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Leo Perez, CIW: “We see the Fair Food Program as… both a method of education… to share information with workers about these risks, and at the same time as a tool for workers to protect themselves against the worst effects of climate change on a day-to-day basis.”
Oscar Londoño, executive director of WeCount: “We look to [the Fair Food Program] for best practices in terms of how can agricultural employers already begin to implement these kinds of protections.”
Each passing harvest season seems to be hotter than the last, and to bring with it more dangers for the farmworkers who toil every day under the boiling sun. Whether it is an acute threat like heat stroke from exposure, or a long-term ailment like kidney failure from chronic dehydration, the heat-related dangers facing farmworkers are real and getting worse. Indeed, it has become abundantly clear over the past several years of accelerating climate change that farmworkers in this country are in urgent need of heat-illness protections — and of the power to enforce those protections — to defend themselves from harm.
Workers on Fair Food Program farms today are, in fact, protected from the dangers of extreme heat by a set of essential rights built directly into the FFP’s ever-evolving, worker-driven Code of Conduct. They include mandatory rest breaks, water, shade, training to respond to symptoms of heat stress, and, perhaps most importantly, protection from retaliation for exercising those essential rights – all backed by the purchasing power of some of the world’s largest corporations, including Walmart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, McDonald’s, and more.
Outside the Fair Food Program, however, a simple request for a quick break from the heat, or even just a drink of cool water, could get a farmworker fired, or worse.
As a worker-centered solution to the labor abuses that have plagued agriculture for generations, the Fair Food Program represents a critical resource for tens of thousands farmworkers throughout the US, and now, thanks to its growing international expansion, in countries like Chile and South Africa. A recent article published in Grist [[link removed]] (a popular, online media organization “dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future”) provides a detailed account of how the FFP’s unique protections work — and of the urgent need to scale those protections as far and as wide as possible. Its authors lay out the worsening impacts of climate change on workers in agriculture, and meticulously detail how the Fair Food Program protects the lives of farmworkers toiling on the frontline of our climate crisis. This piece joins other [[link removed].] recently [[link removed]] released [[link removed]] articles [[link removed]] illustrating [[link removed]] how the Fair Food Program responds effectively to emerging challenges in agriculture — from COVID-19 to heat illness — by providing workers with enforceable tools to safeguard their basic dignity in the fields.
You can find an excerpt of the article below:
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How Florida farmworkers are protecting themselves from extreme heat
Protecting the people who pick your food is as easy as giving them shade and water.
Katie Myers [[link removed]]