WeCount pressures Costa Farms over heat protections for nursery — SkimNews
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- WeCount organized simultaneous petitions at all five Costa Farms nursery locations on Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, calling on the company to adopt a code of conduct modeled on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' Fair Food Program and covering education on heat illness, shade, water, rest breaks, and heat-stress monitoring.
- Costa Farms told Grist it maintains a full-time on-site nurse, a functional medical clinic, and a heat protection policy aligned with proposed OSHA rules, and that it instituted daily five-minute supervisor-worker safety meetings after Hurricane Helene struck North Carolina.
- WeCount's survey of Costa Farms workers found 86% reported dangerous incidents involving heat illness, pesticide exposure, or workplace accidents, while over two-thirds said they were entirely denied breaks and days off.
- Alejandro Gonzales, a Costa Farms nursery worker originally from Guatemala, told a Florida rally in Spanish that summer days have topped 110°F and that workers do not receive cold or clean water, breaks, or shade.
- WeCount is also pressing major retailers — Home Depot and IKEA — to buy only from growers who adopt the code, framing the campaign as Planting Justice and citing the Fair Food Program's record of securing worker wins like year-round electrolyte beverages.
- Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a 2024 law preempting local heat standards after industry pushback, cutting short WeCount's earlier Miami-Dade campaign where heat-exposure deaths were estimated to spike by 600 during extremely hot periods.
- Agricultural workers, a category that includes nursery workers who handle greenery, are excluded from federal collective bargaining protections under the National Labor Relations Act and are more than 35 times more likely to die from heat-related causes than workers in other industries.
Why it matters: Nursery and farmworkers face the nation's deadliest workplace weather hazard while federal collective bargaining law leaves them without the standard protections other workers have; with OSHA's heat standard stalled and Florida having preempted local rules, Costa Farms' voluntary policies — which workers say fall short — and worker-led campaigns modeled on the Fair Food Program are doing the work that regulators won't.
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