Farmworkers—Always Essential,Always at Risk: An Interview With Jeannie Economos

Introduction

Farmworkers are the quiet engine that keeps America running. During this time of anti-immigration rhetoric and policies, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic crisis protests and demands for racial justice, and the threats posed by climate change, it is vital to examine the role that policy plays in creating and sustaining the injustices experienced by the farm working community for centuries. Throughout the institutions and periods of slavery, to indentured servitude and sharecropping, to prison labor and the prison industrial complex, to deportations and family separation, to the present, farmworkers have always played an essential role in the U. S. economy. While the demographics of farmworkers have changed over time, their exploitation and hazardous working conditions continue.

In 1983, Central Florida farmworkers united to create the Farmworker Association of Florida. Jeannie Economos is the Coordinator of the Pesticide Safety and Environmental Health Project at the Farmworker Association of Florida. In this interview, she discusses the impact of racism, immigration, climate change and COVID-19 on the farmworker community.

Farmworker Association of Florida

INTERVIEWER: Well, can you tell me a little bit about the Farmworker Association of Florida and how you came to be involved?

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: Sure. The Farmworker Association started in 1983, and it started because of freezes that affected the orange groves in Florida. The organization was started by farmworkers themselves. It was not top down. It was bottom up. And the farmworkers organized themselves to try and get assistance when they were out of work because of the freezes that damaged the orange crops. That was in 1983. And today we have five offices in the state of Florida, and we have more than 10,000 members. Not all members are active, of course, just like any organization. But we do have more than 10,000 members and many active local community members and volunteers.

Each of our offices was started in response to a natural disaster. So, for example, our office in Homestead started when we went down to do a response after Hurricane Andrew. We have a lot of expertise in disaster response. Our main areas of work are pesticide worker protections and policy, health and safety training and education, worker justice, disaster response, research and immigrants’ rights. My area is health and safety, and like I said, that has been mostly focused around pesticides; more recently about heat, and now about the COVID crisis. But also things like, you know, sexual harassment as a health and safety issue, and other kinds of issues in the workplace, like dangerous conditions of equipment and things like that. Our other main area of work is around immigrants’ rights. The Farmworker Association has been a leading immigrants’ rights organization in the state since it began in 1983, including working on IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 (United States). We were one of the cofounders of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, and we do a lot around “know your rights” for immigrants, working on the local, state and national levels for policies that do not negatively target immigrants but that protect immigrants, and uphold immigrants’ rights and dignity. So that’s a huge area of work that we have been working on.

And then there are several other things. Civic participation and leadership development, where we involve farmworkers in advocating for themselves, learning the political process, whether they are documented and can vote, or if they’re undocumented and can’t vote, they can still advocate and tell their personal stories to try and get regulatory reform, and trying to get better policies implemented at, again, the local, state and national levels. Mixed in there are other worker rights issues like wage theft and low wages and labor trafficking. We deal with a lot of other issues. Housing, for example; we deal with housing discrimination cases.

Another two areas of work are agroecology and community gardens, where we have community gardens to help grow organic, fresh fruits and vegetables by the community for the community, but also we teach principles of agroecology, food sovereignty, cultural diversity and alternatives to conventional agriculture. That’s a whole category itself. And then the last thing is our community-based research projects with academic institutions, and we have done I think five or six major academic research projects since the mid-1990s, including a ten-year partnership with Emory University on health and safety research.

The Farmworker Community

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us a little bit about the farmworker community? Because I think the public perception is that brown people coming from Latin America, that they’re coming here to steal jobs and all of that rhetoric. Could you just describe the nationalities involved, and the history of African Americans as farm workers? Just to sort of break down some of the stereotypes and the rhetoric that we’re hearing every day on the news.

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: Yes, I’m really glad you asked that. I work very closely with the African American community in our area of Central Florida, and this really, it’s hard for me to talk about it, because I get emotional. I’ve known them for twenty years, a lot of the people that used to be farmworkers, and it’s very, sometimes it feels hurtful to them that everybody talks about farmworkers like they’re all Hispanic. And today that’s true. The vast majority of farmworkers in the United States today are Hispanic, mainly from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador. In Florida, we have Haitian farmworkers, as well. Historically, though, farmworkers in the United States were African American, or as they prefer to be called, Black Americans. And the majority of them are descended from people who were enslaved people. On the West Coast you had a lot of Asian and Filipino farmworkers, as well. But in the South, east of the Mississippi River, the majority of farmworkers were descended from people who were enslaved, people from Africa. So, it’s really deeply important to understand that history, because people say, oh, Mexican farmworkers’ conditions are like modern day slavery. That’s true. OK? But a lot of the Black farmworkers were descendants of slavery, and their parents and grandparents worked and lived as indentured servants or sharecroppers, and some of the older folks, most of them are gone now, but their grandparents were enslaved people. You know, we’re not that far removed from slavery. So it’s really important to understand that history. Plus, there’s not that many left, but there are still some Black farmworkers in the United States. I haven’t been there recently, but in Hastings, Florida, there’s a community of Black farm workers that work in potatoes and onions, ground crops, that live in really horrible conditions.

So, I think it’s really important for people to understand that history and the demographics, and a lot of times the Haitians are forgotten, as well. It is a significant, though not a very large percentage that are Haitian. But it is a very vital percentage of workers in the United States that are Haitian, and historically there were a lot of Jamaicans, especially in sugar cane in Florida. I know mostly about Florida. But in Florida, there were, for decades, the Jamaicans who were brought here to harvest sugar cane, which is a really brutal crop. Harvesting sugar cane is just brutally hard work. So, it is important to understand. And then there are even cases of labor from Thailand and other places where workers are being recruited under the H2A program to come and work in the United States. So, it’s changing demographically, but it’s important to understand the historical context.

H2A Visas—Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

INTERVIEWER: I don’t know if the current ban on immigrants will be a temporary one; you don’t know with this administration. And the H2A ¹ visas, is there anything you want to talk about, about how this is affecting the community or the visa process or the immigration process?

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: The H2A program is an agricultural work visa program that enables farmers or growers to recruit farm labor from other countries when they have proven they were not able to find sufficient farmworkers domestically to plant, harvest and pack their crops. Workers that come here on an H2A visa are often called “guestworkers.” The farm owner or labor contractor, under the H2A program, has to provide the transportation, housing and food for their guestworkers; they have to guarantee a certain number of months of work and a certain wage rate. It might sound like a good deal, until you dig deeper. H2A workers are among the most vulnerable farmworkers. Even though their work visa means that they are “legal” or have a legal right to work here, they often live and work in remote rural areas where they have to rely on the employer for transportation to a store or clinic, for example. They generally have no family or support networks in this country, often do not know their rights, and generally speak little if any English. And, the labor recruiter and contractor system is ripe for abuse. Few growers or farmers today hire their own workers. They hire labor contractors to recruit, transport and supervise the work crews. These recruiters and contractors have power over the workers, and they can use it to intimidate, harass and threaten workers, who then have no recourse but to comply or be sent back to their home countries and be essentially blackballed from being hired by other contractors for future work. The most recent labor trafficking cases we have had all have been workers who were brought here on H2A visas. Unscrupulous recruiters get to know the family members of the workers they recruit, so they can then intimidate and control workers in this country by threatening their family members back home. The stories are heartbreaking.

COVID has added another layer to all this. Because the H2A workers are often transported in buses in large groups and are housed in barracks or hotels with many people in one unit, social distancing is almost impossible. Some of the worst outbreaks of the coronavirus among farmworkers have been with the H2A workers.

The Farmworker Association is opposed to the H2A program. Florida has become second in the nation with the largest number of guestworkers. This has resulted in hundreds if not thousands of skilled undocumented farmworkers (because it is skilled work, in spite of how it is characterized) who have lived here for years, even decades, losing their jobs and housing, and being displaced by guestworkers. They have to find work somewhere, so, they end up in an underground economy where they often become victims of wage theft. So much of this heartbreak and struggle could have been avoided if Congress had passed comprehensive immigration reform. The anti-immigrant policies of recent years have only exacerbated the problem, which is compounded by the pandemic, the economic crisis and the racist discrimination against those who are not white and who are immigrants.

INTERVIEWER: Well, does the H2A, visa program have any requirements for farmers to provide COVID safety protection for the farmworkers?

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: Not only are there no regulations to protect H2A workers from COVID, but the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has not issued any coronavirus protection regulations for any workers in the country! This is unconscionable. While they have recommendations and guidance, there are no regulations that they can impose, implement and enforce. The horrible conditions for workers in the meat packing industry are one tragic example of this failure by Occupational Safety and Health Administration. We have, along with and in coalition with many other organizations, been advocating at the federal and state levels to demand that coronavirus protections for workers be mandated by government agencies. In spite of the fact that we are more than six months into this pandemic, it still has not happened. The growing and harvesting season is ramping up in Florida, and we are expecting farmworkers—H2A and U.S. workers—to be returning to the fields. Our fear is that cases will spike again among our Florida farmworkers in the fall and winter. We are preparing as best we can to inform and assist the workers when they arrive to help them to try to protect themselves.

Health and Safety

INTERVIEWER: Well, can you maybe, link from that, to talk about some of the programs that you offer?

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: We have five main program areas. When we were not going through this crisis, we actually had about ten pesticide health and safety and heat stress trainings scheduled for March and April for farmworkers in our Apopka area office, alone, not to mention those scheduled at our offices in other areas of the state. We hadn’t even started doing May yet. So we do trainings with workers about how to protect themselves from pesticides and heat stress and trainings on reproductive health related to occupational exposures. We provide farmworkers with long-sleeved shirts that people donate. The shirts are worn by farmworkers to help them protect themselves from the sun and from pesticide exposure and we share information with them about the dangers and risks of exposure. Our goal each year is to train some five hundred farmworkers in Florida. That was prior to the arrival of the coronavirus. We also file complaints. If a worker says that there’s a violation of a pesticide regulation, we’ll file a complaint with the state Department of Agriculture to try and get an investigation and enforcement measures. Our frustration is that, even when a violation is found, growers often get only a warning, and fines for multiple violations are so small that they are often not very effective. Thus, we always advocate for better enforcement and compliance.

We used to do trainings with healthcare providers as well. Even though the trainings were well-received and we always got good evaluations from participants, we found that it did not translate into implementation of changes at the farmworker health clinics. This is indicative of the urgent need for education and training in medical schools of the importance of occupational and environmental health. And, there needs to be a commitment by CEOs and Chief Medical Officers at clinics to implement policies and procedures in their clinics to address occupational health issues.

We also work with the clinics that work in farmworker communities to try and get healthcare providers more responsive and more culturally sensitive to workers’ health and safety issues. Having someone from the farmworker community on the boards of community health centers has always been one of our goals and objectives, to be sure that there is representation from the affected community on the Board of Directors.

And then we also work on policy—state and national pesticide and heat stress policy. For example, we are supporting several bills in Congress, including a heat stress bill by Congresswoman Chu and a pesticide reform bill by Senator Udall.

But for the workers, we do a lot around health and safety. We reported Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety regulation violations at a mushroom factory where workers had been injured and hurt and where conditions were hazardous. Occupational Safety and Health Administration came out and inspected the plant. We do try to work with growers to get them to improve working conditions, but many growers are really resistant to that. We conduct research projects in partnership with academic institutions, such as Emory University and Florida State University. Several of these projects are funded through the Southeastern Coastal Center for Agricultural Health and Safety, of which we are a part. So yeah, we do trainings and outreach and education for workers about health and safety, but the regulations that are designed to protect farmworkers need to be better, stronger. We also have a reproductive health training, too, for women, about occupational and environmental health related to their work and their reproductive health.

INTERVIEWER: To make sure the babies are safe before they’re born and after they’re born, and before the egg and the sperm even meet.

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: Exactly. Because pesticide exposure can affect fertility. It can affect the development of the fetus. This is an issue of deep concern for me and one that I could talk about for two hours.

We’re part of a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency brought by Earthjustice about the pesticide chlorpyrifos. It’s a known neurotoxin that affects children and it can affect the development of children and pregnant women that are exposed to chlorpyrifos; like kids can end up with ADHD, learning disabilities, there’s even a connection to autism. There are other pesticides, too, but chlorpyriphos is the one that’s well-known and broadly used. It was banned for residential use in 2001 because of its harmful effects on children. So, why is it still approved for use in agriculture? There are children in agricultural areas, and farmworker parents are exposed to the pesticide and their children are at risk from the pesticide’s residues. The Environmental Protection Agency banned all food uses of chlorpyrifos in 2015, but it was not to go into effect until 2016. The Trump Environmental Protection Agency halted the ban. Hence, the lawsuit. In the meantime, farmworker families continue to be exposed.

INTERVIEWER: And you know, since in this country, we always say that education is the way to improve your life, we’re setting up these children to have educational setbacks.

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: Exactly.

INTERVIEWER: You know, we’re failing them from the beginning, the very beginning. Well, do you mind going into how heat affects pesticide exposure, and the dangers?

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: Yeah, that hasn’t been studied a whole lot yet, but with climate change and increasing high temperatures, we’re really concerned. But if you’re really hot, and your body is under stress from heat exposure, does that increase your absorption of pesticides when you’re exposed to pesticides? What does that do to a person’s body? You know, you’re sweating more. You’re exerting more. Can that increase your level of absorption of the pesticides? I mean, if nothing else, then it definitely compromises the body, and you’re exposed to both heat stress and pesticide exposure at the same time. We worked with Union of Concerned Scientists on a report that I can send you. There are multiple news stories almost every day of the dangerous high temperatures being experienced in places all around the country. The heat is a threat to the average person, but if you are also experiencing physical exertion in your work environment in extreme heat conditions, it compounds the risks. In Florida, we have very high humidity, which increases the heat index, which further exacerbates the risks to farmworkers. Heat can make you dizzy and light-headed, which might make you less cautious of pesticide exposure, such as taking off your long-sleeve shirt. If you become dizzy, you could be at risk of falling off a ladder when you are picking oranges, for example. There is so much there, and it is deeply concerning.

One of the things that we were seeing in the Union of Concerned Scientists report is that we need to be reducing pesticides and protecting workers from heat exposure because nobody knows what the long-term compound effects are, including to pregnant women. What is that going to do to a pregnant woman if she’s exposed to both pesticides and heat, and to the fetus? So, there’s some huge questions there, and some huge concerns, and it needs to be studied more. But we can’t just wait for these studies. We need to take action now, because while we’re doing all these studies, people and children are getting exposed and hurt and damaged. This is a public health issue. And so, we need to start doing better and quit using all these pesticides and protect people from heat exposure. You know, how many studies do we need to realize that people need health and safety?

INTERVIEWER: I completely agree. Like, the precautionary principle, and then that whole “paralysis by analysis,” sooner or later you’ve got to make the jump.

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: Exactly. OK, this coronavirus obviously is really horrible. Lots of people are dying. But you know, what about all the farmworkers that have died, or that have gotten sick? You know, we talk about farmworkers are essential workers. Yeah. But they’ve been essential workers for several centuries—from the days of slavery until today!. Our country was built on the backs of the labor of enslaved peoples. So, why are we just finally realizing it and calling them essential now? So, we can make sure they keep working so the rest of us benefit from the food they harvest and supply? If they are essential, we should not treat them as though they are expendable. Farm work is what feeds us all. Let’s treat farmworkers with the dignity, respect, honor and the protections they deserve.

INTERVIEWER: If you had any closing message or calls to action on this issue, what would they be?

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: Well, I guess the closing message is idealistic and possible at the same time if we take this opportunity to realize it. We need a Just Transition. And that means that we need to use this opportunity that is happening right now to realize that we need to completely transform society and our economy. We have seen major systems breakdowns under our current system, and it has exposed the ugly side of exploitation of people and the environment. The talk is about getting the economy open again. Well, what exactly does that mean? Open, for what? For whom? Because obviously our economy hasn’t been working for a lot of people, who have been working, sometimes two and three jobs, under a minimum wage that doesn’t even cover their minimum expenses. Or, those that work in the gig economy that can make millions, even billions for corporate CEOS while they can barely make ends meet. We need to rethink what kind of economy we really want and how we can have equity, inclusion, diversity and justice as part of that economy. Oil prices are still low and renewables are up. We have seen what a cleaner environment looks like—we saw it during the shutdown, and the air was cleaner, including in the United States and in Beijing. We all want cleaner air. We want food free of harmful pesticides. This moment is a turning point. We can turn in a direction that creates a safer, healthier and more just world. Or, we can get stuck in the “business as usual” mindset, which is one of exploitation. There are things that we can and should be doing right now, and this is a chance where we should be completely rethinking everything, including how we treat workers and who we see as essential workers and what kinds of protections that they should be having. Not just protections. But this is beyond protections. What kind of sovereignty and autonomy and self-determination that these workers—these people—should be able to have?

INTERVIEWER: I love how you phrased that.

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: Well, you know, the person who was the cofounder of this organization used to say that “farmworkers are just landless farmers.” A lot of the Black former farmworkers that I work with, they know a lot about farming. They were farmworkers. But if they had had the land, and they had not only land but also access and power. If you read Freedom Farmers—a lot of Black farmers that had land were really given all kinds of obstacles by the government and racist policies that led to a loss of many small, Black-owned farms over the years. But if we can give people their own self-determination, then we can really see potential coming out of this moment.

INTERVIEWER: We strip farmworkers of their humanity as if they’re some other species.

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: I keep using the word “farmworkers,” but I think it’s better if I use the words “men and women.” Farmworker, you can just like, OK, so there’s this group of people out there that are poor, and you know, you have your stereotypes. But if you say “men and women,” that just puts a whole different—you know, I mean, think about it. You just hear it differently, see it differently. The men and women who harvest our food. That’s more interesting than farmworkers. That gives the people a face and a name. They are people—just like you and me.

INTERVIEWER: I like that. Yeah, we need to take—we’re taking—control of the narrative.

JEANNIE ECONOMOS: Right, exactly.