These farmworkers created America’s strongest workplace heat rules

IMMOKALEE, Fla.

The sweet, earthy scent of tomatoes hangs in the air as a crew of 44 workers speeds through rows of vines. They fill 32-pound buckets with fruit, then deliver them to co-workers waiting on the backs of flatbed trucks who dump the contents into crates to be sorted and packaged.

During an eight-hour shift, each worker hauls an average of about three tons of tomatoes. They work at this pace all winter in this small farming community in southwest Florida — and all summer on a farm in Tennessee, where temperatures can reach the 90s.

But unlike at many other farms, every worker takes a 10-minute break every two hours during the hottest part of the year. When they feel the effects of heat illness coming on, they have the right to cool down in the shade. Sunripe Certified Brands, the company that owns the farm, must provide clean water, shaded rest areas and nearby bathrooms for all of its workers.

These are the strongest set of workplace heat protections in the United States. They were not put in place by local, state or federal regulators, but by the workers who spent years organizing to push companies to adopt them.

Created in 2011 by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a nonprofit that represents farmworkers, the Fair Food Program (FFP) certifies farms that follow a strict set of workplace safety rules. In exchange, participating farms are first in line to sell their wares to 14 big produce buyers that include Walmart, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and McDonald’s.

The buyers agree to pay a small premium for produce from farms where workers are protected and blacklist farms that get kicked out of the program. In exchange, they can tout their ethical practices, a selling point with a growing number of consumers worried about who produces their food.

Farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat-related illnesses than workers in other industries, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Heat stress kills dozens of workers and sickens thousands more each year, according to the Labor Department, a toll that’s likely to rise as climate change makes dangerously hot days more common. Last year was the hottest on record, and forecasters are predicting that this year will top it.

But so far, efforts to protect farmworkers from heat have been limited. There are no federal workplace heat safety rules, although the Labor Department is slowly working to create some. Only four states — California, Washington, Oregon and Colorado — have heat rules that apply to farmworkers.

In November, a push to create heat regulations for farm and construction workers in Miami-Dade County stalled because commissioners worried the rules “could potentially kill industry.”

But at a time when companies are resisting government efforts to regulate heat safety, the FFP has convinced many businesses to voluntarily follow even stricter standards.

“Farm owners have to comply because the risk of losing clients if they don’t treat workers well is so great that it can put them in a very difficult position relative to their competitors in the industry,” said Gerardo Reyes Chávez, a leader in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

So far, dozens of farms in 10 states have joined the program, protecting 20,000 workers. At least 30 more farms, from an additional 11 states, applied to join this year after the Agriculture Department began offering up to $2 million in subsidies to farms that follow safe labor standards and participate in worker-led monitoring programs like the FFP.

Workers in other industries have created their own versions of the FFP model, including dairy workers in Vermont, fishers in Britain and a new organization of poultry workers in Arkansas.

The protesters

Farmworkers stand on a truck with crates of tomatoes at a farm owned by Sunripe Certified Brands on Nov. 22 in Immokalee.

Leonel Pérez remembers when conditions on tomato farms were very different. He started picking tomatoes when he was 20. Summers were hot and humid. Workers sometimes fainted or ended up in the hospital with heatstroke.

But even when the heat reached dangerous levels, Pérez said he and his co-workers couldn’t always take basic steps to protect themselves. “You couldn’t just say, ‘I’m going to stop and drink water,’” Pérez, now 35, said. “You’d ask [the boss] for water and they’d say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to rain soon. Just wait.’”

Photo by Rebecca Blackwell/AP

So, in 2006, he joined the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which started in the early 1990s to fight forced labor, violent bosses, wage theft, sexual harassment and other abuses. The organization also advocated for safety rules that would protect workers from the heat.

But it was hard to convince farmers to accept changes to cut the time workers spent picking fruit.

“I’ve heard old-timers say, ‘I’ve got 100 acres I’ve got to pick here. I can’t send the people home. We’ve got to keep going, or I’m going to lose these tomatoes,’” said Steve McHan, a second-generation farmer who has been supervising tomato-harvesting crews for 38 years.

In 2001, after years of protests against farm owners, the coalition decided to instead target companies such as Taco Bell and McDonald’s that bought the produce. By staging protests at corporate headquarters and asking Americans to boycott the fast-food giants, the workers hoped to pressure the companies to join their cause.

“It’s very important to have corporations participating because they can demand good quality and low prices, but now they can also demand respect for workers,” Pérez said.

Workers traveled the country. Pérez recalls laying out his sleeping bag on the floor of a Chicago church one night during a bus trip with 120 other farmworkers to protest McDonald’s. “It was a beautiful moment to be there with the whole community,” he said.

The protests worked. Taco Bell parent company Yum Brands signed a deal with the coalition in 2005. Yum Brands agreed to buy tomatoes whenever possible from Florida farms monitored by the coalition and to pay an extra penny per pound. The price premium went into farmworkers’ paychecks as a bonus that now averages about $24 per week.

Other fast-food chains and grocery stores followed, ramping up pressure on farm owners. Finally, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, an industry group representing 90 percent of the state’s tomato industry, struck a deal with the coalition in 2010, leading to the FFP’s creation.

Since then, it has expanded up the East Coast to New Jersey and spread beyond tomatoes to cover farms growing peaches and melons in Colorado, sunflowers in California, and sweet potatoes and squash in Maryland. It also covers workers in Chile and South Africa. Now, the coalition is campaigning to pressure Wendy’s and supermarket chains Publix and Kroger to join as buyers.

The enforcers

Farmworkers arrive for a training on their rights under the Fair Food Program at a Sunripe farm on Nov. 22 in Immokalee.

Around 8 a.m. on a late November day, 40 workers filed into a sparsely furnished portable building at the edge of the Sunripe tomato fields in Immokalee. They sat in rows of folding chairs to hear from two representatives from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers there to remind them of their rights under the FPP.

Gerardo Reyes Chávez unveiled a large poster showing a drawing of a heat-stricken worker collapsed in a tomato field with a scowling boss looming over him.

In the poster, a devil stands over one of the worker’s shoulders and whispers in his ear that he shouldn’t complain. On the other shoulder, an angel tells him that he has rights and should stick up for himself.

Reyes Chávez got a few workers to act out the scene. One worker drew laughs of recognition for his interpretation of the angry boss yelling at the worker.

“That’s what we want to avoid,” Reyes Chávez said. “You don’t have to risk your life while you’re feeding the country.”

These meetings are the backbone of the program. The safety rules only work if organizers can enforce them — and that depends on workers speaking up. The FFP has set up a confidential hotline where workers can report violations 24/7 in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.

Every year, the organization sends auditors to participating farms, where they interview at least half the workers about labor conditions. So far, organizers say they’ve done more than 30,000 interviews. Auditors also check companies’ payroll records for evidence of wage theft.

That’s more oversight than most government regulators can manage. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which has 1,850 inspectors for 130 million U.S. workers, can’t inspect every job site every year. Last year, it conducted 34,267 inspections for the country’s 6 million employers.

When OSHA inspectors discover lawbreaking farms, they issue fines. For example, when a farmworker died of heatstroke on a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., farm last year, OSHA fined the farm $15,625. But the FFP has the ability to punish wrongdoers by barring them from selling to specific clients, which could hurt farm owners’ wallets more.

“If they lose their status as an FFP farm, then they’re looking at millions of dollars in potential losses,” Reyes Chávez said.

The FFP said it has recovered more than half a million dollars in stolen wages on behalf of workers, ousted 19 supervisors accused of sexual harassment and suspended nine farms for violating workers’ rights — which means those farms can’t sell to the program’s buyers until they prove they corrected the violation. Repeat violators may be permanently banned.

Jon Esformes, a fourth-generation farmer and CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands, says that level of oversight is necessary in sprawling fields. “The difference between farming and, say, a factory is you can be in a 200,000-square-foot factory and have a pretty good idea of what’s going on on all 200,000 square feet,” he said. “That’s five acres. Now imagine a 5,000-acre farm. I don’t know what’s going on in the back.”

Reaping the benefits

Farmworkers on the back of a truck during a tomato harvest at a Sunripe farm in Immokalee.

Out in the fields, the sound of tomatoes falling into crates is an endless drumbeat. Every moment of the shift, there is a tomato hitting the bottom of a crate — and a worker rushing back to the vines to refill their bucket.

Workers are motivated to move fast because they’re paid by the bucket, but the bonus they get from the FFP makes it easier to stop for a break.

“If you start feeling bad, you rest for 15, 20, 30 minutes,” said Arturo Basoco, 35, who is on his seventh short-term contract to pick tomatoes for Sunripe. “Your body might tell you that you need more and you rest for an hour or two. If it gets really bad, then you go home or see a doctor. That’s how it should be.”

That’s why Basoco keeps coming back to Sunripe. “I feel safe working here,” he said.

FFP farms tow water coolers and portable toilets through the fields so that workers can pause to drink water or use the bathroom.

FFP rules require that workers have a shaded rest area nearby from April 15 to Nov. 15. Usually, employers use trucks to tow water coolers, shade awnings and portable toilets, which encourage workers to drink enough water without worrying about having a place to pee.

“Is there a cost associated with 10-minute breaks every two hours? Absolutely,” Esformes said. But he said his business benefits from keeping workers healthy and productive — and it’s the right thing to do.

“My responsibility as a business owner is to provide a safe place for people to work,” he said, “and if I can’t make a living and do that at the same time, I need to find another [expletive] job.”

Still, the relationship between FFP organizers and farm owners is contentious at times. Leaders from both sides meet regularly to negotiate new or expanded worker protections. Last year, they clashed over extending the season for heat protections by a month and requiring that farm owners add electrolyte supplements to drinking water. In the end, the farm owners agreed.

“There’s a lot of back-and-forth,” said Julia Perkins, who has worked for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for 15 years. “It has to be something that both works for workers and is protecting their rights, but it also has to be implementable. We don’t want to set a standard that people can’t meet because then they’re not going to and it’s going to be meaningless.”

Picking tomatoes is still hard work. But Pérez has seen change over the course of his career, even if today’s workers don’t always notice it. “In the beginning, many of them would come to us and say, ‘We’ve made a gigantic change,’” he said. “Now, a lot of the new workers who come here don’t even know about the fight it took to make that happen.”

In a way, that makes him happy: It means workers’ rights have become so normal on FFP farms they’re no longer remarkable. “It’s incredible,” he said.

The tomatoes harvested on FFP farms, which are sold in major grocery stores such as Walmart, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, bear a sticker with the program’s logo featuring a worker carrying a bucket.