Keeping A Watchful Eye On Farmworker Health

Ephraim Camacho, a community worker with California Rural Legal Assistance, hands out brochures on the Affordable Care Act, heat illness, and wage theft at a farmworker health fair in Huron, Calif. (Jeremy Raff/KQED).

Editor's note: California’s farmworkers face a litany of health hazards on the job: working bent over and carrying heavy loads of produce is hard on the back, hips, and knees; long hours in the sun can mean heat exhaustion, or worse. Employers don’t always provide the state-mandated access to shade, drinking water, and restrooms. The state’s regulatory agencies can’t keep a very close eye on such a large area.

To help fill this gap in enforcement, community health worker Ephrain Camacho drives the back roads with a pair of binoculars, pulling over wherever he sees a crew of workers to make sure they have the workplace protections they’re entitled to. As part of our community health series Vital Signs, we followed him to a health fair near Fresno to learn more about his work and about farmworker health.

By Ephraim Camacho

We call it 'reading the land.' You park on the side of the road and observe. The first thing we look for is the porta-potties, drinking water, and the shade.

If we see that there are not enough toilets, or that they’re lacking drinking water, or even drinking cups, we enter the field and talk to the employer about voluntary compliance.

We are going to do everything that we can to bring that employer into compliance. Even if it means having Cal/OSHA [the state's workplace safety regulator] come out and cite them.

We’re out there because there’s a lack of enforcement. There’s like a no-care attitude for the farmworkers. It’s just not a priority for these enforcement agencies to do anything.

The health fair in Huron, Calif., outside of Fresno, retained the atmosphere of a modest quinceñera, even as farmworkers sought legal help for unpaid wages. — The health fair had the atmosphere of a modest quinceñera, even as farmworkers sought legal help for unpaid wages (Jeremy Raff/KQED).

There are probably close to 200 people at this health fair. Most of the families here are farmworkers. People have trouble finding a doctor. We get people from this community all the time who are injured on the job and the employer did not take them to the doctor. These are people who are still hurting, and they need a place to go.

The more we talk to people the more we find out that there's this big gap there. That farmworkers don’t have the same basic rights as others.

So that's our job: to educate the farmworkers about what their basic rights are.

I was a farmworker myself in the early 1960s. There was no toilet, no drinking water, and of course, no shade. Farmworkers couldn't get unemployment benefits. It wasn't until Cesar Chavez started the United Farmworker's Union that we started to see real positive changes.

There has been some progress, but not as much as we'd like to see.

My dad used to say, the better working conditions have to be there for the people coming behind us. That was my dad’s concept, and I believe that.

Jeremy Raff reported this story.