Adam Navarro: Heat can be fatal without proper, legal protection

Recently, new labor protections have come into effect concerning how long field workers can work in extreme heat. Before the new protections became law, according to a YourCentralValley.com article, around 650,000 field workers were susceptible to preventable deaths associated with heat illness simply due employers failing to follow simple heat-illness prevention.

The new law requires employers to provide workers with 10 minutes of “cool off” time in shaded areas with cool beverages for every four hours of intense labor in extreme heat. Due to the majority of us coming from Mexican immigrant families who’ve have, most likely, worked in the fields, I think this is a step in the right direction and reflects the value of the labor in the Central Valley.

While the lack of water and its impact on business have occupied a lot of the articles that have filled your paper since the consequences of the drought started affecting the Central Valley economically, the daily human sacrifices that our agricultural industries create in blistering hot fields all over California is sometimes overlooked.

This story was originally published August 3, 2015 at 1:08 PM with the headline "Adam Navarro: Heat can be fatal without proper, legal protection."