Naples Daily News article underscores the urgent need for enforceable, mandatory heat stress protections like those now made real by the Fair Food Program

CIW's Cruz Salucio: “The harsh reality is temperatures are rising and workers feel that and know it is happening”

Local article published on same day over 200 leading scientific and medical journals worldwide released unprecedented joint editorial calling rising temperatures “the greatest threat to global public health”

Across the country, farmworkers continue to endure record-shattering heat in the fields with few enforceable protections. And they are not alone. Just this week, over 200 of the world’s leading scientific journals, including The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, published an extraordinary joint editorial calling rising temperatures and their consequences — including heat-related mortality — the “greatest threat to global public health” today. The scientific community called on governments “to cooperate and invest in the environmental crisis with the degree of funding and urgency they used to confront the coronavirus pandemic.”

With governments slow to recognize and act on the existential threat posed by rising temperatures, the FFP is doing its part. As we announced here in August, the CIW and Participating Growers in the Fair Food Program have created and implemented a new heat stress illness plan, once again breaking ground on enforceable workplace protections in agriculture, just as the FFP did last season with the first mandatory, enforceable Covid protections in US agriculture.

The rules, also featured in the just-released Fair Food Program annual report, cover rest breaks, monitoring and responding to symptoms, and education of workers and supervisors. The protections are integrated alongside existing Fair Food Program rules around shade and water, and are already being monitored and enforced by the Fair Food Standards Council on participating farms.

Read more on the FFP's heat stress standards