U.S. Orders Water for Farm Labor in Month, Toilets in Three Months

The Labor Department on Tuesday gave 54,000 growers a month to begin providing nearby drinking water and three months to erect field toilets and hand-washing facilities for nearly half a million farm workers.

Issuing court-ordered federal sanitation standards for field workers, Labor Secretary William E. Brock III said growers must begin supplying them with “suitably cool” and “readily accessible” drinking water by May 30.

The growers have until July 30 to provide a toilet and separate hand-washing facility for every 20 field hands within a quarter-mile walking distance of where they are working.

Farms that employ 10 or fewer field workers are not covered because of a congressional prohibition against the Labor Department applying federal job health and safety standards to them. The regulations also do not apply to cases in which workers spend less than three hours a day in the fields.

Farmers See Time Problem

Officials with farm groups said that meeting the drinking water requirements poses no problems but that providing the toilets and hand-washing basins within three months may prove difficult in many areas.

Publication of the regulations later this week in the Federal Register will end 14 years of government wrangling over what the U.S. Court of Appeals here in February called a “disgraceful chapter of legal neglect.”

Officials in the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration estimated that the new requirements will cost growers $24 million a year and raise their daily labor costs an average of $1.09 per worker.