Seasonal Worker Health and Safety: Are We All Guilty of Neglect? 

You may have seen the news coming out of Canada a while back about activists protesting over health and safety issues for seasonal workers. While following the news coverage on this issue, one video interview showing B-roll footage of a greenhouse, a hydroponic tomato operation, and a tractor harvesting vegetables in a field as the interviewee talked caught my attention. The implication was subtle, yet powerful — these types of operations don’t care about the health and safety of their workers.

Sweeping generalizations such as these often target the culprits as well as the innocents, saddling both with a stigma that crushes all in its path. It reminds me of my biggest pet peeve in elementary school, when the teacher kept the whole class in from recess because two people wouldn’t stop talking rather than punishing the two individuals causing the problem.

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Like most polarizing issues, there are two sides to every story. Many growing operations in the green industry care very much about their seasonal workers’ health and safety and have taken measures to protect their employees. Who is drawing attention to their efforts? The answer had better be all of us, because fairly deserved or not, employers’ neglect of seasonal workers is very much in the spotlight right now, and there’s even more emphasis on keeping employees safe in light of COVID-19.

The dynamics surrounding seasonal worker issues are complex. Craig Regelbrugge, Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Government Relations at AmericanHort pointed out to me that the number of workers crossing the border without proper immigration status to work in agriculture has plummeted, and workers are aging out or have been targeted for immigration enforcement. These factors and others have left a gap that grower operations have partially filled with continued improvement in labor productivity, but mostly the gap has been filled with temporary foreign workers.

“The groups that are agitating around worker health have a long history of opposition to temporary foreign workers, for a variety of reasons, so many agendas come into play here,” he says. “I do not see these challenges going away. If Democrats gain ground (and especially the White House) in November, we will get a mixed-bag result of, on one hand, more willingness to engage on constructive immigration reforms, and on the other, more pressure for worker protections, higher labor and wage standards, more union organizing pressure, etc.”

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Regelbrugge’s comments bring up another facet in all of this: government involvement, which almost always brings complications. After the COVID-19 outbreaks on Ontario’s farms, for example, the government declared that, as part of its three-point plan to address the problem, workers who tested positive for COVID-19 but were asymptomatic, would be allowed to work together in the fields, apart from other employees. This only infuriated some seasonal workers and activists more. They labeled the move a “death sentence,” saying that seasonal workers would now be forced to go to work against their will. Suddenly, employers were the enemy, even though there were many that would never think of forcing employees to come to work against their will.

Do we want the government dictating what should be done about worker protections, immigration reforms, and other hot-button issues based solely on the voices of activists and others with self-serving agendas? It seems to me there needs to be fair representation on both sides of the issue. And that’s up to us.

Bottom line — those of you who do care about seasonal worker health and safety and are doing right by your employees are the other side of the story. It’s time to speak up.


Sound-Off:  How do you feel about seasonal worker health and safety issues? What are you doing at your operation to take care of your workers’ well-being? Drop a comment in the reader section below. 

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