Food and farmworkers need protection from heat and other dangers

Just like the last few before it, this summer has been marked by record-breaking heat, with cities across the U.S. marking new all-time high temperatures. Depending on where you live, how old you are and what you do for work, this extreme heat can range from unpleasant to dangerous: Heat kills more people than any other kind of extreme weather, and heat deaths have doubled in recent decades. While many people can perform their work with air conditioning or mandated water and rest breaks, farmworkers don’t get that luxury. Without federal protections from extreme temperatures, field work and other outdoor jobs can be dangerous and even fatal. 

Even in today’s economy where most workers have basic protections from physical hazards, farmworkers (and to a lesser degree, food workers more generally) are still mostly left out. That’s called agricultural exceptionalism, and it’s a result of more than 200 years of lobbying efforts from wealthy landowners that have fought hard to keep farms mostly unregulated and farm laborers un-unionized. 

The last year has seen some much needed progress on rights for farmworkers, however. With long-awaited federal heat protection regulations finally ready for public review, farmworkers and others who deal with extreme heat may finally have some protection from one of the most fatal on-the-job threats. But federal progress hasn’t always been matched by Republican-majority state legislatures, whose bans on local heat regulations are imperiling food system workers. And in a few states, those moves have been accompanied by troubling rollbacks on child labor regulations that undermine the most basic worker protections. In addition to being a blow to human rights, these rollbacks are merely an attempt to sidestep much-needed immigration reform that would help resolve the years-long farm labor shortage. 

The Biden administration finally advances heat protections

For many years, labor advocates have urged the federal government’s worker safety organization, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to develop more comprehensive standards for people who work in extreme heat, whether indoors or outdoors. Despite OSHA having long-standing recommendations for avoiding heat-related injuries and years of data on heat-related deaths from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there have been no federal guidelines that mandate protections in high temperatures. 

They include mandatory, paid 15-minute breaks for employees working in the heat for more than two hours, water and shade access. Because workers adapt to hot conditions over time, new workers or workers who won’t be working in the heat long term may be required to take even more frequent breaks. With 70 percent of workplace heat deaths occurring within the first week of an employee working in the heat, these acclimatization provisions will go far in protecting new workers and workers in generally cool regions who are experiencing a heatwave. The rules also mandate that employers have training on heat stroke, heat exhaustion and other heat-related illnesses, and that they develop emergency plans for workers who exhibit symptoms of a heat related illness. It’s not just outdoor industries that will have to comply with the new rules: Indoor workplaces in manufacturing, commercial baking and restaurants will also have to comply with the standards. 

The new rules aren’t finalized yet — they still face a long approval process that includes a public comment period, during which representatives from affected industries will likely push to make rules more lenient or at least delay their implementation. Finalizing and implementing new regulations is a long process, so the rules wouldn’t end up taking effect until 2026, leaving at least one more dangerously hot summer without federal protections. Critically, these measures could well be abandoned by a future administration, so the results of this year’s presidential election will determine whether these measures get pushed forward by a Harris administration or scrapped under Trump.   

In the meantime, workers in a few states — California, Washington, Colorado, Minnesota and Michigan will get some protections thanks to state-level laws that already mandate some of these measures. Maryland is developing its own standards, while cities like Phoenix (where the temperature hit a record high of 118 degrees this past July) have also adopted ordinances to help protect workers on the hottest days. 

These provisions cover a lot of workers in these farm-heavy states, but farmworkers in Texas and Florida have been effectively boxed out of similar provisions. Agriculture, construction and other industries have successfully lobbied lawmakers for bans on local heat ordinances, blocking city councils and local governments from adopting their own heat protection standards. Even where legal approaches have failed, however, workers themselves can organize to demand protections from employers: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Florida farmworker group, has successfully pushed major retailers like Walmart and McDonald’s to source produce from farms following standards that protect workers from heat and other risks that state and federal regulations don’t adequately address. 

Rollbacks on child labor protections continue

Sadly, it’s not just heat protections that have been blocked or rescinded in some states recently. Even the most foundational labor protections — those protecting children from working in dangerous conditions — have come under fire recently. Employment agencies have a long history of falsifying records and flouting rules to get children dangerous jobs cleaning meatpacking plants or working illegally long hours on farms. Those violations have had disastrous consequences, like the death of a 16-year old boy in a Mississippi poultry plant last year. 

Worryingly, a number of states have worsened this crisis by effectively legalizing these underage hires, with more than 20 states loosening child labor protections since 2021. Many of those provisions have targeted food and farm jobs, with states dropping provisions that prevented teens from operating dangerous machinery on farms or taking night shifts where accident rates are higher. Meal and rest break requirements have been dropped for minors, as have limitations on hours or stipulations that work not interfere with school. Perhaps the most sickening shift happened in Iowa, which adopted rules in 2023 that allowed children as young as 14 to work in meatpacking.So far in 2024, six states have weakened child labor laws, with Indiana taking specific aim at provisions designed to protect children from dangerous agricultural work. 

With so many rollbacks targeting food and farm jobs, it’s clear that some lawmakers see children as a viable solution to the ongoing farm labor shortage, which has been impacting farm states for several years now. But rather than addressing the underlying causes of the problem —  namely a dysfunctional immigration system and a farm labor market that doesn’t supply jobs most people want to do —  loosening child labor laws is a decision to exploit some of the most desperate and unprotected people in society. 

Farm labor hangs on an increasingly inflamed immigration debate

Fixing the farm labor market has been a theoretical priority for lawmakers for years, but there has been a failure to enact comprehensive reform.

What that looks like hasn’t just been contentious in Congress, it’s been hotly debated on the presidential campaign trail. With the Trump campaign promising “mass deportation now,”  and Harris speaking about a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the candidates’ messaging on immigration is widely divergent. As campaign season continues to inflame anti-immigrant rhetoric, it seems unlikely that bipartisan consensus on immigration reform is coming soon. But with the implementation of the new heat rules and other common sense policy that protects farmworkers hanging on the outcome, it’s still a pivotal one for the wellbeing of farmworkers in the U.S. 

Top photo by Miravision/ Adobe Stock