On Saturday, we mourned the one-year anniversary of Jose Macarena Hernandez' death due to extreme heat. A veteran field worker, Jose died during record-breaking heat while harvesting squash in Santa Maria. Temperatures that day reached 110 degrees. Jose was found in the outhouse, his body blistered from the heat.
At a press conference before his funeral services, his niece, Maria Elena Curiel, expressed her frustration to a local TV station."We have a lot of unanswered questions that no one has come forth. The employer has not contacted us to at least explain the situation, what was going on that day, was he not feeling well." She went on to say, "We surely hope that he didn't suffer very long to the point where he was feeling all this going on with his body that he was cooking basically underneath this heat."
Please TAKE ACTION.
As we mark the one year anniversary of Jose's death, we must look at what Governor Schwarzenegger and the state of CA have done to prevent more needless deaths. Unfortunately, it is very little.
Two weeks ago, Cal-OSHA admitted that its regulations do not adequately protect farm workers from the heat. Then, Thursday, they proposed revised regulations.
Unfortunately it’s just a mirage. In reality, the Schwarzenegger administration is still failing to take adequate action to protect farm workers—after finding that employers weren’t complying with its weak regulation, the state gave them a bit more to comply with, but did nothing to: increase employers’ incentives to comply; give workers a means to enforce the law themselves; strengthen Cal-OSHA’s well-documented shortcomings, such as its inability to identify noncompliance, its failure to verify whether a violation has been remedied, and its disappointing record on penalty collection.
Examples of CA’s Flawed Enforcement and Farm Worker Protections:
Cal-OSHA does not have enough staff to protect farm workers:
+Cal-OSHA has only 187 safety and health compliance inspectors to inspect more than 1 million workplaces throughout the state and to protect some 17 million California workers, 650,000 of whom are farm workers
Cal-OSHA under-inspects agricultural workplaces:
+In 2008, Cal-OSHA conducted only 750 agricultural inspections out of approximately 35,000 farms--many of whom use several labor contractors.
+Almost 40% of the farms inspected –289 companies– violated the Heat Illness Prevention regulation
Cal/OSHA does not verify whether violations it identifies have been fixed:
+Cal-OSHA spokesperson Dean Fryer recently admitted that it is "not unusual" for Cal-OSHA to fail to do return visits at companies where it has found violations to see if the violations were fixed.
Cal-OSHA regularly imposes no or absurdly low fines for violations of the heat regulations:
+Fines for heat violations that result in death average less than $10,000 and have even been as low as $250.
Cal-OSHA does not collect fines it imposes:
+In the much-publicized heat-related workplace death of 17-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez in 2008, Cal-OSHA had already fined the employer, Merced Farm Labor, $2,250 in 2006 for serious occupational safety violations, but never collected the fine
Profile of employer abuse:
+Employer YNT Harvesting was cited in 2007 for two serious safety violations when worker Eladio Hernandez died after picking peaches at the company, and was assessed $25,310 in penalties
+After a settlement, Cal/OSHA deleted a serious violation and reduced the penalty to $7,310
+Cal-OSHA cited YNT Harvesting again in August 2008
+YNT Harvesting has yet to pay any of its penalties
The state's own reports highlight its poor record. Despite an extensive campaign to train employers, the number of identified cases of non compliance were more in two weeks this year than they were in all of last year.
The new proposed heat regulations are full of exceptions and won’t protect the workers.
ABC7 - Stricter laws to protect farm workers?
"One of the primary problems with this emergency regulations is that it's rife with loopholes and exceptions," said Gabriel Sanchez, ACLU attorney.
They give the example of the water requirement. Farmers provide it, but some charge $2 per bottle.
"The supervisor would bring ice chests filled with water and other drinks that he would sell to us," said Mauricio Alvarez, farm worker.
Then there's the enforcement issue. The family of Maria Isabel Jimenez has joined the fight. She was the pregnant 17-year-old who died last summer after collapsing in a vineyard when the temperatures peaked at 95 degrees.
"If these regulations were actually enforced, Maria Isabel would be with us today," said Doroteo Jimenez, Maria Isabel's uncle.
The state's failure to protect farm workers from heat illness is just one of the reasons farm workers need a system to protect themselves. It's why SB789 is so vital. SB789, CA Employee Free Choice Act for Farm Workers (Steinberg), will make it easier for farm workers to organize and help enforce the laws that California's government hasn’t enforced. SB789 passed the California State Senate on April 23. It will next be heard in the State Assembly and then go to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Please TAKE ACTION today.