Worker’s Suit a Test of Responsibility : Courts: Migrant burned in shack fire unsuccessfully sought damages from employer and landowner. Advocates say his plight shows a need for laborers’ housing.

Sidronio Sarmiento Rodriguez’s trial by fire began with the dream of $3.35-an-hour wages.

Five years ago, he crossed the border into the United States and made his way to a Fallbrook strawberry farm that he knew from his years of riding the stream of migrant workers.

Like many migrant farmhands working from dawn to dusk for minimum wage, Sarmiento lived near the fields--cooking, washing and sleeping in a gully near the rows of strawberry plants. His home was no more than a shelter, a 10-by-12-foot shack made of cardboard, wood and plastic scraps scrounged from the farm dumpster.

One night he fell asleep in the shack to the glow of a candle. Fire erupted, severely burning Sarmiento so that his face was badly deformed, his hands blistered and his skin rough. The pain of standing up, he says, “eats up my flesh.”

Contending that someone should pay for his pain, Sarmiento sued the grower and the landowner, charging that they were directly responsible for the fire.

So far he has been unsuccessful in his case, a novel legal test that spotlights the farm-worker housing problems that plague San Diego County, where agriculture is a billion-dollar-a-year business and many laborers, mostly Mexican migrants, sleep outside on the ground.

The contrast is especially acute in North San Diego County, where avocado groves, strawberry patches and flower fields are abundant. At night, the migrant labor pool of 10,000 to 15,000 workers find shelter in coarse casitas --cardboard, wood and plastic hooches--hidden among the brush, often within sight of prosperous suburban developments.

Sarmiento’s case illustrates the legal barriers that stand in the way of change. He alleges that he essentially was held in servitude in a farm labor camp, beholden to an employer who required him to live nearby and provided materials for a shelter--and who, Sarmiento says, should be held liable for unsafe living conditions.

The employers, a collection of companies tied to San Bernardino-based produce grower John Livacich, deny responsibility for an accident that happened on someone else’s land.

The landowners--an elderly Los Angeles woman, Ruth Garmes, and her two daughters, who have since sold the property--made it plain in legal papers that they could hardly be at fault for a fire that harmed a trespasser.

Advocates say that only a favorable ruling in a case like Sarmiento’s can bring to bear the pressure that would prompt landowners and growers to provide large-scale, decent housing for the workers.

“Supply and demand is such here, in terms of (the availability of) migrant labor, that employers still don’t have to provide benefits like housing in order to have an adequate work force,” said Claudia Smith, a staff attorney in Oceanside with California Rural Legal Assistance, a farm laborer advocacy group. “That is the unfortunate reality.”

A state appeals court was unsympathetic. In a recent ruling, the 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego threw out the case against the landowners, saying they had no obligation to warn Sarmiento that burning a candle in a hut could be unsafe or to try to prevent the fire.

The court gave Sarmiento the chance to amend his complaint against the growers but suggested strongly that the case was bound to end up in the workers’ compensation system, a course that would pay Sarmiento’s medical bills but deny him the opportunity for a precedent-setting ruling. The growers deny any civil liability.

Sarmiento filed his new complaint Aug. 24 in San Diego Superior Court and his attorney, David Ronquillo of San Diego, said he remains convinced that the legal system will ultimately do right by his client. The suit involves claims of negligence and emotional distress, among others.

In the meantime, Ronquillo said, referring to the plight of migrant farmhands, “It is an absolute travesty what is happening to these people. It is awful.”

“The bottom line is that these people are homeless,” said Dave Owen, spokesman for the San Diego County Farm Bureau.

“Why are they homeless? They can’t afford the housing,” Owen said. “They are rural homeless.”

The case was first dismissed in April, 1990, by San Diego Superior Court Judge Ross Tharp, who said that Sarmiento’s attorneys deserved an “A plus for ingenuity” but declared that the case involved a “social problem that the government should deal with, not (the grower) and the landowner.”

A few weeks ago, the appellate court upheld most of that ruling. As for Garmes and her daughters, there was no evidence that they contributed in any way to the fire, the court ruled, dismissing all charges against them.

“No question they are terrible injuries,” Garmes’ lawyer, Everett Meiners, said of Sarmiento’s burns. “You don’t want to see anybody have those. But when you go to assign responsibility for that injury, I don’t see the basis for claiming that the landowners have some responsibility to protect this individual from himself.”

As for the growers, the court said, one of the basic rules of the workers’ compensation system is that it provides the sole recourse for an employee injured on site, even if the injury occurs when the employee is not working.

“Our position is simple,” said David B. Oberholtzer, the San Diego lawyer for the growers. “Workers’ comp will provide for the surgery this guy needs. It will give him a pension for his life. It is his best hope for leading as good a life as he can.”