What's the most dangerous job in America?  Mining?  That's only number two. Farm work is the most deadly, most dangerous job in America, with the highest number of fatal accidents and disabling injuries. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 20,000-300,000 people a year are exposed to the toxic effects of pesticides on farms. Back injuries, muscle injuries, amputations and the like are a daily risk for the people who bring us our food. Congress has responded to these tragedies over the years by creating programs to help disabled farm workers. But just as farming in America has changed, with family farms being replaced by large agri-business corporations, the way farm workers get to the farm is changing as well. These changes have created havoc in the process of matching services to the workers that need them.

Gone are the days of a generation ago when Pennsylvania farmers, after sizing up their prospective harvest, would get on the phone to Miami or Puerto Rico, and substituting shouting for Spanish, would try to recruit workers, or else wait anxiously as summer truckloads of workers would pull up to one farm after another, asking if any help was needed.. Now most farm work is brokered. Brokers and contractors hire, house, transport and pay the worker, who is usually Latino.

Responsibilities blurred by new brokering system
The Department of Labor certifies and licenses contractors in order to monitor wages, safety and ensure that social security deductions are made. Leaving the recruitment and management of employees to contractors frees growers to concentrate on their crops. This doesn't work out quite as well for the farm worker, who may be left without a clear picture of who is responsible should he become disabled on the job. Sometimes, both the grower and the contractor are legally co-employers. Sometimes not. Then there is a confusing welter of government licensed farm worker programs, each governed by different regulations and with different protections and rights.

The person who picked and processed the food you ate this morning might be a migrant or a seasonal farm worker. Migrant farm workers are citizens or legal residents of the United States who move from place to place following the ripening crops. Seasonal farm workers work seasonally, or less than full time, in farm work. They are also either citizens or legal residents. They are assisted and served differently than the H2A agricultural workers.

The H2A is a relatively new program that is very popular with growers. H2A visas bring in farm workers from other countries, usually Mexico and Central America, and give them legal status while they work. It provides growers with plenty of help at less than minimum wage, and with few legal responsibilities. Typically paid $3.13 an hour, H2A workers are documented workers who are here legally, but do not have permanent residency. Their visa does not permit them to switch employers and their contracts typically run a year or less. The H2A workers, should they become disabled, are entitled to some services and legal protections, but fewer than provided to migrant and seasonal farm workers.

Numbers of farm workers unknown, uncounted
Pennsylvania is a workforce development state, that is, a state in which the education and health of youths in preparation for entering the workforce has high priority in funding. The state funds migrant Head Start, migrant education and good migrant health services in general for the young. But the service system falters when it comes to the adult farm worker population. While guessing the number of migrant and seasonal farm workers to be about 50,000, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania doesn't even have a good handle on how many farm workers are actually working in the state. Landscape, food processing workers and other contracted laborers are working in large numbers in programs uncounted by the agricultural industry. And no one can even guess at the number of undocumented farm workers. The first week of January alone, remote and mountainous Schuylkill County saw an Immigration and Naturalization Services round-up of more than 100 undocumented workers at just one site. Clearly, the number of Latino farm workers in all programs, documented and undocumented is so vast that its no surprise that the rehabilitation agencies are chronically under-funded.

The demand for food is never ending, however, and the grocery stores must be stocked. Our relentless appetites put great pressure on all parts of the food supply system. Workers must be found to bring in and process the crops around the clock and at all costs. The Grower, pressured by a narrow profit margin and perishable crops, leans on the Contractor to keep the workers working. Workers report that when they become unable to work, the Contractor may exploit his knowledge of Latino culture and machismo to shame the worker into not reporting the injury. "They called me a woman and told me not to cry for the doctor," a worker reported, adding that the taunts in front of his peers made him embarrassed not to go to work. A worker can be made to feel that if he lets his crew down, or Contractor down, or the Grower down, his future employment opportunities will be crippled. Add to this pressure the H2A stipulation that if the worker does not complete his contract, his transportation costs home need not be paid.

What happens when a farm worker becomes disabled?
So what happens when, inevitably, Pennsylvania farm workers become disabled? There is a very widespread myth that farm workers are not entitled to Social Security Disability Benefits. That's usually not true. Citizens and Legal Residents who have paid into Social Security are entitled to receive benefits if they become disabled after working at least a year and a half. All farm worker programs require deductions be made to Social Security. It's often not eligibility that's the obstacle, it's the timing. Most Social Security applications require at least one appeal and take more than a year to resolve. A disabled farm worker seldom has the resources to go that long without earnings. Most will go on working, relying on help from peers to cover up their diminishing performance and family to supplement their diminishing pay. Sadly, in repetitive motion disorder cases, and hand trauma injuries such as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome, putting off medical treatment can result in permanent disability and a lifetime of agonizing pain.

Since a farm worker who reports disability may lose employer paid housing, transportation, and sometimes-legal status, the pressure to hide the disability is enormous. Some resort to sharing their already small pay with their co-workers in exchange for help meeting the demands of the job. Others have found a sympathetic grower who will let them switch to a less physically demanding job. Still others have fallen back to a support role, perhaps taking on housekeeping or other jobs for fellow farm workers when fieldwork becomes impossible. What's clear is what isn't happening. Disabled farm workers are not using rehabilitation services and treatment in anything close to the numbers we know must have suffered injuries, given the nature of the job.

Workman's Compensation can sometimes help when it's a clear-cut case of work related injury. Since Workman's Compensations cases are fee generating, finding a private attorney who will take the case on a contingency basis is usually not a problem. But not all states extend the full scope of Workman's Compensation to all farm worker programs. Thus, Guillermo, who lost the use of his two middle fingers on his right hand through nerve damage after working a year in a poultry processing operation, was denied Workman's Compensation, even after appeal. Guillermo's understanding of the denial is that it was based on the short amount of time he worked in poultry processing. He suspects the fact that he was not in the right visa program for his field of work may also have contributed to the denial. Clearly, issues that weigh against the claimant, such as legal status or eligibility do not help in a system that many injured workers believe is increasingly weighted in favor of the employer.

Interstate complications
New farm worker programs complicate the issue. The relatively new H2A farm worker program comes under Environmental Protection Agency protections, but not all the Fair Labor Standards Act or Migrant and Seasonal Worker Protection Act provisions. To confuse matters more, Pennsylvania, the nation's third largest employer of H2B slots, which are not intended for farm workers but cover service industries such as landscaping, sees cases in which contractors transfer H2B workers to H2A jobs. H2B visas, while providing legal status and work contracts in the United States, don't provide the services and protections given to H2A workers. A worker disabled after working in an agricultural setting may think he or she has rights under H2A, but find out when they seek help that they are enrolled in the wrong program, and not entitled to Legal Services which are available to H2A workers. New Jersey, which follows Pennsylvania as the nation's fourth largest user of H2B enrollees, sees cases in which Interstate Clearance Orders recruit workers currently housed in New Jersey cities, then picked up and transported daily to Pennsylvania sites where they may be employed in seasonal agricultural food processing. "It becomes a shell game," says Karen Detamore, Executive Director of Friends of Farm workers, a public interest agency that offers legal services to farm workers. "Workers enter at one point only to find themselves at another point. Often they have no real control over what they will be doing or what legal protections they will have."

In Pennsylvania, many farm workers who become disabled are entitled to disability and rehabilitative services, but few apply for help. Why?  Greg Selmer, a supervisor with Pennsylvania's Office of Vocational Rehabilitation shakes his head. "We just don't see them. Now the mushroom workers in southeast Pennsylvania, yes. But as for the field workers, we're not seeing them."

Word of mouth most effective Latino referral system
Word of mouth is the most effective information and referral system in the Latino community, and the discouraging results experienced by disabled farm workers who have tried to get help holds backs their friends and colleagues. On the other hand, the rehabilitative programs that can help are just not well known. "For example," says Ms. Detamore, "OVR (Pennsylvania's Office of Vocational Rehabilitation) is an excellent program. They do some wonderful things. But people just don't know about it. I didn't even know it existed until I heard about it from a disabled friend, and I work in the field."  Ms. Detamore says her own struggle to find services for her disability has helped her to understand the obstacles facing the disabled farm worker.

 She demonstrates what does work by her first hand experience. Informal networks of information and experience, passing along success stories and first hand ‘how-to' accounts are the most important asset a person with disabilities has. These networks exist in the Latino community in urban settings, but are needed in isolated and rural farm communities.

Success story of mushroom workers and private non-profit groups
Their success is proved by Berks' county mushroom workers. Living in a high-density population area, they had the numbers to organize and advocate for employment and training services in Spanish, which ought to have been available for injured and displaced workers, but were not. They were able to mount a class action lawsuit and win bilingual services.

Private non-profit agencies are at present Pennsylvania's farm workers best remedies. Friends for Farm Workers provides legal assistance on employment and injury issues, and is a crucial resource, practically the only one of its kind in Pennsylvania to sort out the tangled legal web of farm worker programs and rights. Although Legal Services corporations and agencies are restricted as to which farm workers they can serve, and the kind of help they can give them, Friends for Farm Workers will search out and find legal representation for farm worker employment issues, even if they can't provide it in house.

Relying on private donations to supplement federal funding, Rural Opportunities for Farm Workers, provides education and training to disabled farm workers that in many cases has made a life saving difference. Though funding cuts led to the closure of four local offices last year, they were still able to help 400 farm worker families improve their lives. Although they are unable to serve injured H2A workers under the guidelines of their Department of Labor funding, Rural Opportunities State Coordinator Nita D'Agostino says: "We'll never turn disabled farm workers away. We'll keep on searching until we can match whatever church and private agencies we can find to disabled farm workers who don't qualify for our help". Ms. D'Agostino draws on her heritage for inspiration. Her father was among countless thousands of miners recruited from Italy, Spain and other countries to work in Pennsylvania coal mines, and who became disabled or died on the job. The civil rights and workers rights won at that time for all Americans by those who championed the immigrants struggle improved the lives of all workers in the country. A new public awareness of the plight of the farm worker, upon whom we all depend for our daily bread, has never been more needed than now.

To contact Friends of Farm Workers, Inc., you may visit www.friendsfw.org or call (215) 733-0578. Rural Opportunities for Farm Workers may be reached at www.ruralisc.org or (717) 234-6616.

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