Earlier this month, Florida’s Senate passed a bill banning local jurisdictions from passing measures protecting workers from heat exposure, the latest of a series of draconian laws targeting immigrants and workers in Florida. This bill, which awaits the approval of governor Ron DeSantis, prohibits governments from requiring that employers provide water, shade, and breaks to workers—relatively small measures that can mean the difference between life and death for workers laboring under Florida’s hot sun. This law precedes what is expected to be another record-breaking summer of extreme heat.
“It’s morally repulsive, and it will kill farmworkers,” said Erik Nicholson, a farmworker advocate and the former vice president of United Farm Workers. “I have accompanied the families of too many farmworkers who have needlessly died due to heat stress.”
But Nicholson also highlighted the promise of another avenue to bring strong heat standards to Florida farms: The Fair Food Program (FFP), a groundbreaking partnership between retailers, farmers, and farmworkers that has implemented the strongest, legally binding heat protocols in the nation on Florida’s farms, while bypassing the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.
Originating in Florida’s tomato industry, the program now operates across eleven states and four countries. With the support of a new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) award, it is anticipated to expand this year to protect farmworkers in 25 states.
“We as workers can’t afford to wait for the Florida legislature to find its conscience,” said Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a former farmworker and organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, in a statement. “That’s why we are focused on our partnership with many of the state’s largest growers and on expanding the Fair Food Program.”
“We as workers can’t afford to wait for the Florida legislature to find its conscience. That’s why we are focused on our partnership with many of the state’s largest growers and on expanding the Fair Food Program.”
The FFP was established in 2011 by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a worker-based human rights organization with a long history of community-based farmworker organizing in Florida. The program is a unique partnership between farmers, farmworkers, and 14 major food retailers—including Subway, Whole Foods, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Taco Bell—that guarantees a set of legally binding farmworker protections for heat and other workplace conditions, which were drafted by workers. An independent, trilingual council operates a 24/7 worker complaint line and audits the participating farms.
“[Farmworkers in the FFP] don’t feel pressure to keep working under conditions that are placing their lives and their health at risk. And that’s fundamentally different from what happens outside of the program,” said Chavez.
Between April and November, Florida’s hottest months, the program’s heat protocol mandates shade on fields, water with electrolytes, and a rest break every two hours. The addition of electrolytes, explained Chavez, was based on “scientific research about the need to incorporate those so that workers can be protected long term in regards to kidney failure.”
The shade is provided by a portable structure attached to a pick-up truck that accompanies workers as they move through the field, he said. Whenever workers need to take a break, the shade structure is nearby. Crew leaders also monitor for signs of heat illness, trained to especially look out for new farmworkers still acclimating to the temperature.
And if a worker does develop symptoms of heat illness, they have the right to stop working and take a break or receive medical attention if necessary. The federal government and state of Florida do not mandate any of these worker protections, which means that participating farms have heat protocols that surpass any regulatory requirements.
Currently, only a handful of states—Washington, California, Oregon, and Colorado—have passed heat protections that extend to outdoor workers. In October 2021, the Biden Administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) initiated a rulemaking process to develop a federal standard to regulate heat exposure. Yet, after over two years, the regulation has yet to be finalized as global temperatures tick upwards.
“It’s been a pretty substantial amount of time for OSHA not to have actually created a regulation for heat stress,” said Laurie Beyranevand, the director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School. “In the absence of federal regulation, people are concerned about the health of farmworkers.”
