April 15, 2024 update: Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill late last week that would ban heat protections for workers. The headline of this article has been updated to reflect the bill’s implementation.

“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.”

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.”

If the standard isn’t finalized by 2025, she adds, another Trump Administration would be in a position to keep the heat standard pending without ever finalizing it, deferring a promise that farmworkers and advocates have long fought to establish for decades.

Last week, Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, launched a project in which federal health leaders commit to better protect farmworkers from heat and smoke. In the past, the agency has recommended that OSHA finalize standards.

The FFP, however, offers a more immediate avenue of protection for retailers who are willing to come to the table and collaborate with farmworkers and farmers. Beyond concern for the health of farmworkers, major retailers are incentivized to join the program because it guarantees a level of transparency in their supply chain, eliminating the social liability of contracting with farms rife with labor abuse. And farmers sign onto the agreement because it gives them preferential purchasing from the major purchasers, while also ensuring that their workplace practices are ethical and often helping retain employees.

“[The Fair Food Program] is not designed to magically erase the problems and risks of harm. It is designed to respond appropriately, and by doing so in a really effective way, reduce the amount and the types of abuse that take place,” said Chavez. “In the case of a heat illness, it’s the most powerful tool that there is in the country.”

FFP has been quickly expanding beyond Florida’s tomato fields to operate across many crops: flowers, sweet potatoes, onions, corn, peaches, melons, and squash. The program recently added international farms that grow flowers in southern Chile, South Africa, and Mexico, with support from the Department of Labor. The USDA also recently launched a pilot to support farms in addressing labor abuses, recognizing the worker-driven social responsibility model as a pathway for achieving the highest human rights standards. This development has incentivized more farms to join the FFP, Chavez said. Based on the applications submitted so far, it could lead to the program launching in as many as 15 new states.

This model pioneered by FFP, known as Worker-Driven Social Responsibility, has been adopted by other industries long plagued by abuse. It inspired Bangladesh’s garment industry to form a similar partnership between brands and trade unions, protecting over 2 million factory workers with a legally binding accord. A similar program, known as Milk with Dignity, has been adopted by Vermont’s dairy industry. The United Kingdom’s fishing industry has been in conversation with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as they build their own version of this model.

“We see this as the blueprint for workers in other realities,” said Chavez. Even after Florida’s move to ban heat protections, he remains hopeful about the promise of this model to support workers when the government fails. “We are in a great moment in history where there is a cure for many of the abuses that have plagued not just our work but many industries.”

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