My friend nearly died of dehydration. Farmworkers like us need better protections.
As temperatures rise, so do risks for outdoor workers. Fair Food Program is trying to help both manual laborers and businesses.
Ten summers ago, just outside the small north Florida town of Marianna about an hour from Tallahassee, I watched, helpless, as a man I call my brother nearly died from the brutal, unforgiving heat of the watermelon harvest.
Our crew was moving through the treeless field together, throwing melons rhythmically from the rows to the truck, joking as we often would to distract ourselves from the hot, heavy work. Suddenly, my friend lost consciousness and fell hard to the ground. We quickly carried him to the only shade we could find and wet the shirts off our backs with thermos water to keep him cool until the ambulance arrived. For what felt like an eternity, my friend’s life hung in the balance.
He eventually came to, and after a few hours at the hospital and a much-needed IV, he was back to work throwing melons with the rest of the crew the next day. But the shock and fear we all felt that day was a wake-up call, reminding us that the symptoms we often joked about – crippling cramps, dizziness, disorientation and an unquenchable thirst – were serious signs of chronic dehydration and could have fatal consequences.
And the statistics bear that out: According to the National Institutes of Health, farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat-related issues than workers in other industries.
Today, a decade later, I work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a human rights organization based in the farmworker community of Immokalee, Florida. We educate workers about their rights under the CIW’s groundbreaking Fair Food Program, including protections that The Washington Post recently called “America’s strongest workplace heat rules.”
