Farmers must share in keeping workers safe

last updated: June 02, 2008 04:07:23 AM

The tragic death of Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez is a classic farmworker tragedy. An undocumented worker laboring in 95-degree heat without sufficient water or shade collapses. The labor contractor who employed her, apparently unaware of the seriousness of the medical emergency, does nothing at first, then all the wrong things.

The unconscious teenager lies on the ground for five minutes cradled in her fiancé's arms. Then she is placed in the back seat of a sweltering van. By the time she reaches a Lodi clinic, her body temperature is 108 degrees. She dies two days later without regaining consciousness.

Such stories are all too familiar. So is the story of Merced Farm Labor Contractors, which employed Vasquez Jimenez.

The state fined Merced Farm Labor in November 2006 for failing to provide heat- stress training for employees. The company also was fined for failing to have a written injury and illness prevention program and for not providing sufficient bathrooms or clean water for washing. The company was supposed to have corrected these failings, but no state inspectors checked to make sure. There is no record the company even paid its fines, and now it is under investigation.

Vasquez Jimenez had been working nine straight hours pruning at a Farmington area vineyard owned by West Coast Grape Farming, a division of Ceres-based Bronco Winery. The grower is not under investigation, raising an important question: What responsibility should growers have to ensure that workers in their vineyards have water, shade and rest? Under California's farm work rules, laborers are employed by middlemen called contractors. They often are poorly financed and just a step away from the fields themselves.

These contractors are liable for violations of work safety and wage and hour rules, while the farmers they contract with -- and whose crops they tend -- are not.

For decades farmworker advocates have tried to make farmers responsible for the plight of the workers. Growers have blocked bills that would have given them more responsibility for ensuring workplace safety.

There are 80,000 farms in California and more than 600,000 farmworkers; there are not enough state inspectors to protect them all. The best way to protect people like young Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez is to make those who benefit most from their labor partners in keeping them safe.

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