm workers unprotected because it applies only to the 500,000 employees at farms that employ 10 or more workers.

Ralph Lightstone, a staff attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance, said farms employing at least five workers are covered by California OSHA regulations, thus granting more protection to the state’s estimated 600,000 farm workers than they would get under the federal regulations.