California’s Sonoma County, for example, is currently piloting a program that offers a one-time payment to farmworkers for lost wages due to unprecedented spring floods.Įmma Scott, a clinical instructor at Harvard University’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, said that the pandemic revealed both how vulnerable farmworkers and other essential workers were to illness and economic shocks, but also how quickly and effectively emergency funds could be distributed to protect them. “We would think that if there’s potential danger to your health, work should stop, and funding should be available if workers need to stop,” he said. “You don’t want a company with a lot of labor violations, where workers are getting hurt constantly, to get these contracts that are coming up.”įranks, the union political director, said that the USDA could set aside money that farmworkers could access when extreme heat, wildfire, intense flooding, or a surprise frost prevents them from working. “What you have in the Farm Bill is the opportunity to regulate who gets money,” he said. Oyefeso said the upcoming Farm Bill could incentivize employers to take care of their workers by only providing business or funding opportunities to those with strong records of worker safety. “We have to break through that noise and explain that you can do everything you can to stimulate the farm industry, but if you don’t take care of the workforce, you won’t get anything from it.” “Regulators, legislators, and companies have spent so many decades with this traditional belief that the Farm Bill isn’t about workers,” said Ademola Oyefeso, International Vice President of the United Commercial and Food Workers Union, one of a handful of organizations advocating for a “labor-focused” Farm Bill. But what it can do, advocates say, is create conditions that might make it easier for workers to turn down dangerous jobs. The USDA does not have the jurisdiction to create or enforce traditional labor protections, which fall under the purview of the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Department of Agriculture (USDA) distributes billions of dollars over the next five years, is an opportunity to bring life and livelihood-saving protections to these workers. risk losing a collective $55.4 billion in earnings each year to climate-related extreme heat.īut advocates say the 2023 Farm Bill, legislation that determines how the U.S. A 2021 analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that outdoor workers in the U.S. In California, an unusually wet and cold winter has left fields soaking and frost-ridden, leaving workers with little option but to wait for conditions to improve without pay and farmers with less income to pay them. The number of days in which extreme heat poses a risk to field laborers’ physical safety is expected to nearly double by 2050.Įxtreme heat, wildfires, and floods also endanger farmworkers’ livelihoods. In the U.S., at least 384 farm workers died of heat-related causes between 20, according to a 2021 investigation by NPR and the Columbia Journalism School. The climate crisis has made farm work more dangerous and precarious. “Every year after that, it’s just getting hotter and hotter and more unpredictable.” “We knew something had to be done around wildfires and heat and smoke,” said Edgar Franks, who worked in the fields for years before eventually becoming political director of the Washington-based union Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Silva’s death triggered a series of strikes across the state, including a 70-worker walkout at Sarbanand Farms, to demand safer working conditions. His fellow workers attributed his cardiac arrest to long hours working in the smoky heat. At Sarbanand Farms, a blueberry orchard in Sumas, Washington, a 28-year-old seasonal worker named Honesto Silva Ibarra collapsed and later died. In August 2017, as wildfires raged across British Columbia, a blanket of smoke settled over the neighboring state of Washington, turning the sun blood-red and filling the air with grit and ash. Climate change is making agricultural labor more dangerous.
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