Panel OKs Tighter Farm Worker Protections

Riding a wave of sentiment evoked by the recent death of Cesar Chavez, an Assembly committee voted unanimously Wednesday to approve legislation that would tighten laws protecting farm workers by extending liability to growers as well as labor contractors.

Advocates for the mostly Latino work crews that move through California’s farmlands at harvest time have complained for years that owners and growers have been able to dodge responsibility for abuse of workers by maintaining that any mistreatment comes at the hands of the contractors.

By a 7-0 vote, with five abstentions, members of the Assembly Judiciary Committee approved a bill sponsored by Assemblyman Phillip Isenberg (D-Sacramento) to make farmers strictly liable for violations of state farm labor laws even if they use farm labor contractors as middlemen.

Arturo Rodriguez, who succeeded Chavez as president of the United Farm Workers union, testified at the standing-room-only lower house committee hearing, accusing farm labor contractors of committing a long list of abuses against the field hands under their control.

He said farm workers have had to pay bribes to get work, received lower pay than promised after work is completed and worked overtime without pay. Rodriguez said contract workers are often required to pay for bus rides to take them to and from the job, are cheated through Social Security deductions that aren’t forwarded to the federal government and endure inadequate toilet facilities that are placed far from the work site to discourage their use.

“More often than not it is the labor contractor who directly cheats and exploits farm workers,” Rodriguez said, “while the grower for whom the farm workers labor disclaims any knowledge or responsibility for what is going on.

“Enforcement of state laws that protect farm workers from labor contractors has been mostly a joke,” he added. “This bill would only help enforce the laws that this Legislature has already passed to bring a measure of human dignity to the fields.”

Half a dozen farm workers, for whom Rodriguez interpreted as they testified in Spanish, told of instances of mistreatment at the hands of farm labor contractors.

Isenberg’s bill was strongly opposed by several major farming groups who argued that it would place an unreasonable burden on farmers who must use farm labor contractors and impose liability for contractor actions over which they have no control.

They also said farm workers already have adequate legal remedies to correct adverse working conditions.

Opponents include the California Farm Bureau Federation, Western Growers Assn., Agricultural Producers Assn., Agricultural Council of California and the state Department of Agriculture.

“This bill ignores the reality of what really goes on in this $18-billion-a-year industry,” said George Soares of the Agricultural Producers Assn. “It assumes all farmers are violating the law--and they aren’t.”

Isenberg submitted statistics showing that more than 20,000 farm workers suffer disabling injuries in California every year and that the occupational death rate in the agricultural industry is 16 per 100,000, more than twice the state’s average for other workplace deaths.

Although there are about 84,000 farms in California, Isenberg said, the Department of Industrial Relations issued only 94 citations for labor law violations in 1990, 26 in 1991 and 62 in 1992.

“The reality is that the system is not working for the farm worker,” the Northern California lawmaker said. A similar Isenberg bill died on the Assembly floor last year.

Invoking the name of legendary UFW founder Chavez, who died April 23 at the age of 66, about 100 proponents of the Isenberg measure rallied on the Capitol steps and inside the news conference room before the committee hearing.

They chanted slogans and waved red and black eagle UFW flags that have not been seen much here since the landmark 1975 farm labor protection law passed during former Democratic Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.’s Administration.