APOPKA, Fla. (PAI)—For Letty Pineda, 20 years of toil in the high heat and humidity of Southern Florida was enough. As her subsequent experience shows, it was too much.

Pineda labored in the fields and greenhouses in and around Apopka, Fla. She decided to get out and find a job with better working conditions. She now works indoors, in an airconditioned plant.

But, after eight years there, Pineda still suffers the impact of those years in the sun, with no shade, no water, no bathroom breaks and supervisors who made her do piecework —out in the heat.

The more fruits and vegetables she harvested, or the more ferns she tended and collected inside Florida’s all-glass greenhouses, the sicker she got, she told Press Associates Union News Service in a telephone interview.

Eventually, she had to get out. But Pineda must see a cardiologist twice a year for coronary checkups. She can’t go to the beach or even play outside with her daughter without suffering heat exhaustion. Her energy is low. Meal preparation becomes a chore. Sleep is fitful.

“My first job was cutting ferns for decorative wreaths around roses,” Pineda explains. “Twenty-five ferns to a bunch and they paid me $4.25 an hour.

“We don’t have [close] access to restrooms and clean water, and there was no shade. And we don’t want to spend time so far away from the restroom.” But they had to.

“I started when it was hot, and there was a lot of humidity and no air conditioning” in the greenhouses, called ferneries, the naturalized citizen adds. “Central America was hot. This is a lot hotter.”

Taking time to take care of herself in those years in the fields and greenhouses, Pineda says, would cut her earnings. She was paid the minimum wage, plus piecework. The more ferns she gathered, the more she earned, and the more the bosses profited.

Now, all of Pineda’s lingering after-effects of working outside in high heat and humidity will persist. Indeed, they’ll only get worse for her and other agricultural workers, thanks to climate change.

Jeannie Economos, health and welfare coordinator for the Farmworker Association of Florida—a grass-roots, worker-organized group whom Pineda works with—says the situation facing farmworkers, greenhouse workers and other agricultural laborers will worsen as the globe heats up. So does Dr. Roxana Chicas, RN, an assistant professor of nursing at Emory University of Atlanta—and a former farmworker.

Her most recent study: “At the mercy of the elements: Environmental risks for farmworkers.”

“Farmworkers have been struggling with extreme temperatures for years,” says Economos. And some of those farmworkers face the extreme heat year-round, as they migrate from Floridian farms, fields, orchards and greenhouses in the winter months northwards to the mid-Atlantic states to harvest fruit and vegetables during the summer.

“Heat stroke, skin rashes, complete lethargy, chronic dehydration,” muses Fabiola Valdez-Ortiz, a farmworker group activist who keeps an eye on the state of workers in the Pacific Northwest. “It’s an occupational hazard.”

“The few workers’ protections are not enough,” she adds. “Long-term health conditions persist.” They certainly do in Pineda’s case.

The Emory team is working with the Florida farmworkers group. They’re studying the causes, the negative health impact and the stress of high heat on farmworkers, and advocating practical solutions to keep workers healthier.

Pineda’s story is duplicated by agricultural workers, in fields, farms and greenhouses—even dairy barns–from coast to coast. But it takes a back seat to the grim statistics about deaths on the job among the nation’s farmworkers.

The AFL-CIO’s annual report, Death on the Job: A Toll of Neglect, lists logging, farming and fishing as the most-hazardous occupational group of all, year after year.

Also based on federal data, deaths on the job—which get the most attention—totaled 1250 among Latino/Latina workers in 2023, the most-recent year available. Their death rate was 4.6/100,000 workers, 35% higher than the national rate (3.4/100,000).

Among those 1250 dead, agricultural work, with 71 deaths, tied for third among all occupations. More telling: Deaths due to “exposure to harmful substances”—like toxic pesticides in fields—or “to a harmful environment,” such as high heat.

Those causes accounted for 192 deaths, fourth among all causes of death on the job. And 134 Hispanic Floridians died on the job in 2023, the third-highest state total, trailing only California (210) and Texas (265). The number of heat-related illnesses and injuries among farmworkers is even higher, Dr. Chicas reports.

“We’re doing a research study and many of them [farmworkers] are telling us how hot it is outside,” she told an interviewer for The World blog. “Sometimes when they come into our office, you can feel their body is just so hot and it’s very humid down here in Florida, as well.”

“Farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die from a heat-related death, compared to other occupations, and we have documented they sometimes work with a fever. Their core body temperature goes over the 100.4-degrees Fahrenheit threshold.

“Many of them are chronically dehydrated” even when they report for work in the morning, she added. “They suffer from heat-related illness symptoms. Some of them are even suffering from acute kidney injury.” 

“In addition to the record-breaking temperatures that farmworkers are exposed to, it’s just the collision of both climate change and lack of immigration status coming together, and it’s deteriorating farmworker health, and also, not really protecting them and protecting their human dignity,” she says.

Death on the Job makes the same point, though it concentrates on fatalities and illnesses which put workers off their jobs for short times—not the chronic effects such as from the heat that attacked Pineda or black lung that attacks and eventually kills the nation’s coal miners.

When it comes to injury and illness numbers, Pineda and the miners aren’t counted.

“Certain groups of workers are especially vulnerable to the unreasonable choice between raising job safety concerns and retaliation, including job loss, change in pay or shifts and deportation without due process,” Death On The Job adds.

“Severe inequities in dangerous working conditions have created unacceptable disparities in those who face the largest burdens of disease, injury and death because of their jobs, especially as our nation’s demographics are changing.

“Initiatives to address the safety and health risks posed by changes in the workforce and employment arrangements must take more prominence. We need to continue to elevate initiatives that address the increased risk of fatalities and injuries faced by workers of color, immigrant workers, aging workers and child workers who are often exploited, and enhance efforts to protect temporary and contract workers.”

Will such change occur? Legislatively, that’s unlikely.