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The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 established the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). As part of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), its objective has been to improve the overall health and safety of all United States workers. In doing so, it conducts extensive scientific research in the area of occupational safety and health, provides workplace health hazard evaluations and technical assistance to states and other agencies, makes recommendations for new standards based on its research, and disseminates health and safety information.
Traditionally, NIOSH has been devoted to examining the health status of industrial workers. In 1990, however, family farm advocates and Senator Tom Harkin through a congressional mandate created the Agricultural Initiative, which directed NIOSH to place the agricultural industry among its top surveillance and research priorities. During the first five years, NIOSH focused its energies around the traditional family farm. With steady congressional support, the Agricultural Initiative brought needed attention to the hazards often present in the agricultural workplace. As NIOSH's investigative efforts progressed, however, it became apparent that certain members of the agricultural labor force such as hired farm workers were not being addressed by its research and surveillance initiatives. Acknowledging this discrepancy, NIOSH redirected its focus and began to examine hired farm workers as a distinct and unique population. In need of further guidance about the health and safety issues that confront hired farm workers, Dr. Lorraine Cameron of NIOSH, in the Spring of 1995, organized a work group of experts with extensive experience in the field of migrant and seasonal farm worker health and occupational safety.
On May 5, 1995, the group convened in Cincinnati, Ohio, to produce a set of recommendations and to prioritize action items, which in turn, would direct NIOSH in developing surveillance, research, and intervention activities in the area of hired farm worker health and occupational safety. The meeting was structured into workshops which focused on three central themes: 1) Health Status, 2) Hazardous Work Exposures, and 3) Intervention/Evaluation. To facilitate the exchange of ideas, the group was divided into two subgroups: 1) Health Status Surveillance and 2) Exposure Surveillance. The two subgroups began their sessions by brainstorming around questions such as what are the important health outcomes in the hired farm worker community and what are the hazardous exposures that confront this population. NIOSH staff observed these sessions along with the plenary discussions and recorded the work group's ideas onto flip charts.
The work group separated into subgroups a second time to examine interventions and determine which types could be evaluated for their effectiveness such as improved ergonomic training and better ergonomic design of agricultural related implements. By the end of the meeting, the work group had produced a set of occupational health outcomes and workplace exposures for future surveillance systems and research projects, a set of proposals for increasing the distribution of funding and better project collaboration, and a set of priorities for project design.
Following the conference, work group co-chairs, Valerie Wilk and Rose Holden constructed an exercise for ranking the ideas generated during the meeting. Each work group member received a copy of the ranking exercise and then returned the completed copy to the co-chairs. Wilk and Holden tallied the results and prepared this report, which received a final review by the entire work group. Challenges in the Occupational Health Surveillance of Hired Farm Workers
Since the Farmworker Justice Fund published its report, The Occupational Health of Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers in the United States, twelve years ago, the attention given to hired farm workers has gradually improved. Cross-sectional studies of agricultural labor, such as the National Agriculture Workers Survey, have contributed new techniques, which have proved extremely successful in tracking even highly nomadic hired farm workers and in gathering data on some of the occupational injuries and illnesses prevalent in this population. With these new approaches, knowledge about the demographics, health status, and occupational hazards of hired farm workers has become more detailed and more accurate. This information has enabled persons concerned with the well-being of agricultural laborers to inform policymaking at the federal, state, and local levels. In spite of these advances, numerous obstacles continue to hinder effective hired farm worker surveillance and research. Political opposition farm owner and labor contractor groups, reduced funding for enforcement agencies, and a slow reaction on the part of state and federal governments to acknowledge the realities of hired farm workers represent a few examples. As a result of these roadblocks, problems acknowledged twenty years ago as threats to the health and overall condition of hired farm workers still persist. Issues such as the absence of employer provided field sanitation facilities, pesticide exposure, and musculoskeletal injuries are just some of the hazards that continue to confront agricultural workers. Even though some protective legislation and regulations have emerged, farm workers are often unaware of the laws and the agencies that enforce them, and consequently, many work-related injuries and illnesses as well as employer violations go unreported.
Similarly, misperceptions regarding the characteristics of hired farm workers have impaired funding and the direction of research. This, in turn, has restricted the progress of occupational safety and health programs. Both federal and state governments, unaware of the true characteristics and conditions of hired farm workers, have initiated well-intended programs that failed to resolve important issues affecting this population. In the case of labor contractors, who are significant players in the agricultural industry, conflicting laws at the federal, state, and county level along with the lack of inter-agency cooperation have made it extremely difficult to monitor and regulate their business activities. This report summarizes the challenges in conducting accurate occupational health surveillance of hired farm workers and offers a set of strategies and solutions for overcoming them. In this manner, it is intended to serve as a guide for a new direction in the surveillance of hired farm worker occupational safety and health.
This document is in the public domain and may be freely copied or reprinted.
NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
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