Suffering Farm Workers

To its shame, California continues to deprive farm workers of basic human needs. The quality of crops may also be affected by the failure of many farmers in California and other states to provide toilets, washing facilities and drinking water for workers in their fields. The federal government adds to the problem by failing to enforce its own rules adequately.

California law has required field toilets since 1965. The U.S. Labor Department made the requirement national only a year ago and then only after a federal court said it had to do so. The regulation still exempts farms with fewer than 11 workers. Larger farms must provide cool drinking water with disposable cups, a toilet for every 20 workers and hand-washing water, soap and towels. Employers also must tell workers that the toilets and water are available and provide them reasonable chance to use them. Some don’t do either.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration now has major responsibility for checking farms to see if they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. Yet, as Times staff writer Henry Weinstein reports, its officials concede that inspectors visit only a few of the work sites; and when they do they find many violations.

At one farm outside Stockton, workers said they had been cutting asparagus for 15 days and had seen neither a toilet nor a government inspector on the property. At another field, a worker was seen defecating in a ditch. Even at farms that provided drinking water workers often had to share cups, meaning that illness might easily be spread.

Bad as the situation was on some of these California farms, doctors in Texas who treat farm workers consider conditions there to be far worse. Growers don’t think of farm workers as human beings, one physician said, adding that “the amount of disease that can be prevented by a little hand washing is so much you’d think they’d do it.” Farm workers especially risk contracting parasitic diseases and diarrhea; they suffer from heat stress, exposure to chemicals and skin rashes caused by pesticides they can’t wash off quickly.

The federal inspection program is inadequate. So are the federal rules, which cover only 470,000 field workers out of the estimated 1.5 million to 3 million in the country. The rest work on farms with 10 or fewer employees. In California, county health departments are supposed to check on those small farms and clearly they could do more, too.

Farmers may have to pay as much as $24 million to obey the rules. But they would save two to three times that amount if their workers stayed healthy. If all farmers, not just some of them, followed the rules, that’s the best solution of all. That would benefit everybody--farmer, worker and consumer.