Assembly Standing Committee on Labor and Employment

Then take that yellow one off. There you go.

Good morning and welcome to the Assembly labor and Employment Committee informational hearing on the lack of labor law enforcements for California farm workers. With me today are Committee Member, Assembly Member Arambula. And throughout this hearing, several other Members will be coming in and out. We have a lot going on today, but on the dais should be Assembly Member Lee, Ward, Zabur and Alanis, Assembly Member Soria and Senator Cortese. Thank you all for being here today to discuss such an important and timely topic.

Our hearing today will be live streamed on the Assembly's website. I'd also like to mention that our hearing will be translated by two interpreters joining us today, Reyna Rodriguez and Estefania Avalos. They will be providing simultaneous interpretation from English to Spanish and for Spanish speakers in attendance, and consecutive interpretation from Spanish to English for panelists and public commenters. Today's hearing focuses on the failure of state agencies to meaningfully enforce labor laws and protect unrepresented farm workers.

Agricultural work is among the most dangerous work in the United States. Farm workers are 35 times more likely to die of heat related injuries than in any other industries. In addition, these workers experience high rates of chronic health conditions. Farm workers are also subjected to wage and hour violations, and employers use both their undocumented status and status as monolingual Spanish speakers to intimidate and discourage them from asserting their basic right to timely and full payment of hours worked.

Fear of deportation is very real and widespread. Despite these recognized health and safety issues and persistent labor abuses, and despite years, I wanted to repeat that, years, of historic budget surpluses, the well being and rights of farm workers have been left largely unenforced. Much of the data and testimony stories we will be reviewing today will be from times of budget surplus. Ensuring that workers can safely do their jobs and enjoy basic labor rights must be and will be a priority of this Committee.

I see our discussion today as part of a broader process to identify the gaps in the State's enforcement of many critical labor laws for farm workers and other workers who are unrepresented, so that we can make recommendations to create a more effective framework for protecting these essential workers. Today, we will hear from four panels made up of farm workers, researchers, government officials and advocates. After each panel, we will have some time for Members to ask questions.

At the end of the hearing, we will take public comment. Now, I want to add one more thing. I want to state what I'm not interested in hearing today. What I don't want to hear is why state agencies failures happen during a time of surplus. I don't want state agency failures to be conveniently whitewashed by the current budget deficit.

Let's remember, as I stated at the beginning, many of the stories and the data that we have today is what happened when we had billions of dollars in surpluses. If I hear that in anyone's testimony, I will respectfully ask you to stop and talk to me about real recommendations. And if there are other factual disputes, I will encourage our Committee to seek assistance from either both the State Auditor or the Legislative Analyst.

With that, I will ask our first panel, who's already seated here, and introduce them. Our first panel will talk about the hazards, the wage death, and the threats of retaliation based by farm workers. Speaking will be Dr. Ed Flores, Faculty Director of the UC Merced Labor Center. Elavio Platon, a farm worker with the Centro Binacional para el Desarollo IndÍgena Oxaqueño or CBDIO. Cecilia Perez, a farm worker with the UFW. And Dr. Sarai Martinez, Executive Director of CBDIO.

Each of you will have five minutes to speak, with an additional five minutes for translation. You may go.

Okay. Thank you to the California Assembly for the opportunity to present testimony on the behalf of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center. Agricultural workers are essential to maintaining the food supply but face many hazards and workplace violations. Agricultural workers are largely immigrant, non citizen and undocumented have historically faced great barriers to unionization, and these dynamics have enabled employer non compliance with labor laws. Next slide, please. Agricultural workers have historically experienced among the least work protections in the nation.

California industrial agriculture was modeled upon the southern plantation, and when the National Labor Relations act and the Fair Labor Standards act established modern day worker standards, the only two worker groups excluded from those protections were agricultural workers and domestic workers, jobs where southern black workers concentrated. To this day, these groups don't have the same federal protections for unionization, collective bargaining, or wage and hour standards.

These exclusions were created to preserve a caste system, and they now affect a largely Latino immigrant population that often lacks the same formal rights as citizens. At the same time, in recent decades, California has passed several standards for agricultural workers that have greater protections than federal standards. These include the California heat standard, wildfire smoke standard, and minimum wage and overtime protections. Nonetheless, as we will share today, the evidence indicates that compliance with these higher standards is lacking.

Today we will be sharing findings from the UCR Merced Farm Worker Health Study. We'd like to acknowledge the California Department of Public Health for sponsoring this study. A farmworker Community advisory board and two clinics conducted 1242 interviews with farm workers two to four hours in length, in six different languages, across five California regions, between August of 2021 and January of 2022. The profile of an agricultural worker is one of economic and class disadvantage. Most farm workers are Latino, foreign born, noncitizen, and 59% undocumented.

The median agricultural worker works 40 hours per week and earns very Low wages, according to the American Community Survey. Median earnings are $21,915 per year. In our survey, we found more than two of three workers worked for contractors, rather than directly for growers.

More than one in five traveled at least 75 miles for work at some point in the past year. More than one in three agricultural workers self reported health status was fair or poor, a very high rate, more than three times that of the General working age population. 42% of farm workers reported self reported having been diagnosed with at least one chronic condition. The most common chronic conditions were diabetes, hypertension, anxiety, depression, and asthma. Evidence indicates heat related deaths may be greatly undercounted.

An analysis published in Inside Climate News found that from 2018 to 2022, 168 California farmworkers died suddenly on the job and that nearly half of those deaths occurred within one day of weather that was over 80 degrees. Our findings indicate some amount of employer noncompliance with wage and hour provisions. 19% of respondents said at some point they were not paid wages owed to them by an employer 15% said they were paid all or part in cash.

15% said they did not receive the minimum number of paid 10 minute rest breaks under state law. Our study also indicates troubling rates of employer noncompliance with workplace health and safety standards. 43% said there was never a written heat illness plan posted at their workplace, even though such plans are mandated. When asked about different types of protective equipment needed but lacking for work, 32% said that when respirators were needed, they were always lacking.

25% of those who worked applying pesticides reported they did not receive any training on the use of pesticides, and I apologize because I forgot to tell the slideshow to advance. Next slide, please. California farmworkers largely lack citizenship rights. When we asked about qualifying for unemployment benefits, which is a proxy for legal status, only four in ten farm workers said they would qualify for such benefits. In addition, most respondents expressed the highest level of fear when asked how often they worry about family separation due to deportation.

So that last second to last point, I want to emphasize, because of the Wawona farm that just closed down, that's going to affect an estimated five to ten thousand farm workers losing their jobs. Again, only four in ten farm workers said they qualify for benefits. Finally, California farmworkers lack of citizenship rights have consequences for employer compliance with labor standards. When asked if they would report employer compliance that they witnessed, more than one in three farmworkers said they would be unwilling to report noncompliance.

Nearly two in three of those persons said they would be unwilling to file a report due to fear of retaliation such as hours reduction, job loss or deportation. Our report ends with several policy recommendations, many of which you'll hear today. These recommendations are aligned with recent shifts in state policy and emerging initiatives.

We recommend investing in public resources for protecting workers rights like education and enforcement. High road agricultural development like the USDA's Farm Labor Stabilization Protection Pilot Program and increasing access to the economic and healthcare safety nets such as the Safety Net For All initiative. Thank you.

Thank you. Again, I just want to remind we have four panels today. I know it's a lot to capture in five minutes and I don't want to be the one to interrupt so let's try to stick to the five minutes if possible. We have a beep up here if you can hear it. All right, next we have Elavio Platon, farm worker, the Centro Binacional para el Desarollo IndÍgena Oxaqueño

So we have a change of worker so he couldn't make it. But we have another of our members, leaders.

Can you please state your name for the record?

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

Hello, my name is Sumitria Rendon. I have been an agricultural field worker for 16 years here in Fresno, California and I have done, performed different job activities. I've been pruning grape vines here in the valley. And a lot of the times when we do complete our 40 hours, we do piecework, but they won't pay us for lunch break, or sometimes we'll work overtime on Saturdays. And instead of paying us for our overtime, they will pay us in cash.

This is when we're doing piecework, working by contract. And if we don't meet the contract to work, if we don't meet the daily requirements, they will pay us for less hours than we actually work. They'll pay us 6-7 hours for the 8 hours that we'll work. And then the other thing is, if we don't meet any requirements, we'll check our pay stubs and we'll know that they're not paying us right.

The other wage death that we're having in our job is we're not seeing the employers pay us for the work that we're performing. The other is job conditions. Right now, the restrooms sometimes are unclean, or the water that they provide us to drink is dirty. It's from the sink. It's not clean water to drink, and sometimes there's not sufficient shade for us all. Thank you.

Just, if you're wondering, you've heard Mixteco as they were speaking. It's an indigenous language from either from Oaxaca or Guerrero.

Thank you for that. We were wondering. Thank you for that. I would like to acknowledge Assembly Member Berman, Lee, and Alanis for joining us during this hearing. Next we have Cecilia Perez from UFW farmworkers.

Hello.

My name is Antonio De Loera, and I'm here on behalf of the United Farm Workers. I'll be introducing Cecilia and translating for her. Just very briefly, in the UFW, we have a saying, the laws on the books are not the laws in the fields. For example, in 2020, 7,820 Covid-19 related workplace safety complaints were deemed valid by CAL OSHA, but this resulted in only 627 inspections and only 32 citations.

Another study found that Latino workers in food and agriculture had the highest excess mortality out of any occupation during the pandemic. Beyond Covid, when farm workers have taken violations of their labor rights to the Agricultural Labor Relations Board even after winning their cases, the average settlement paid by employers is only between eight cents and ten cents on the dollar of the financial judgment awarded by the ALRB. More needs to be done to enforce farm workers rights and to empower farm workers to enforce their rights themselves.

I would now like to present Cecilia Perez. Cecilia is a Member of the United Farm Workers and Cecilia will be speaking about her own experiences. I will serve as her translator. Thank you.

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

My name is Cecilia Perez. I've spent 22 years as an essential farm worker. As farm workers, we work to protect ourselves from pesticides and from very high heats. During the summer, we wear long sleeve shirts, denim Pants, boots, big hats, and handkerchief to protect our face from the sun and from pesticides, leaving only our eyes exposed to harvest the fruits and the vegetables that feed California and the rest of the nation. Despite this, in 2023, my steps to protect myself were not sufficient.

While I was harvesting cherries, they were spraying pesticides in the adjacent field from the property where I was working, very close to my workers. We were around 50 workers there at the time.

Given what I had learned about the dangers and protections against pesticides through the classes that I receive every year from my union, I told the farm labor contractor and supervisor that this was illegal to spray pesticides while we were working, we could get sick or begin to feel weak or have nausea, and the contractor said that yes, but that the rancher had said it was very urgent that we harvest as well as it was very urgent to spray the pesticides.

And so they were spraying pesticides for around 30 minutes until finally I got them to stop because I continued to defend our security and insist that this was illegal.

[Foreign Language]

So the contractor told me that they would continue spraying by night. Even though they spray by day or by night, it continues to be dangerous for us and we fear nausea, headaches, or even death. That day, I was afraid for myself, for my family, and for the more than 50 work colleagues that were also present while they were spraying these dangerous pesticides. In the high heat, I have also felt and been witness to the effects of extreme heat.

In 2022, it was very hot and I felt headaches and started sweating profusely. I was able to go sit down and take a break and drink water without being asked any questions. Another occasion, it was very, very hot. I told all my work colleagues that it is not worth our lives to risk ourselves for just a few cents more.

[Foreign Language]

So I am a defender of my rights, both for myself and for others, and I insist that it's not worth losing your life. Fortunately, in my workplace, when I work under a union contract, my company has a person whose job it is to check the water temperature. If we feel ill, our supervisor is ready to help us. But many of my colleagues who work without a union say that they are not provided shade and that they are provided warm water.

At other companies, they do not apply the heat protections and without applying the laws that protect farm workers, these laws do not mean anything. I aske the State of California to comply with the protections against heat and pesticides to ensure the security and the health of all farm workers. And yes, we can. So se puede, thank you.

That concludes this panel. I want to now. Excuse me. I'm sorry. Yes, we have one more. Sarait Martinez, Executive Director, CBDIO.

Thank you so much again. Thank you for having me. My name is Sarait Martinez. I'm the Executive Director with Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño, also an indigenous sapotech and the daughter of farmworkers in the Salinas Valley. CBDIO, for short, is a community based organization that works primarily with indigenous farm worker communities in two major agricultural regions, the Central Valley and the north part of the central coast. We work with the communities and a lot of the stories that you've heard are not uncommon.

I was really glad to hear the opening of the hearing. I think it was very accurate and also would like to add that a lot of the things that were mentioned here are not new. This has been really the reality of farmworkers, and I think that the storms, the recent storms and Covid really highlighted and really saw the needs and the effects of farmworkers and what they're suffering.

So wanted to say that CBDIO exists to make sure that the community gets the information that they need in the language that they need. Like, we work with a broad and diverse culturally and linguistic community to ensure that they get the information. Our farm market population is multilingual and multicultural. Not everyone speaks Spanish. And for example, in the organization in CBDIO, our staff speaks 16, 16 indigenous languages that our farm market community speaks across the state. We are about 165,000 indigenous farm workers.

And these are numbers for 2009. That was the latest census. There's really no information of farm workers and their origins or what language they speak. So that's also a huge issue. And I think through Covid, again, workers were deemed essential and there was efforts which again, I think have been really helpful in a way to cover some of the gaps through the state. We have the Covid-19 program that is the.

I might have messed up and I should prepare for this, but the COVID gave us funding for many organizations to increase capacity to ensure that we're covering some of those gaps. However, that money is not enough. The community has been neglected for so many years and we are trying to ensure that people get the basic information. But there's a lot more work that needs to happen to ensure that it doesn't end with information. But there's enforcement and there's follow up from the multiple agencies at the state level to ensure they're responding. Like CBDIO shared, we have many cases of wage theft. As CBDIO, we started doing a lot of labor and worker rights like in mid 2022.

And since then we have process or are in the process of filing 10 class action lawsuits for wait and hour violations impacting about 20,000 workers, many of them indigenous farm workers that didn't know the rights or are learning and speaking up. Wanted to say that all of those wage and hour violations, many people are getting paid in cash. Like Simitria mentioned, this brings many problems.

We have many people that have got injured that they don't have proof that they worked because again, they've been paid cash. There's no sick time. So there's a lot of sick time violations and lunch and breaks as well. And also when people try to speak up, they really are trying to demand a better wages. They've been told that there's plenty of workers. Either you take it or you can leave it. We have plenty of workers for us to bring. So this is your only option.

What we also have seen is increase of kind of putting workers against each other and saying either you take this job at these conditions or we bring guest workers, H2A workers. I'm not sure how aware you are, but we have an increase of guest workers in California that it's been told that there's a worker shortage, but we know that there's workers. They just bring them to pay less wages.

And because of this, we're also seeing a lack of, because of the eight hour overtime limit that recently that was passed, workers are not being allowed to work overtime and they're being asked to work on Saturdays to pay cash or to work in a different name. We have plenty of examples like this. People just don't want to pay or switch crews so the growers don't have to pay overtime. I won't go a lot into details in the heat because there's more heat happening.

But again, my main message is enforcement. We have laws that are not being enforced and there's a lack of coordination across different agencies and people are just confused on where to go. And that way to submit claims is not adequate for the linguistic and cultural needs of our farm market community. Thank you.

Thank you. And now we are finished with this panel, but I want to open it up to our Members for questions and want to welcome assemblymember Ward and Zbur for joining us. Any questions from our members?

Buenos Dias. Bienvenidos aqui al Capital De Estado. Es un honor hablar con ustedes, y son importante que nosotros escuchamos a los campesinos y trabajadores del estado. It's really an honor for many of us to hear your testimony and just want to appreciate the farm workers who took the time to come here to make sure that we heard your story. I have heard time and time again that the laws in the fields are not the laws that we are passing here at our statewide level, and we need to hear your stories so we know that implementation is not working for our communities. Many of us have fought for those wage and hourly protections, the overtime protections that are not getting implemented for our community members who are essential workers. So I'd like to really dig in a little if I can, and I'll focus specifically on some of the heat protections that I think are lacking as a world.

We had our warmest year on record last year, and it's oftentimes our farm workers who are on the front lines who are experiencing those illnesses and deaths. While many of us sensationalize the hurricanes and wildfires we have, we have more people who are dying from extreme heat each year, and it's people who are on the front lines, like our farm workers, who are suffering the most.

And so I'd like to understand, because I heard from Cecilia that it was the union who was helping you to have those protections. And while I'd like everyone to be unionized and to have that opportunity to be protected, how do we ensure that all workers in our state are able to understand what rights they have so we can empower them to be the change makers in our communities?

Can we do it in a more culturally or linguistically competent way to make sure you understood that those of us who are sitting up here are fighting for you and want to make sure you know we've been passing laws for you, that we need to make sure that they're getting implemented on the ground.

I'll let my colleagues at CBDIO respond to this as well, but I did just want to share one brief point. So the UFW, we operate our own heat safety hotline, which we promote on our dime as best we can. And we actually do get a lot of calls. And these are often workers who have tried to call Cal OSHA or don't know how to call Cal OSHA. Sometimes what we can do is we can then refer those cases to Cal OSHA ourselves. But it's interesting.

I'll just share a brief anecdote. This happened in Yolo County, which is where I'm from, which is not too far from the state capitol here. I received a series of calls from some workers who said, we're a large crew of over 100 workers who are not being given shade, are not being given water. Can you come and do something about it?

And I basically drove out to the field and actually had a little bit of just a direct confrontation with the contractor there and basically said, hey, you're not following the laws here, and you need to provide shade and water, and we will report you to Cal OSHA if you keep this up. And the very next day, they had shade. They had water. So in some ways, that was a success.

But I remained in contact with those workers, and I think the thing that I want to emphasize is just the extreme level of fear that these workers are operating under. When they called me, they said, when you arrive, do not say who. Obviously, I wouldn't have done this anyway, but they really emphasized to me over and over again, don't say who called you. When you arrive, pretend you don't know us. Pretend you just someone anonymously called you. Definitely do not say who.

And then I asked the worker later, at various points, the worker who called me, would you like to report this to Cal OSHA? Would you like to come testify at a forum like this? Would you like to talk to a reporter? Because your story really illustrates the problem here. And the worker said, absolutely not, under no circumstances, because I need that job next season. That's how I feed my kids. And so I think it's really hard to disentangle just the.

We obviously spoke about immigration status, but in this case, this worker actually is a legal permanent resident, has us citizen children. For them, it's just about the fact of if they don't have this job, they cannot put food on the table for their kids, and they're so afraid of losing it that they're unwilling to be public. And they do want the laws enforced.

Of course they want the laws enforced, and they are able to kind of get it enforced through the union without putting themselves all the way out there. And so this is a challenge that we wrestle with. Right. What's that balance between helping workers with the realities that they're facing versus actually fighting to hold employers all the way accountable. In this case, we did not hold the employer accountable.

We just fought, pushed the employer, basically gave them an informal chance to do the right thing, which they should have been doing from the beginning. But I think that story just illustrates some of the barriers and it really is the economic precarity. And of course, we believe that ultimately the best solution is unionization because it empowers workers to defend their rights themselves.

Yes, and I know the next panels are going to be talking a lot more about heat and we have actually solutions to propose. So I don't want to go too many into details, but I do want to say something that I said before to our former chief of Cal OSHA and some other state representatives as well, is that the reality is that people know that the laws are being violated. One, they don't know where to go or like the process to file complaints is not adequate.

But I think the bigger problem is that the agencies are not responding in a timely manner. They're not taking the complaints. And there's so many. We hear this all the time from workers. I'm going to say here, but I know we've been told over and over again this is not true, that the Cal OSHA informs the employer. So then when they show up to do the inspection, everything is clean and ready, like we've been told over and over, this is not true.

Workers keep saying that over and over again as well. That is a problem. Cal OSHA, right now, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they have a vacancy rate of about 35%. It's really understaffed. They don't respond. Workers lost trust already. They don't have faith on the system, on reporting. So that's another bigger problem. So information, it is not as much as a problem. Of course, there's like training that is still not happening, indigenous languages.

But the reality is that the agencies are not responding in a timely manner and they're way understaffed. I know they're probably underworked, but they're just not responding. And when you don't respond in time, especially in the central valley, that the seasons are so short, one week you're in the orange and the cherries. So it is not like if you take more than a week to respond and go and do an inspection, the workers are no longer there, the crew has left. So it's really also understanding the farm worker job that is very diverse from region to region. And with the current staffing and response time of agencies, it's not adequate to really go in and tackle that issue at the moment.

I'm just going to uplift your comment, if I can, regarding Latinos not being monolithic. We need to make sure that as we're passing policies that we're able to communicate those policies to all communities. And I want to make sure to, you just had your 30th year anniversary, and we have needed your support for a long time, and we need your continued partnership to make sure we can express the information, but that also we can hear when we're failing.

I want to make sure, since I hear constituents who are on this panel, that, you know, that you can also reach out to our offices and that we're available and that we want to be representatives for all, regardless of whether or not you can vote for us. And as such, please use representatives to help amplify the voice after we've heard from community and appreciate the fact that we're able to do it so effectively in the Central Valley.

Thank you.

I just want to thank all our witnesses today, and we'll have so many different panels, of course, and hear from so many farm workers directly today. I also want to align with some of my comments with the chair in the original and your opening comments about how a lot of these failures in our oversight and law enforcement system are during the times of surplus. Right. So it's very easy for us now, in the time of scarcity in our budget to cover up those things.

You talked about, Dr. Mihia, you talked about the vacancies in Cal OSHA that persisted for a long time. And I do think we as a state have to do better to rebuild that trust because we have these agencies that should be looking out for the common worker, for people in the fields. And I really do hope that on this committee, I'm sure under the direction, leadership of the chair, we'll be practicing more oversight and holding our agencies accountable. I know at the last panel today we'll be asking some of these questions of the agencies, but I hope that we will continue to do so even through the budgetary process. So I just want to thank the chair for putting this together and thank you for serving today.

Thank you. I also just want to thank the chair. I want to thank the chair for inviting me to come and participate in a bit of the hearing. I don't serve on the committee, but I do represent half Moon Bay, where there was a shooting. Seven farm workers were killed almost about 13 months ago, a little over a year ago.

I know one of the things that isn't specifically being talked about is farm worker housing, but I think it falls under hazards where the gentleman from the UFW was talking about how workers are afraid to report violations in the field, violations that are putting them at risk. We had a situation where workers were afraid to report the absolutely despicable living conditions that they were living in, because if they had, those living conditions would have been red tagged, which they should be. But there's no backup option.

There was nowhere else for the farm workers to go. We need to do so much more to support all of you who are supporting us, support you who are doing the hard work that a lot of us won't do to put food on our tables and to feed our communities. We covered a lot of really important issues today, and there's a lot more that we need to continue working on.

So grateful for the opportunity to be here, and thank you all for coming and talking about the experiences that you're having. One other thing I just want to mention to the point of farm workers come from lots of different communities. We had no idea five of the farm workers who were killed were Chinese, and then the shooter was Chinese, was a Chinese farm worker. And so it just really emphasizes that point. It's a very good point that we needed to do more to make sure that everybody, no matter where you're from, knows what your rights are in California. Thanks.

Thank you. I actually have one question, so apologize. I can't remember who mentioned this, but what I'm hearing is a lot of times workers have a hard time filing complaints or even willing to talk to anyone. But in the chance that they do get through that process, at the end of the settlement, they get $0.08 on the dollar. Can you repeat that for me one more time and tell me a little bit more about what that looks like?

Yeah. So this is a statistic that we have that when farm workers take their case to the ALRB and they win, which in itself does not happen often enough. But when they do win, the ALRB orders a financial judgment award of the money that's owed to the workers. And the average settlement paid by employers, we have found, is between eight cents to 10 cents on the dollar of that financial award.

So for every dollar the ALRB orders an employer to pay a worker, the worker is seeing between eight to ten cents of that dollar. Prima Wawona, folks may recall that in 2017, the ALRB ordered the then owner of the previous company, Dan Garawan, to pay $10 million in back wages to the workers. That was never paid. The company was ultimately sold. It merged with Primona, was sold to private equity. Now it's going under.

It's worth mentioning there's been some reporting that EDD just gave out a $7 million grant to a farm worker serving nonprofit La Comparativa Campecina. That money will help assist workers, many of whom, as was mentioned in testimony, are not eligible for direct unemployment benefits. And of course, that makes a lot of sense that will help people in need. But there's an irony there of the company was ordered to pay $10 million and they never did.

And now, many years later, the state, the taxpayer, the public is paying $7 million to try to help accommodate these workers now in their time of need. Of course, if the union had been recognized there, if the law had been followed, it's possible that this would all be happening in the context of that being a union company, we would, of course, be fighting for severance. We would be fighting for better payout packages for the workers. But I think there's a real irony there.

Know the public is basically subsidizing now the failure of the ALRB to actually enforce this settlement that it ordered paid to the workers for the back pay that they would have been getting had that union contract been implemented. So that's one example of just an area of when these payouts don't always get to the workers. And if I could just add one brief comment regarding Half Moon Bay.

I was just there two weeks ago for the anniversary along with Alas and many of the community serving organizations there. We did just get some KQED reporting that a settlement was owed, was ordered, was paid, was agreed to by the employer. I don't have the figure in front of me, but I believe it was somewhere between 100,000 and $200,000 was fined, and then there was some amount of back pay owed. But many of those workers in Half Moon Bay haven't received that yet.

And so I think there's a real potential for follow up there. And Alas would have more information of just how do you get this money that has been ordered paid into the hands of workers in a timely, efficient manner? I mean, I've met with at least four of the workers who are still at that mushroom company, and at least those four workers haven't seen any sort of settlement money come through yet, even though we've heard that it was ordered paid.

Member Zbur.

So I want to thank you all for being here today and I think really raising, I think, really important issues that workers are facing in our agricultural communities. I had one question, and that is on the retaliation we're facing. If you could sort of, I know you've painted a little bit of a picture of some of what's happening. To what extent is it isolated in some companies? And are there sort of good actors and bad actors? And should enforcement be more focused and wondered if you could sort of speak to that?

I think generally speaking, our view is that your labor rights should not depend on whether or not your employer is a good actor or bad actor. I think that really. Obviously, we know of growers who really do try to do the right thing. And frankly, they're often at a disadvantage when they're competing with other actors in the industry who are not doing the right thing, who are underpaying their workers, for example. That puts kind of good actors at a competitive disadvantage.

But generally speaking, we do not believe that any worker should rely on employer being a good actor. Right. I mean, again, going back to the Prima Wawona example, companies change hands, mergers happen, private equity takes over. Workers, many of them move seasonally. Cecilia spoke a little bit about this, but she spent some of the year working under union contract where conditions are good, spends other parts of the year working at non union companies just because of the seasonal nature of agriculture.

And so we feel very strongly that you cannot rely solely on the goodwill of an employer. And that's why we do need reinforcement capacity from the state. And of course, for us, the gold standard is empowering workers to defend their rights themselves, and that's through a union contract. And that way you don't have to rely on the goodwill of an employer. We represent farms where employers, the employer donates quite a bit of money to republican presidential candidates. And that's their right. That's totally fine.

We make sure that the workers are treated gold standard in terms of wages, benefits, workplace protections. And so it does not matter what the politics or the ideology of the employer is, because the workers have that union contract that's going to hold them accountable no matter what, no matter if they wake up in a bad mood one day.

All right, go ahead.

Yeah, I just wanted to very briefly say agriculture is one of the only industries that has a state agency that's dedicated to them. And this complicates efforts to raise standards in the industry because they feel like government is so responsive to them. When the USA released the Farm Labor Stabilization Protection pilot program, the first that people are able to point to that invest public subsidies into employers that show that they're raising their standards, agricultural employers that show they're raising their standards.

We had growers and associations from California and even a state official calling the USDA to complain about this. So we do need to think about how other state agencies and these employer associations really do resist efforts to try to invest in employers that are willing to raise the standards and to think through how we do that.

Can I just share just really quick, the majority, the vast majority, I mean, they probably have the numbers but are not unionized. So we cannot depend on the goodwill of employers. And definitely enforcement is failing workers, and nobody should be going to work fearing of speaking up because they don't have the proper shade watered or, we just wanted to say that.

Thank you for saying, again, we framed it to talk about unrepresented workers today. Thank you. Muchas gracias. Now I would like to acknowledge assemblymember Soria for joining us. We're going to move on to our next panel. Thank you very much for the brave workers that are here today. Really appreciate your testimony. Next we have our second panel is going to discuss the barriers to reporting legal violations.

Speaking will be Cristina Gonzalez, a farm worker from the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Victor Mora, a farm worker with the Teamsters. Megan Ruble, President of the California Applicants Attorney Association. Annalise Cortez Bulosan, directing attorney with California legal rule assistance, and Yelisa Ambriz, a farm worker advocate with the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Thank you all. This is a big panel. Again, each of you will have five minutes to speak, with an additional five minutes for translation. Please. Let's do our best to stick to the five minutes, and then I will open it up from questions from our Committee Members. So first we have Christina Gonzalez.

Hola buenos dias, mi nombre es Christina Gonzalez. [Foreign Language]

Good morning. My name is Christina Gonzalez and I am a farm worker and I live in Madeira, California. I have worked in the harvest, picking tomatoes, chilies, blueberries, and lately, these past two years, I have also been picking figs, and I am here today to elevate testimony from my colleagues who also work in the fields and go through many difficulties, many barriers in their place of work, especially when we call Cal OSHA to submit a complaint because of a violation.

Many times the workers speak another language other than Spanish. They speak Triqui, Mixteco, Zapoteco, and Chatain, and other languages that I don't necessarily have written down here at the moment, but we oftentimes feel very neglected when there isn't somebody to interpret to us in our languages. Cal OSHA does not understand us as workers. They talk about the problem, but we see that they don't do anything about it.

We have seen this in moments when Cal OSHA lets the farmer know that there is a violation search and they let them know and because they quote unquote, cannot enter without giving them notification. That gives the farmers owners time to be able to tell the foreman, the supervisors, so that then they have us usually work the first two or 3 hours in the morning cleaning up the area so that when Cal OSHA finally arrives to inspect the work area, everything is clean.

And usually the owner is at the entrance ready to greet Cal OSHA to show them that everything is clean. And we as workers end up in bad evidence or looking bad. And this makes us lose faith to have that interest. To call another example. In August of 2023, when I was working harvesting figs, as I was mentioning once again, I have contact, direct contact with the foreman, and she'll let me know. Tomorrow we're going to spend the first 2 hours of the day cleaning.

They have us pick trash, they send off the restrooms to get washed, fresh water. And all of this is ready, so that when they go and supervise the area, everything is good. To me, this isn't correct. To my colleagues, this isn't correct. This is an injustice. And to us, this really does make us feel dissatisfied.

Thank you. Do you have more or no?

Okay.

Victor Mora.

[Spanish]

[Spanish]

Gracias.

Sorry, just getting some clarification. Good morning. My name is Victor Mora and I come from the valley of Salinas and I have been working for Dole for about 40 years and I represent the Teamsters 890 local and I simply want to comment something that we are able to achieve or what we have been able to achieve. Many of our colleagues who are without a union contract, what happens? What problems do they go through? There's a lot of discrimination for them.

They don't give them enough time for everything. People who are not under a union contract, we who do have a union contract, there are many benefits that we do have during the time frame that we are there. We get our lunch hours, our breaks and good benefits. We have good insurance policy. Every three years we are able to renew our contracts and go through them right now. I have been negotiating for Dole for about 20 years for the department that I work in.

Each department has their representative. I represent the department that works in the salary. And we have been able to, little by little be able to accomplish something good for us. Good insurance, good benefits, bonuses, vacation time and even holidays and our people who are not under a union contract.

I think that that is why oftentimes because they don't have the knowledge of what we do have, they oftentimes don't have this experience. So I feel that our colleagues who have not been exposed to the benefits, perhaps they have not been educated on the benefits that come with being unionized. But during the time that I have been working for this company, as I just stated, I've been working on working with the union contracts for about 20 years, negotiating.

And I can say that when somebody gets hurt and they're under union contract, you are steadily brought back in. But when somebody doesn't have a union contract, they have to work without those protections. When we have a union contract, we are able to negotiate what we would like to achieve and our benefits to make sure that we have those better protections.

I know that we're short on time, but I just want to summarize one last thing to close off. The people who do not have a union to represent them once again, when they get hurt and they come back to work, they treat them as if they would not have gone through a work related issue. But when you have a union contract, they treat you different. When you do have any type of work related injury, you have more support through a union contract, they let you know.

Okay, well, based on your injury, go ahead and work 5 hours or 6 hours till you recover from your injury. The poor people who don't have a union contract, they have to come back and work their regular hours. And oftentimes they probably don't even feel ready to go back into a full day of work, but they have to do it because they don't have those protections.

So I hope that you, as our board, take into consideration what we bring to the table so that it can be applied and so that other community members have access to unions so that they can work the way that we should be working. Thank you.

Thank you. Next we have Megan Ruble, President of. Sorry, where did I lose my. California. California Applicants Attorney. Sorry, go ahead.

Thank you so much. Good morning, Madam Chairwoman. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you today. Again, my name is Megan Ruble. I'm the President of the California Applicants Attorney's Association, and I also represent injured workers in the Central Valley. So today I'd like to talk to you a little bit about representation. First, representation means results. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that workers represented by unions earn 18% higher wages than unrepresented workers in the same industry doing the same job.

The judicial counsel of California points out that 85% of low wage workers don't seek legal representation in civil court because California doesn't tell them that they can. In workers comp, only one and a quarter percent of all requests for review of an insurance company's denial of medical treatment come from injured workers who are unrepresented. UC Davis conservatively estimates that 250,000 California farm workers do not have legal immigration status.

The National Library of Medicine reports that farm workers had the highest rate of COVID deaths, 400 per 100,000, but the lowest rate of reporting COVID safety violations. Representation means farm workers can report their injuries. So in workers comp, an injured worker is entitled to workers comp benefits regardless of their immigration status. But we have dueling state and federal laws which really make that meaningless for farm workers. So take this example.

If we have a farm employer who is aware of or becomes aware of an injured worker's farm worker's immigration status, under federal law, they can't legally return that farm worker to their job after they recover from their injury. It only takes one person losing their job, or worse, one person getting deported, right, to chill any desire to report an injury. I represent workers in the Central Valley, one of the most agriculturally rich regions in the state, and I have very few clients who are farm workers.

And I believe that's because they are afraid to report their cases because of retaliation, because of the things you've heard today from the workers who are out there. In the case of the growing number of H2A farm workers, it's even worse. These indentured workers have a federal permit to work here for a single employer for a specific period when they get seriously injured.

The workers compensation process for a major injury takes longer than they're even allowed to be here, and they never receive the medical treatment they're supposedly legally entitled to. And finally, the state only collects 21 cents on the dollar for all the fines that are assessed against workers comp insurance adjusters who illegally reduce medical treatment. Representation means the ability to enforce the rights of farm workers. We need a new enforcement paradigm to reduce intimidation.

Last year's SB 27 gave legal standing to coworkers at the University of California to enforce wage theft laws. That's new, and that might work. You should consider giving legal standing to coworkers everywhere to do what state agencies just aren't equipped to do, give legal standing to coworkers who have legal status to stand up in court for workers with no job security, not one farm worker represented by the UFW has died of heat illness. And that's because the protection of a union contract.

Right, the protection of a union contract. Those workers are able to enforce the state's workplace heat regulations for themselves. To the chairs of both labor committees, none of the legally required signs posted in any California workplace tells injured workers that they might need a lawyer or that they're entitled to a free legal consultation. I mean, I've heard this for myself. I go on court call and I hear people say, I can't afford a lawyer. I didn't even know I could have a lawyer.

How can I get a lawyer? They don't know. It's not posted for anybody. So we applaud you, Madam Chair, for introducing legislation to correct this. We also applaud Senator Cortese for introducing legislation that will make workers' compensation a meaningful system in reducing heat, illness and deaths among farm workers. Thank you.

Thank you. Now we have Anali Cortez Bulosan, directing attorney for the California Rural Legal Assistance.

Good morning, everyone. As a directing attorney, I supervise a team of several advocates who provide a variety of services to the community with regards to health and safety in the workplace. These services include know your rights presentations, legal representation, and the filing of health and safety complaints. Both we facilitating or filing complaints ourselves. We also field monitor since 1966, CRLA has engaged in field monitoring to better the health and safety of workers in the workplace.

We have a close collaborative relationship with Kelosha that allows us to file health and safety complaints with fewer barriers compared to unrepresented agricultural workers. Field monitoring is when advocates go out into the community and from the public roadway observe agricultural fields to determine whether or not there are any health and safety violations. Where we travel depends on the season and the time of year.

Before we head out, we call the local CalOSHA office and let them know we will be out field monitoring and calling in with complaints. In teams of one or two, advocates drive around the community and observe whether workers have water, restrooms, shade, hand washing facilities, or, for example, how far the restrooms are from the workers, if there are any restrooms at all.

Despite regulations and decades of filing complaints, advocates consistently see ag workers working in the field without drinking water or proper shade structure in high temperature weather. So when an advocate sees a health and safety violation, they gather evidence of the violation by taking photos or video recordings. The advocate then calls CalOSHA and reports the observations. The advocate provides as much information as they can based on what they observe from the public roadway.

The information CalOSHA requests can be found in the fact sheet created by CLA that has been provided. One of the more difficult pieces of information to obtain and provide to CalOSHA is the employer information. Despite rules requiring otherwise, many workers don't actually know who their employer is until they get their first check, if they ever find out at all. Without the employer information, complainants risk their health and safety violation call being rejected.

Though we do not have the employer information when we call Kelosha, as we're field monitoring, our close relationship has allowed us to file those health and safety complaints. Nevertheless, however, it is important to note that sometimes we ourselves face resistance and some pushback. Once we file a complaint, Kelosha visits the site and conducts an inspection.

If Kelosha is unable to verify our complaint during their inspection, they ask us to provide the evidence that we've collected, such as declarations and, as I mentioned, pictures and videos that we've taken. With our legal training, we're also able to help them find the employer information, and we provide that as well. Once we file a complaint, we typically receive notice of acknowledgment within six months or so. Sometimes it's a lot more, sometimes it can be less.

And when we don't, we try our best to follow up. If we receive a notice of no findings, we determine whether or not we to file an appeal. And when we do, we submit declarations, evidence, et cetera. In 2023 alone, we submitted 27 complaints and received notice of $67,540 in citations issued. This process, the complaint process, field monitoring, all that is very time consuming and without applicable training and knowledge, many ag workers are unable to access this complaint process. That's where we step in.

But there's still more work that can be done. The truth of the matter is that ag workers face many barriers when accessing basic and fundamental rights to a safe working environment. Thank you.

Next we have Yelisa Ambriz, farmworker advocate, Central California Environmental Justice Network.

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for meeting with us today. My name is Yelisa Ambriz, and I'm a farmworker advocate with the Central California Environmental Justice Network. And I'm here today with the California Farmworker Advocacy working group that's made up of organizations committed to centering the voices of farmworkers in state policy. And I'm also a daughter of farmworkers who also deeply understands the issues here today, like many of our colleagues here.

So as you heard from farm workers in the previous panel, there's been a lot of frustration from farm workers. Among them specifically, I want to emphasize their discouragement and that frustration in filing labor complaints. And I want to share the difficulties that advocates like me also encounter when trying to file those complaints. And I do also want to touch on the solutions to address those farmworker concerns and issues.

So in my role as a farmworker advocate, I've been actively involved in documenting many accounts of farmworker stories and complaints. And the stories have reinforced that most workers simply do not have faith in the state labor agencies, and they feel it's pointless to report those complaints. And though this is true, many complaints today regard their health and safety in the workplace. So I specifically want to focus on the interactions I've had with CalOSHA. One of the first barriers that farm workers face is fear of retaliation.

As you've heard, because workers often lack documentation and live paycheck to paycheck, they comply with hazardous conditions, and because of fear of losing their job, they simply do not report or submit any sort of claim. As you heard from Cristina here, language accessibility is a major barrier for those that overcome their fear of retaliation. When workers call CalOSHA, they usually select Spanish and they're forwarded to a staff person that speaks English.

If they're calling during the extended hours from five to seven, their calls are forwarded to a call center where staff have no knowledge of workplace safety, and they do take that message, but they don't have the knowledge or expertise on the regulations that CalOSHA has. There's also a lot of lack of trust and enforcement among farm workers for those workers that do reach CalOSHA. Many workers share negative experiences interacting with CalOSHA's staff in district offices. Sometimes they encounter staff that's rude, patronizing, discouraging.

Even myself, as a bilingual advocate, I have had experiences where staff are condescending and unprofessional to me. When workers are able to overcome those barriers and file the complaint, agencies often lack communication with workers or community based organizations throughout the investigation process, and this leads to even further discouragement. As an advocate, the complaints I file most often receive no follow up from the agency. I usually receive a letter stating that the case has been closed many months later because there was lack of evidence.

During this time, more hazards occur and the existing ones have worsened. Cristina's story here and the ones from many of the various farm workers we have here are not unusual, and we hear over and over again that employers are being told about inspections before CalOSHA arrives. This advanced notification issue has been told many, many times, over and over to the agency that allows field supervisors to clean up the work site and tell their employees what to say to CalOSHA.

These interactions show a lot of lack of urgency and a lot of lack of respect towards farmworkers'health, and safety. This usually prompts farm workers to have negative attitudes because they usually never hear back.

And so, to begin tackling these issues, our working group has been designing an expert navigator pilot program where staff at community based organizations with the experience in farmwork communities would receive health and safety training and certification needed to make this enforcement more effective by conducting field monitoring to collect evidence violations similar to what an Ali shared today here, as workers would see that there's more immediate action taken by expert navigators to respond to their health and safety complaints.

There would be more success, since these expert navigators that we are designing can collect evidence without putting workers jobs at risk, and more farm workers will come forward with more testimonies. So with these expert navigators, CalOSHA will be able to find more work sites efficiently, build stronger cases against problems, and withstand the appeals and share additional evidence and testimony. And this can lead to more effective enforcement. And this need for similar programs at the organization would also have a lot of farm worker trust.

And so we were happy to see that there was.

You have 30 seconds.

I'm almost good. One last point.

Yeah.

So we were really happy to see that in the January budget, there was a proposal that could be used to support these expert navigators that we designed. A separate budget request, or maybe state grant dollars could also be used to invest in this model. So we just urge the state to invest in our organizations and trusted partners, both CalOSHA and farmworker communities. So please help us support our farmworkers. Thank you.

Thank you. I will now open it up for questions from our committee members. Assemblymember Soria.

Good morning. Move over here because I don't have a mic. [Spanish] Thank you. What I just said thank you to Victor and to Cristina. I know Cristina actually is from my district, from Madera. I want to thank them for their testimony and presenting some of the barriers and challenges that they do see faced in the workplace.

And I'm a strong believer in that workers, regardless of being represented or not, should be protected in the workplace. As a daughter of farm workers, I also intimately know some of the challenges that my parents experience being farm workers that were never represented both in the field and the packing sheds. And so I want to thank them for that.

I'm very interested in figuring out and hearing from OSHA on some of these issues and answering to why is it that we don't have folks that are readily available, culturally, linguistically available, to answer to the response to the concerns and the reports of violations in the workplace?

I'm also interested in hearing about what kind of training some of these work the workers in the agency receive, the fact that people are condescending government work as public service, and if you're there, you should love your job and want to do a job for the people that you're supposed to serve.

And it really infuriates me to hear that these vulnerable workers, workers that are most of the time not willing to call because they get treated like crap, that when they call a state agency, they're not responsive in meeting the needs. And so that's really disappointing. And so I do have to step out for another thing. But I hope that OSHA will have an opportunity to really share what is going on.

I'd like to see some of the data in terms of the complaints that have been reported in the outcomes. If we see a lot of complaints and then they supposedly get resolved because there were no issues, I really want to kind of better understand what is really going on and how we're truly documenting what people are experiencing out in the fields. So again, thank you for being here, coming all the way to Sacramento.

I know that it's not easy for our workers to take time off to come and advocate on not just their behalf, but on behalf of workers across the state.

You know, I want to echo your comments in my opening statements, and we will have an opportunity to hear from OSHA and our labor department. But I did make a statement about the fact that this is happening. When we had $109,000,000,000 surplus. And in the State of California last year, there was a bank that went under, Silicon Valley bank. We saved that bank in 72 hours.

We're talking about years of years of workers in our farms being disrespected and not having access to basic needs that we as a State of California should be giving. And to say I'm infuriated is an understatement. To say that I said I'm committed to this issue and I mean it. I will be asking for an OSHA audit. Because just. I don't want to hear any more excuses. Excuse after excuse, year after year, under resource, underfunded. We just came out of billions of dollars in surplus.

With that, I do want to acknowledge. Hold on 1 second. Hold on 1 second. I do want to acknowledge how serious we are about this committee. Senator Cortese, who is my colleague on the senate side, has joined us. He's also the labor and employment chair and we'd like an opportunity for him to say a few words. I will give you 2 seconds.

Christina just wants to, she wants to share something to respond.

[Spanish]

Thank you. I just wanted to answer real quick your comment, Mr. Esmeralda Soria, we are trained. The contractor does gather us in an area at the work site to give us information regarding the cleanliness, our rights as workers, how we have to go to work, regarding sexual abuse, regarding the cleanliness in our work area. But the issue is that that's where we host the training. But once we are out in the fields, in the harvest area, the situation is another.

So we, once again, as I had mentioned, we feel let down. It feels like an injustice because us as farm workers, when we report, when we call to submit a complaint, what do the bosses do? They get together with the supervisors, with the foreman and they send us off to clean the area so that when they go there to supervise, the area looks different than how it was.

And that's where we feel like this is an injustice and it makes us feel just let down, to be very honest.

Thank you, Senator Cortese.

Thank you, Chair Ortega. As you mentioned, I chair the policy committee on the Senate side, Senate labor and appointment committee. And just about a year ago, Senator Hurtado and I did a joint webinar online hearing. This is much better, of course, to have witnesses here and have everyone here present. But I wanted to point to the fact that that hearing was an eye opener.

Not that we don't know, to your point, chair, that these problems and barriers have been going on for years, since I was a young person picking prunes in southeast San Jose and probably before then, and it is time, it's beyond time that we address these issues and stop making excuses.

But on reporting violations, one of the things that we learned, and I'll be brief here, but one of the things that we learned that I know is coming out today as well, is that there's not just a barrier to reporting, but the agencies themselves told us that in this sector there are more withdrawn reports, complaints than in any other labor sector in the state. Why is that? I don't think you have to engage in too much speculation or conjecture to know that there's threats of retaliation.

There's what was just described recently, post complaint remediation, that seems to undermine the complaint itself, at least temporarily. We've seen this over the years, creep into other areas that farm workers have moved into or farm worker families move into domestic work and frankly, work in mercados, in places like San Jose, where if you set up an anonymous line for complaints, you'll find out real soon that folks are being threatened and intimidated

in terms of any follow through on complaints that can't happen in the State of California. We can't talk about a California for all. We can't celebrate the kinds of things we've been celebrating this week with transition to new leadership in both houses, committed to California for all means, including farm workers and those ancillary to farm labor and farm work. So I just want you to know, I'll conclude there.

I don't want to dominate the discussion here, but I want those who are testifying and those who are listening and those who are paying attention to this hearing know that I'm absolutely committed to accelerating the remedies that should be in place and that need to be in place for farm labor and farm workers.

And I, too, chair Ortega, join you in whatever requests for immediate budget action are necessary to make sure that we don't have unnecessary excuses whether, let me just say in any agency, I don't want to call out any agency. But again, these issues have been around for years, vacant positions, complaint driven processes that aren't properly or adequately auditing different labor sites. If you have a complaint driven process and the people who are making complaints are intimidated not to make complaints, it's not going to work.

We need to go in affirmatively and proactively. I really do think we need to not only Fund, but we need to rework the approach that we're taking. So I'm with you on that Chair Ortega, and look forward to working together.

Thank you so much. If there are no other questions or comments, we can move on to our third panel.

Thank you.

Our next panel is lack of enforcement in the field. So we have Anastasia Wright, Efren Aguilera, and Erica Cervantes.

Okay, we have one more panel left after you. So once again reminding you, we got 5 minutes for each of you, including. And then 5 minutes for translation. And first panelist is AnaStacia Wright.

Yes. Okay. Hi. Good morning. Thank you all for having me. My name is AnaStacia Nicole Wright. I am a policy manager at Worksafe and I'm here today to talk about the staffing crisis at Cal OSHA. The State of California is currently facing a vacancy crisis. In particular, the Department of Industrial Relations Agency. Cal OSHA today is in a staffing crisis that has gone on for so long and risks being treated as normal. A third of the positions at this vital worker protection agency are unfilled, meaning dangerous workplaces are going uninspected.

Complaints from injured workers are answered slowly, if at all, imposing substantial obstacles to the implementation of a host of significant new health and safety rules addressing silicosis, heat stroke, pace of work issues in warehouses, wildfire, smoke, and more. The staffing data tells a troubling story of a vital state agency that is working out of a deep hole.

Much appreciation to Garrett Brown, who is a decades-long employee of CAl OSHA, for his work in tracking the information that I'm going to cite today, we have entire offices around the state at 30, 40, and 50% vacancy rates for personnel involved in enforcing the law. The total number of vacancies for Cal OSHA enforcement is 133 as of the end of 2023. This is an overall vacancy rate of 38%. San Francisco, San Bernardino, Bakersfield, and Long Beach all have vacancies between 50% to 67%.

There are only 16 field enforcement inspectors at Cal OSHA that are certified in speaking languages other than English as we heard from the previous panel. There is also a vacancy rate of 32% in the Cal OSHA legal unit. There is reportedly just one person in the criminal investigation unit that should have nine staff and is facing a massive case backlog. The problem is not just absent inspectors, but vital administrative vacancies that support all of the agency's work.

In 2014, an agency watchdog reported that the agency has an inspector to worker ratio of one inspector to 102,000 workers. That's worse than Fed OSHA's ratio of one to 66,000. In an October 2023 update, almost a decade later, the ratio was worse. Cal OSHA inspector to worker ratio is one inspector for every 110,000 workers in the state.

We want to call out two specific impacts from this understaffing the increased reliance on letters instead of actual investigations, and an inability to communicate with California workers in a language that they understand. Letter inspections. In 2000, Cal OSHA did 13,000 letter investigations of businesses across the state, of which 3700 were done simply by mailing a letter to the employer. The remainder involved in-person visits to follow up on a health and safety concern. We've seen a growing increase in letter investigations from 2010 until now.

In 2022, during the pandemic, almost half of the investigations, 6400 out of 14,000, were by letter. Second, language access. At workspace, we work with community partners who come to us with their tales of workers' struggles to communicate with Cal OSHA due to language barriers, again, as we heard from the previous panel. A KQED study documented 19 Spanish bilingual inspectors to serve a population of over 2.3 million Spanish speakers. One Cantonese bilingual inspector is serving over 300,000 Cantonese-speaking workers.

167,000 Vietnamese speaking workers are serviced by one inspector as well. And there are zero inspectors serving some 600,000 California workers who speak other languages. The good news is there is some good news. Cal OSHA should be applauded for its move to reorganize and redirect resources to the Central Valley with a new office in Fresno.

I think Esmeralda left, but in Fresno we welcome the August announcement by the Department of Industrial Relations Director Hagen that this is a planned expansion that ensures a more permanent presence in this community. Recent reports by Cal OSHA leadership to deeply emphasize the importance of hiring, I think they call it hiring Mondays, in their retention plan. The path forward will require the need to take a fresh look at many barriers. I know. I'm almost done. I'm so sorry. We need to look at many barriers.

The restrictive minimum qualifications process, the opaque processes designed by and for people who have advanced degrees to take these roles but repel many qualified employees or possible employees and problematic incentives such as paths to salary and career advancement that have driven all the industrial hygienists into the safety engineer classification. We can address this by programs such as STEP and Governor Newsom's call to open doors to public service. And with that, I'll pass it on, I believe, to our worker advocate, Maria. Thank you.

Sorry. Efrain, you're doing the testimony for the worker?

Yes.

Okay.

Sorry.

So, good morning, Chair and committee members. My name is Efrain Aguilera. I'm a unit representative for United Food and Commercial Workers Local Five. Before that, I was a worker for Fresh Express in Salinas, California, solid packing company for six years. So that's where I became active with the union. UFCW Local Five represents about 25,000 members, 3500 of those members are under the agricultural division, which includes farm workers and packing houseworkers.

While you have heard today a lot about the lack of Cal OSHA enforcement and of laws meant to protect the farm workers from hazardous and wage theft, I'm going to talk to you today about the other important issues the farm workers faces that fall under the purview of the Department of Pesticide Regulations and County Agricultural Commission's exposure of pesticides and the lack of application notification. I have experienced firsthand on how harmful pesticides herbicides applications can be.

I have been seeing helicopters applying pesticides on farms with workers working on neighboring fields coming into direct contact with pesticides drift pesticides exposure is underreported because workers fear retaliation or job loss. Workers receive little to no pesticide exposure training and the lack of PPE makes it a lot worse and the lack also health insurance that coverage makes them seeking financially restrictive for workers. Farm workers disproportionately experience an acute and chronic effects of associated with pesticide exposure.

Pesticide poisoning incidence rates among the US farm workers is 39 times higher than the incident rate found in all other industries combined. Example of acute symptoms include rashes, breathing difficulties, vision changes, digestion issues, and central nervous system disorders. We have members that haven't gone to the hospital due to pesticide portioning even though our contracts have protections language in regards to the safety and health of our members.

For example, UFC Local Five Member Teresa Martinez and her coworkers from a company have experience headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, irritated eyes and the throat. Additional workers can experience long-term chronic effects pesticides exposure. These effects include cancer, hormone disorders, reproductive health issues, birth defects, and learning disorders. UFC Local Five Member Maria Hernandez was exposed to pesticides without even knowing that the neighboring fuel was being applied with pesticides.

Maria was pregnant at that time and she was doing exercise during the lunch time right around the parking lot of Fresh Express Company. This exposure caused her daughter to experience birth defects and she now has speech problems and learning disabilities. While pesticides exposure happens directly and regularly in the farm worker community to their families, the DPR and the CAC who are in charge of enforcing pesticides protections for farm workers often lacks the enforcement of pesticides regulations similar to the enforcement issues you have heard with Cal OSHA.

Many of those issues are present at the DPR. When a violation does occur, it is difficult to access the CACs and DPR because of the lack of language accessibility and often their investigation result in zero penalties or very small penalties for the companies that made the violations. Furthermore, we want to share our disappointment with DPR, ignoring standards established with the State Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment. DPR allows pesticides that have cancer-causing risk 14 times higher than we has safe harbor level recommended.

To make it matters worse, the double chemical has called 50 micrograms per day and that is 14 times what has been found to be cancer-causing danger levels warnings. What is wrong with this picture? That's what I call. Why is the agricultural communities, especially on the Latino farm workers, lives 14 times less important than the rest of the California residents that don't live in rural communities.

Some of the solutions we urge the DPR and the county agricultural commissioners to adopt are protecting workers from retaliation after reporting pesticides related illness, increasing the minimum penalties for violations of pesticide use and worker safety laws, and encourage the inconsistent enforcement of the pesticides and worker safety laws across all county agricultural commissioners. The fact sheet in your materials has more information on the policy solutions we and other advocates propose to strain the enforcement of pesticide regulations.

Thank you.

Thank you for letting me speak.

Thank you. Next we have Erica Cervantes.

Good afternoon. My name is Erica Ria Cervantes and I am a community and policy advocate with Central Coast Alliance United for a sustainable economy or cause in the City of Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County. As a daughter of farmworker parents and as someone who is a farmworker herself, I have witnessed and experienced the harmful effects due to the lack of enforcement in agricultural fields.

Workers are in danger every day when they are not trained, every day that a restroom is not available to them, and every summer when the sun burns above them and they thirst for cool, refreshing water to ease their burning throats but are instead given warm water for their already heated body temperatures. These are the life-threatening situations that, unfortunately, my family and community continue to experience every day for every year of their lives.

As an advocate, I have learned that agencies such as Cal OSHA exist with a mission to protect the health and safety of every worker. Unfortunately, I haven't seen much of this mission fulfilled. In the last panels, you heard about all the barriers workers face to filing complaints with state agencies and how they struggle just to find one person who can take proactive measures to protect them.

When Cal OSHA appears at their work site, employers threaten workers with job loss and coerce them to say whatever needs to be said so that there isn't a second glance in their direction. We understand the vacancy issue the agency has been experiencing, and we would like to say that we are encouraged by the recent commitment that Cal OSHA has demonstrated in partnering with community-based organizations through programs such as the COVID-19 Worker Outreach Program, or CWOP, and the proposed rural strategic engagement program that appeared in the governor's January budget. We believe that this could be built upon to invest in the community expert navigators that Yelisa Ambriz proposed in panel two.

However, from AnaStacia Wright's testimony and from my own experience, I know that farmworkers' calls are currently going unanswered. Though we acknowledge the agency's efforts to work with community-based organization, the agency continues to struggle filling enforcement positions, leading to unanswered complaints and resulting in distrust between the enforcement agency and workers. The agency itself has to change to be resourceful and protective of farm workers so that complaints are investigated in a timely and professional manner.

With that being said, we would like to propose solutions that would help Cal OSHA staff the enforcement division with enforcement agents that are linguistically and culturally competent to serve farmworkers and other low wage workers. As of now, current minimum qualifications for inspection jobs are exclusive and unattainable. Instead of excluding these workers, the agency needs to create a viable pipeline of workers from high-risk industries into Cal OSHA's enforcement branch.

One way to expand entry level positions would be for the agency to replicate a model like the Federal OSHA program called STEP, or the Safety Technician Enhancement Program. STEP is designed to offer specialized training and curriculum where workers can learn health and safety codes, how to do an inspection, write a report, and shadow an enforcement officer. By following this model, the agency can provide opportunities to worker leaders who could fill vacancies within the agency and will bring important diversity and experience to on-site calls.

Moreover, farm workers and even advocates have shared how difficult it has been to communicate with Cal OSHA due to limited Spanish-speaking staff. In comparison, the Labor Commissioner's Office has multiple Spanish-speaking staff, which has made such a difference in being able to proactively work with them. Cal OSHA often relies on remote phone interpretation services with no expertise in workplace safety.

Just as in the medical field, which requires specialized interpreter training, worker and health safety can be life or death, and workers deserve skilled interpreters that are knowledgeable and professional to ensure they can communicate the workplace hazards. We propose that the agency establish full-time interpreter positions in district offices serving high farm worker populations. While having bilingual inspection staff that speak the multiple languages that farm workers speak is the ideal, we know that the current unattainable qualifications for these positions.

We know that these positions making finding qualified bilingual inspectors are extremely hard. Creating full-time Spanish interpretation positions would ensure that interpreters are knowledgeable and Cal OSHA information and inquiries via phone or during an inspection in the field would be truly accessible to Spanish-speaking workers and advocates. Lastly, we are well aware that the chief of Cal OSHA is no longer with the agency.

As the governor seeks to fill the position, we implore him to appoint someone who has experience with enforcement and management and proven track record of partnering successfully with CBOs and prioritizing language, accessibility, and justice. We understand that the state budget is tight, but Cal OSHA has had a significant vacancy rate for many years and it is time to reallocate that money towards solutions that will begin to address the chronic understaffing by attracting culturally and linguistically competent staff. These haterdress working conditions are an emergency and should be treated as such. If we value agriculture in ensuring that families are fed, couldn't we at least protect the families that feed us?

Thank you. Any questions for this panel by our committee members?

I'll start, and I should have started today by appreciating the chair for having the opportunity to sit on the dais today to be able to ask questions. But I do want to bring back Cristina's comment from the previous panel regarding the injustice that happens for too many farm workers who are making calls that are going unanswered.

And I'd like to highlight some of the suggestions that you made regarding the vacancy rates and the efforts that OSHA can do to help to strengthen so that those calls can be answered in a culturally and linguistically competent way, as well as uplifting the CBOs who have been in this space for decades doing the hard work of being those trusted messengers. But it leads towards distrust.

When our farm workers, who are fearing retaliation, are making calls that are going unanswered, it leads towards that injustice that she's speaking about. And so I like to flip the question, where's the justice in having a 38% vacancy rate? Where's the justice we have when they're giving advanced notice to the employers that they're coming out to do an inspection and then asking the workers to clean up the sites that they've just complained about? I think we have to ask these questions of the department and want to ask through the chair to make sure that she's elevating those questions during our next panel and wanted to thank this panel for the presentation.

Thank you.

Thank you all.

Absolutely. Okay. Thank you so much. And our final panel, our state agency response. Here today we have Sebastian Sanchez, Lilia Garcia-Brower, and Debra Lee.

Okay. We have Deanna Ping, who's here to answer questions as well. Thank you for being here today. We've heard a lot from workers and advocates. You've heard from me at the beginning, stories of retaliation, wage and health and safety violations, threats, injuries, and in some cases, deaths. And all this happened while we had plenty of money. So want to take this time to give you an opportunity to respond, but also keep what I said in mind.

I know we're in a budget deficit, but I don't want to hear about the budget deficit and I want to hear solutions, just like you heard from my other committee members and those who are watching. So with that, I will ask Sebastian Sanchez, who is here, deputy secretary, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Thank you. Chair Ortega, good morning. My name is Sebastian Sanchez. I am the deputy secretary for the immigrant and agriculture workforce at the state's Labor and Workforce Development Agency. I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. I want to thank all the workers that were here today as well, and all of the organizations that work day in, day out to support them.

I'm very proud to say that we work with all of these organizations on a regular basis in a variety of forums and greatly appreciate the insight that they provide to us as we develop our strategy. The agricultural workforce is a priority for this administration and for the Labor Agency. Secretary Knox has made it a point to insist that all of our departments, boards and panels be engaged in working to improve the lives and working conditions of farm workers.

As you may have seen, we recently announced $26 million in funding for farm worker training that is meant to also improve the quality of work and the wages for farm workers. The issues that have been raised here today are not new, as we all know.

We have read the reports, we've discussed these issues with stakeholders in multiple forums, and we are well aware that farm workers continue to experience violations in the workplace, that there are severe obstacles in front of them to report those violations, whether it is not knowing where to go, who to contact, or not having information that is linguistically or culturally appropriate for them, or not even trusting that the enforcement process will function.

I'd like to take a few moments to provide you with some examples of the work that we've engaged in over the recent past to address these issues and to improve the services for farm workers. Along with our better-known outreach program, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we had the Covid-19 Worker Outreach Project, CWOP. We also developed and launched the Statewide Agriculture and Farm Worker Education program, SAFE we launched this in conjunction with the UC Davis Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety.

This program was developed to focus exclusively on creating content to reach farmworkers to work in conjunction with community-based organizations and other ag stakeholders to distribute information to farm workers directly in the fields where they work, where they live, and where they congregate. This program alone since November of 2020, the organizations have reported engaging over a million individuals.

We've developed 125 videos in 22 languages, including 14 indigenous languages, with the support of CBDIO. Other efforts and you'll hear more from Acting Chief Lee and Labor Commissioner García-Brower. The CalOSHA launched an initiative with the UC Meced Community and Labor Center to build and strengthen relationships between our district offices, workers and advocates in the Central Valley.

In response to an ask from the CAMPO Coalition, we extended our hotline hours till 07:00 p.m. And we've really revived the Agricultural Safety and Health Inspection project to conduct regular inspection of sanitation in the fields. In response to advocate requests, the Labor Commissioner has really led the way in launching monthly clinics with MICOP down in Santa Maria, with TODEC in the Inland Empire, as well with CBDIO in Fresno and Madeira. And I'll speak a little bit more about these programs.

The Agricultural Labor Relations Board created an outreach team. In 2018, they had 37 outreach events, reaching just over 5000 workers. Last year, they held 276 events and engaged over 23,000 workers. They also send an attorney to the cause offices in Santa Maria to do intake directly with workers. I coordinate a monthly farm worker collaboration call with all of our departments to discuss our outreach efforts, emerging issues, and opportunities to collaborate on enforcement.

We include in these calls CDFA, HCD, the Department of Cannabis Control, Department of Pesticide Regulation, the Civil Rights Department, as well as the Federal Department of Labor. This call has given rise to two memorandums of understanding that are meant to address the issues that farm workers face. The first is an internal MOU to facilitate and streamline the sharing of information across our agency so that enforcement can happen across the board collectively. The second is an MOU with the Mexican Consul General to better reach Mexican nationals.

And as we know, over 80% of our farm workers are Mexican nationals. Now, as I said, we know that the gaps continue to exist and that we need to continue to improve enforcement efforts. At the secretary's request, I have spent the past year working with all of our departments on developing a strategy around three key goals. The first is to increase access to in-person services for farm workers.

We want to build on the Labor Commissioner's model of having in-person and regular monthly clinics in farm worker communities so that workers can receive educational information and also file complaints with any of our enforcement entities so that they don't have to go looking for which one they need to report to.

We want to establish a no wrong door policy for workers to have efficient internal coordination so that if a worker contacts any of our outreach or enforcement staff, they will be warmly referred to the appropriate enforcement entity that should support them. And third, we want to simplify access to information for workers. That means we need to continue to develop audio and visual tools, particularly in indigenous languages, to better develop the awareness of farm workers.

The rural strategic engagement program budget change proposal that was in the Governor's budget is meant to help fund these efforts. It provides funding for organizations to launch the clinics, funding for staffing to ensure we have the capacity to administer these programs, training for our staff, and continued development of our outreach materials. If you give me 1 second.

Just last week, we convened all of our executive leadership and senior management from Agricultural Labor Relations Board, the Labor Commissioner, CalOSHA, EDD, Division of Workers Comp to discuss how we will implement this and move forward. And it is our hope to continue to work closely with all of the community partners here, as well as employers and other stakeholders to execute on this strategy. Thank you for your time.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair, members of the committee. I'd like to first acknowledge all the testimony that we heard this morning that is completely aligned with what our experience has been in my office. Thank you to all the workers for providing that testimony. And because of those consistent experience, we have prioritized recovering that confidence and expanding our reach into farm worker communities where we have historically not had contact. Unfortunately, the structure of the agricultural industry, as you all well know, facilitates violations.

The use of the subcontracting model undercapitalized contractors, a workforce, as we heard, who speaks many different languages, agencies who don't have those language capabilities. These are all barriers to enforcement. Which is why it's more critical that in this particular industry, we work closely with stakeholders to identify systemic violations and obtain worker cooperation. My goals have been to fill vacancies, to increase farm worker access to the Labor Commissioner's office resources, to invest long standing relationships with community leaders, and to train employers.

I'm going to identify a couple of highlights. So in hiring, hiring continues to be a top priority for us. In 2023, we hired 171 professionals, which represents a 25% increase from the previous year. Now, outreach is just as important, if not more than the enforcement, because it's foundational to enforcement. If workers do not know their rights, they cannot exercise them.

So we launched an interactive outreach campaign reaching every californian that prioritizes farm workers in the agricultural industry, and that takes us out of our offices into the communities that we serve. We initially launched labor caravans in 2020. As with the pandemic, we saw that claims went down and we started to hear reports of untruths on our public information line. So we knew that we had to get out there.

However, we reflected and understood that even though those caravans were innovative and brought an infusion of attention to a particular targeted area, that was temporary and we needed to review and provide a more regular engagement, which is where we came to design. Sorry, I'm forgetting your title.

What, the deputy secretary just testified to a pop-up office model in areas where we do not have an office and then we're able to provide in-person contact. We initially started just with the Labor Commissioner's office. We now partner with CalOSHA regularly, and other agencies like ALRB and EDD are also participating. And we're prioritizing relevant information for farm workers.

For those who are interested in taking action, we also provide a clinic component where they could file claims on the spot or report law-breaking employers to us. Our initial partner was MICOP, Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project, and then we expanded as the deputy secretary spoke. So I want to highlight that we continue these. And aside from the areas that were mentioned, we are now expanding into Crothers and Lindsay. In working with CBDIO this year, we've also trained 210 agricultural employers over the past year.

We also, through our Workplace Rights Ambassadors project, are working with 12 different organizations who service farm worker communities. Through these different collaborations, we've received more than 120 referrals and we've been able to resolve half of those referrals and the other half we had to refer for formal filing because they presented more complex situations that we needed to engage in the formal process.

We also have a youth advocate program, as the chair is well aware of where we prioritize reaching the children of farm workers who often serve as interpreters for their parents to help them resolve issues. We also have regular radio shows on Radio Indigena that reaches 10 to 1500 listeners every day and 2 to 3000 daily on their Facebook. And we also are regularly on Radio Bilingual that reaches more than 10 agricultural areas.

I know I'm going to be out of time, but I just want to highlight three enforcement examples that demonstrates our commitment to community collaboration and how critical community partners in, in us achieving our role. We had a referral from Machado Dairy where farm workers had filed CalOSHA complaints. And then within a month or so later, the employer put on an I9 notice on their door when the workers came back to work, an I9 notice that they were going to review their immigration papers. Right.

So the advocates contact myself and the OSHA chief over the weekend. On a Saturday, I engaged my team on Sunday. And we were communicating with that employer by midmorning that Monday, advising them that that is potentially illegal if they can't demonstrate other information. The employer retracted, put down the notice and continued. So that was a successful enforcement activity. We also have another one with the Monterey District Attorney. This is not a wage theft case.

This is actually a premium and tax fraud, workers comp premium and tax fraud case. But what our role there was, they were investigating. The defendants were farm labor contractors who had a license with our agency. The Superior Court was able to leverage that license, which we were in the process of revoking because of the criminal investigation.

And they were able to maintain, put those employers on house arrest and they were able to maintain the 1500 farm workers working while the employers served their term and recovered, corrected the restitution. So that was another successful collaboration that we want to see more of.

The last one I'm going to mention is a farm labor contractor, MG Luna, in Fresno County, where we use the client employment law to cite two growers who had a contract with MG Luna because they failed to pay minimum wage and other violations. So the client-employer tool is necessary to achieve the sustainable compliance that we know we're all going after. So these are just some examples of the fruit of our long-term investment with community partners.

In each of these cases, we are working with community partners, including Sierra Lay. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Next we have Deborah Lee, acting chief of CalOSHA.

Yes, good morning, Madam Chair and committee members. And I would also like to acknowledge and thank the farm workers here today for their testimony. Can you hear me? Probably move it a little bit closer. Better. Okay. I was stating that I would like to thank the farm workers for their testimonies here today. I was very moved by those testimonies here today and very concerned. I would also like to state that my name is Debra Lee. I'm the CalOSHA Deputy Chief.

Currently, as the acting deputy chief, I joined the team of CalOSHA about 25 years ago as an industrial hygienist. I would like to once again thank you for this opportunity to share with you our accomplishments and current things that we are working on to protect and improve workplace safety and health for farm workers. And I have a video here to share with you guys or a presentation here. So, yes.

Next slide. Our action items as we move here today is to increase our presence in agricultural areas. We want to establish an agricultural enforcement unit. We would like to continue to build strong partnerships with community-based organizations. We would like to provide outreach and training to farm workers. We are working heavily on recruiting, hiring, and retaining a diverse and professional workforce. Next slide, please. Employment data shows that approximately 70% of agricultural employment is in the Central Valley.

And in the Southern California, the highest agricultural employment is in Riverside and Imperial counties. We are establishing additional offices in Fresno, Santa Barbara, and Riverside. We have hired several staff for the Fresno office and the Riverside office. These offices we're continuing to hire and moving towards opening these offices. We're also recruiting and hiring staff for our Santa Barbara District office and those positions are currently posted. If we can move to the next slide, please.

We realize that farm workers face unique challenges in their places of employment, as testified here today, and we have launched an initiative to establish an agricultural safety and health enforcement unit. This unit would focus on agricultural workers. We will set a goal to recruit and hire bilingual staff. The unit would have a designated multilingual complaint hotline, allowing farm workers and advocacy groups to report their concerns and complaints totally anonymously so that we can respond to those tips. Next slide, please.

Our goals for this unit would be one, improve workplace safety and health for all agricultural workers and two, change the workplace culture to increase agricultural employers awareness of, commitment to and involvement in workplace safety and health and third, secure agricultural workers confidence and trust through excellence in the development and delivery of CalOSHA programs and services. Having limited time to share our strategic plan for the rollout of this unit, I will be brief.

The unit will roll out in multiple phases, starting with establishing the multilingual complaint hotline. Starting that sometime in the summer. I'm sorry, the spring here. Next, we will identify office locations followed by opening of the offices. The goal of this unit aligns with our agricultural safety and health inspection project that we will be kicking off this year before the heat season. Next slide, please. Every enforcement district office will have a team dedicated to conducting proactive agricultural inspections.

The focus of these inspections will be indoor heat, outdoor heat activities, nighttime operations, cleanliness of drinking water, toilets, and hand washing facilities. We will also be involved in doing joint housing inspections with our DLSE, our Labor Commissioner office, and the Department of Labor. We will also be engaging in doing joint hazardous substance inspections with the pesticides control. Next slide, please. CalOSHA has established regional relationships, building initiatives with UC Merced labor law, I mean, I'm sorry, Labor Center.

And we've also developed with Southern California Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health. We are developing a multilingual video on how to file a complaint with CalOSHA. We can move to the next slide. We have created, translated and updated multiple safety publications resources for agricultural workers, such as information on workers rights, Covid-19 prevention for workers, how to find your exact coordinates using iPhones and a lot of these ideas came out of our collaboration with community-based organizations. Next slide, please.

Hiring is one of our top priorities in CalOSHA and we continue to actively reach, I mean, sorry, recruit and hire qualified team members. This will include hiring for the agricultural unit that I mentioned earlier and developing. We are moving toward a statewide recruitment campaign which Ms. Ping will talk about a little bit later in more detail. We're using radio, newspaper, bulletin boards, social media. We're networking with colleges and universities as well as with professional health and safety organizations.

CalOSHA shares its enforcement, recruitment and hiring staffing numbers on its website and as of the 31st of 2023, Calocia has 185 filled inspectors located throughout California. Since 2022, a total of 71 enforcement appointments have been made, which include hiring and promoting and transferring, and also hiring retired annuities. In the coming months, we are launching our enforcement statewide recruitment campaign, including providing assistance to prospective candidates or applicants on how to navigate the state hiring process. Next slide, please.

I want to express my deepest thanks for inviting me here today. All of our efforts here, be it rulemaking, enforcement, compliance assistance or training, are not done. I'm sorry, are not an end unto themselves. They are tools to accomplish our mission. Our mission is worker safety and health. This is a mission CalOSHA shares with everyone in this audience. Workers' lives and livelihoods depend on our ability to jointly prevent injury and illness.

Again, I'd like to say thank you and I would like to leave you with some of our resources here and also our phone number, our hotline. This number here will direct you to our call center. It's available for advocate groups and farm workers. We understand the limitation of this call center. We do have bilingual people available and also we would like for people to also be aware of our job website location and we ask for them to join and I'm open to questions at the end.

A little nervous. Thank you.

Don't be nervous. Senator Cortese, do you have any questions?

I do. One of them is for the Commissioner. And by the way, thank you for presenting here again today. We heard you in Joint Legislative Audit Committee last year. And also I appreciate your efforts to meet in my office to go over some of these issues and others wouldn't necessarily know that you're making all those efforts.

I know you mentioned the hires added on the new hires, and I want to just make it clear this isn't a trap question in any way, but I want to make sure we're transparent with the public and with legislators in terms of the net problem that you're facing, or at least have been facing.

I know in Senate Subcommittee Five and a Budget Committee going back a couple of years, we've had this deficit where as fast as you can hire, you're having attrition and having trouble really increasing the occupied positions versus the vacant positions. Can you speak to that? I'm really just trying to get that out on the record. I don't want you to feel defensive about it.

But if that's happening, I think we all need to know as the people with the purse strings and the resources here that we need to try to help somehow with that.

Yes. Thank you so much, Senator, and really appreciate your commitment to support us over the years. So of those 171 hires, 93 of them were internal candidates. So that's the tension that we have. Right. So for 2023, we have about a 53% higher on internal candidates versus external candidates. Our numbers have decreased in terms of the separations that we're seeing. And as I shared with you, we are investing more in retention strategies. Actually, a lot of our professionals enjoy being out in the community.

They enjoy designing programs to reach individuals. And so the more opportunity we create for them to take a break from that load of cases, that is also a retention strategy. And as I had previously shared with you, we also have a pipeline strategy with the University of California that we have with UCLA, similar to what Chief Lee mentioned of trying to create that constant recruitment and demystifying the state hiring process.

But I'd like to defer to Deanna Ping, who is going to share some more details about ceneral hiring efforts.

Thanks, Labor Commissioner Garcia-Brower. Good. I think it's afternoon now. Good. Almost afternoon. Deanna Ping, I'm the Chief Deputy Director for the Department of Industrial Relations. Thank you for your question, Senator Cortese. As you know, hiring is a top priority for our department, especially for our divisions. As you may recall, we actually lost our hiring delegation in 2019, and it took us several years to get that back. And we're starting to see steady progress especially within the last six months.

So I can say that the department as a whole saw a 2% reduction in the last six months in our vacancy rate, which is pretty significant. And also that we saw a 4% reduction for the Labor Commissioner's office and CalOSHA, we saw a 3% reduction. And those might sound like small numbers, but given that, like Labor Commissioner Garcia-Brower mentioned, having internal hires is really important from a recruitment standpoint and retention.

So we like to have those numbers, but it does mean we have to backfill that vacancy. We also have retirements and also we've been very fortunate where we've received hundreds of new positions from the Legislature, all of which affect the vacancy rate. So I do want to just note as a point of comparison, in 2020, so this is when we didn't have our hiring delegation.

DIR as a department made 252 appointments as an entire department. For CalOSHA and LCO, just within the last six months, they've made almost 200. And as a department as a whole, in six months, we've made 416. It's not enough.

We still need to do more, but I'm hoping that that can help illuminate that we are making steady progress and we actually have different strategies in place as well, where both CalOSHA and the Labor Commissioner's office have added significant resources internally to help scale up their hiring, which we've also done with our human resources team. And so we expect to continue to build on this progress and see bigger double-digit numbers. So thank you.

Yeah. If I can comment through the Chair, appreciate hearing all those numbers. And I think the difference is, and I do think 2% is low. Anybody who hears that is going to think that's not enough. I think most of us up here probably feel it's not enough or not rapid enough. But if there's a message there, it said it's net plus because it was not going in that direction. We had an ongoing deficit, growing deficit employment.

I appreciate the Commissioner pointing out candidly that some of those hires are internal, which means it's great we have a bench. We're growing employment within. We're rewarding people for doing a good job, but it doesn't get us to the overall numbers that we want. I appreciate you being here. I know you've testified before my committee as well.

And I have one more question through the Chair on the OSHA side, and it's a little bit not self-serving, but parochial to a bill that we fought hard to get approved last year on workplace violence. Senate Bill 553, which was signed into law. And if you don't know, Ms. Lee, that's fine. No pressure here.

I didn't hear a lot about proactive enforcement there, and we're feeling that that ill required an addendum to OSHA documentation in the workplace that simply requires employers to indicate what their plans are for addressing workplace violence. And I'm hoping that as part of the proactive kind of affirmative work that's going out, that in this space in agriculture and farm labor, that's seen as just as important as in industrial locations or in retail, which gets a lot of attention.

But the fact of the matter is one of the worst tragedies we saw in the Bay Area near my district in San Mateo, next door to Santa Clara County, of course, was in Half Moon Bay. And we've seen another situation like that recently. So we know there's this tension and oppression and things like wage theft and people withholding checks from folks when they don't feel that that's righteous can lead even to coworker violence. So we're hoping that that becomes part of the proactive enforcement.

Yes. Thank you for that. In regards to when I mentioned the agricultural safety and health project inspection and also the unit, the areas that we will be focused in on as well will be violence in the workplace with the new standard. And so as we train our staff in rolling out, we're asking them to look at all of those programs like COVID-19, violence in the workplace, as well as looking at indoor heat issues.

And so we're looking at a holistic approach when we go out and do these inspections. It may not be hot at the time that we're rolling out, but we're going to evaluate the employers programs to see that they are being proactive and putting forth their training before these things happen.

Thank you. And we have a heat bill coming this year.

Yes.

Great. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. And I apologize. I came in late because as usual in the legislature, we have two committees going at the same time, and I'm on the Education Committee in the Senate, and I have to leave now for a caucus meeting. But I've appreciated very much the discussion and appreciate your leadership in pulling this together. Chair Ortega, thank you.

And, Madam Chair, if I may just add to Mr. Cortese's question, even though it's not new law, but we know that there's sexual violence in agricultural industry, and the legislature has established mandates to attempt to address that. And so in our regular increased engagement with community leaders and in these workshops, we also include the sexual violence standard, the sexual assault prevention training requirements, also lactation accommodations, the violence against victims protections that are found in the labor code.

So we're bringing that information to farm workers as well.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, one of the concerns and main reasons I wanted to host today's hearing is because we do pass a lot of laws here in the legislature, but we need to make sure that they're being enforced and that there's accountability. And I have a question for Acting Chief Lee.

I appreciated your presentation about everything that you're going to be doing or in the process of doing, but in today's testimony, I repeatedly heard witnesses speak about notifying employers when an inspection is going to occur. Can you talk a little bit about that? And I'm very concerned about that.

Thank you. So am I. I would like to start first by saying that any person within the organization that is providing any type of information about an inspection, which we refer to that as events notice, will be subjected to violations of the labor code. And those violations are very swift. They entail imprisonment and civil fines. Our procedures have been outlined and staff has been trained. We cannot give advance notice to any employer. And so if this is happening, this is something we want to know.

We need to know, and we will take action. But inspectors have been trained not to give advanced notice. That is what it's called. There are circumstances where we may have to give advanced notice, such as a prison. We can't just walk into a prison. But once again, there, there's a protocol that you would have to follow and go through. So I'm very concerned in hearing what is occurring, and we would want to know about that to take appropriate action.

Is this something we can. I'm looking at my staff. I mentioned I wanted to do an audit of your department because while I understand there's protocols in place, I've heard over and over today of instances. So just want to make sure we have the data, the information, so that we can act accordingly. Another question I had for you is around staffing.

I mentioned a lot of these violations have occurred when we have plenty of money and so want to hear more about your current staffing, how we're going to move forward, and a lot of the issues that were raised today around languages, et cetera, and access.

So for staffing, I'll start, and then I'll refer over to Deanna Ping to talk about some of our strategy because it overlaps with DLSE as well. I'm sorry, DIR as well, and DLSE. So as I stated, we currently have 185 field staff that are out in the field. Our strategy was to build our management force starting first because we need managers in order to manage the offices. And so when we look at our regional staff, we have a total of eight regional positions.

We only have two vacancies now. We've been successful in hiring those positions and getting them up and running. When we look at our district managers, these are the frontline first-line managers that are also attending some of our community-based organizations so that we can start to network. We are 27 and we have three vacancies there. And those are now posted. I believe that's approximately three. And then from there, our strategy is to move toward working on our fill staff.

And so I'm going to pivot over here to Deanna at this time.

Thank you, Chair Ortega. So something that Acting Chief Lee mentioned was the statewide recruitment campaign that we're working on and launching in the next couple weeks. And so that's to help impart what we've heard today is bring greater awareness about these positions to people who may not realize that they would be good candidates for them. So that's going to be statewide. It's going to include social media.

It's going to include out-of-home, which is sort of, when you see different postings at bus stops or things like that, that's what out-of-home is, as well as different for both the Labor Commissioner's office as well as CalOSHA for enforcement positions. Because what we're seeing is a need to scale up. Now that we're seeing what Senator Cortese mentioned, we're seeing net gain now, we need to scale it. And so that's what the recruitment campaign is partially to help with.

And also, like I mentioned as well, both the Labor Commissioner's office and CalOSHA are investing heavily in their own division hiring infrastructure to help move these hiring packages and make these hires. And I also want to note that we found, in part due to the partnerships we've had with our community organizations, we've heard, is to help support candidates navigate the state hiring process. And so in addition to just raising awareness about these jobs, it's also how can someone apply for a state job?

And so we're coupling that with different workshops or convening so that we can help people actually be able to navigate that process as well to hopefully give us a candidate pool and inspectors who represent the diversity of the state that we're enforcing. Thank you.

Thank you. Another thing I heard from one of the testimonies was the use of pesticides? Are employers obligated to train their workers on the risk of pesticides? And if they fail to do so, what are the consequences?

So one, that would be the pesticides control. But for CalOSHA, when we go out, we do look at hazardous chemicals, and in that process, in looking at the hazardous chemicals, we have something known as the hazard communication. And so we would look at that and look at areas in communicating to the employer that you're in violation of our HazCom. But also we would do a referral over to the pesticide controls so our team will be able to take that information and do that referrals for pesticide controls can come out and enforce.

So when there's a violation, we call another agency.

No, I'm saying when it's pesticide, it's controlled by the pesticide agency. What we can do is look at those that are under our jurisdiction, which is the hazardous substances. But if it's pesticide, it goes over to the pesticide control unit. What we would do is at that moment in time, do a call or referral over to that agency to get out there.

In the meantime, we would use what tools we have in order to stop or to issue the citation and inform the employer that this is a violation and you must cease.

Okay, so what are the tools and what are the consequences?

The consequences would be that they would be cited and they would have to stop that practice and what they're doing. We would move to stop that practice and failure to do so. We will probably collaborate with our legal team to see what other actions could we take until the pesticide control unit can get out there and do their, and enforce their regulations. We have tools at our disposal such as order to pivot use or to stop operation.

We would collaborate with our legal team to see if that's something that we could enforce under our jurisdiction or not, or if it would be pesticide. We would contact them to get them out there as soon as possible.

Got it. Last question, and this goes for any of the panelists here today. We heard a lot about the fear of retaliation. So what are ways that the state can help them feel better protected so that they can come forward? And I do want to acknowledge those that are here today. It's not an easy thing to come to Sacramento to speak, to share your story and in the back of your mind know that there might be retaliation. So what are the steps we can take?

Thank you so much, Madam Chair. That is within my jurisdiction, so I'll be the first to respond. There's two main components with retaliation. One has to do with educating the workforce about what the law requires. There is a lot of myths about retaliation. Probably over 90% of claims that we receive are not final, are not entered as formal cases because we don't have jurisdiction or the worker has not identified the protected activity. And so that's why we've invested deeply in educating the workforce about what's required.

I just did a training last night in Santa Maria on retaliation. Right. And so there's very specific things that the workers have to do to protect themselves to be able to defend themselves against retaliation. So I think that is the biggest piece. The second piece was captured in the example of Machado Dairy case is for us getting that information quickly so that we could stop the retaliation.

Workers don't want to stand in a long line for a legal dispute and we want to get to it sooner. We've engaged in early engagement throughout all of our operations when the information is presented to us. So we've been working with community partners and explaining what that is. And I think our partnership with UC Merced, who was able to bring us forward that case and we acted quickly to stop it. That's the third piece of regaining trust and communicating that with the workforce.

If you don't mind, I'd just like to add the UC Merced report on farmworker health noted that the primary reason that farmworkers don't move forward is due to zero retaliation based on their immigration status. As you may recall, the Governor announced the Farmworker Immigration Legal services program that we've been developing in conjunction with the Department of Social Services. We've hired legal service providers, we've developed structures to refer cases directly to those immigration legal service providers.

When farm workers let us know that they're concerned about their immigration issues and are developing outreach assets right now to start properly sharing information about this program. So we know that there are specific needs that farm workers need to not feel that fear of retaliation. I also like to note that the rural strategic engagement program has funding for legal service providers as well, that we'd like to see present at the clinics to assist in mitigating some of the concerns that farmworkers have.

At the very least, they can be accompanied by someone that can represent them through the proccess.

And with CalOSHA, if I may. So when we do our inspections and we open, we inform the employer as soon as we open, it is against the law to take any action or any retaliation against any employee as we do this investigation. We then also inform employees that if you fear that you have been retaliated in any shape or form, and that could be by reducing your work hours or not calling you back to work to please notify us.

From there, we work closely with DLSE to take appropriate action. We get our legal unit involved as well.

Thank you. So that concludes our panels. Thank you so much for being here today. I will now open it up for public comments. We will give each person up to 1 minute and 1 minute additional if translation is needed, so you can come up to their microphone. Okay, the sergeant is going to do row by row if anyone would like to come up for public commentary. No public comment. Oh, there is. Okay.

Please state your name, and again, you have 1 minute.

[Foreign Speaking]

My name is Adelina Espinosa, and I speak Mistico. She did grant us some words in Mistico, and she lives in the City of Madeira, California. And on behalf of all of her colleagues who work in the field, they want to appreciate that you were listening and that we really hope that you can advocate so that laws become better, because there is a lot of abuse in labor law.

We see it day by day with the situations with our farm worker community that are the ones who feed all of this nation.

[Foreign Speaking]

Good morning. My name is Jorge. I am a community organizer with the program friend, and I'm here to talk about my experience submitting complaints to Kelosha that oftentimes I have to wait for somebody to speak Spanish to be able to submit a complaint. And 82% of the people in the area of Ventura speak Mistico, Zapotec, and other languages.

In my district, in Van Nuys, there's also one inspector for every 101,000 people in my district. In 2020, there was a 22% vacancy where there weren't any inspectors.

So we do not even have a director in our district. In 2020, in Camarillo, there's a company that, 3H coastal coast, 21,000 to Kelosha.

Thank you.

Indigenous Este Apoyari and Polara. Indigenous fundamental parallel organization. Este locates, este Uncomprovante Tambien importantes disposal as quaranta oras Los salvados or Domingos Perolis Pagan estebo Para Vadir. Este loces extras.

Good afternoon. My name is Opelia Torres. Opelia Torres, and I am with Projecto mist, and my function is to help empower our indigenous communities and to help our farm workers so that they can organize because they go through a lot of wage theft.

Wage theft is very common in the indigenous community, in the immigrant community, because many employers don't want to pay sick pay, they often ask for proof of sickness. And this is also something that is a barrier.

And when it comes to overtime, after the 40 hours, Monday through Friday, they have us work Saturdays and Sundays, but they pay them cash to try to avoid what are overtime hours.

So what we want is that agencies listen to community more that there is that communication with the community. Thank you for listening to my comment.

Naomi Martinez with the Central California Governmental Justice Network. I just want to support the idea of the navigator or call it whatever you want. But we need someone that looks like the farm worker who knows the needs of the farm worker, helping provide better enforcement.

And we're ready to work with the agencies to improve this aspect. I also would like to respectfully request that we heard a lot about language access today.

We have interpreters because we, the nonprofits, paid for it because we were told that there was no money for that. And I'm sorry, but we cannot host a farmworker hearing with Spanish speaking farm workers and say, either you bring your interpreter or we cannot understand you. That's inadmissible. Thank you.

Madam Chair and member Sarah Flocks, California Labor Federation. Thank you for having this hearing. And I wanted to echo some of the earlier union speakers.

There is nothing that compares to a union contract to improve working conditions and enforce workers' rights and I wanted to commend the UFW for their work to support workers' right to organize and to keep enforcing the law in the fields for also. But that said, enforcement is incredibly important.

And we see with the labor commissioner, we have huge vacancy rates. Cal/OSHA has huge vacancy rates. This is a crisis for workers. We need enforcement, and we need to do as much as possible to support the agencies, to fill these positions so they can do their work.

And also at Cal/OSHA, need more inspectors. They need to be out there inspecting. And we need to increase penalties across the board to create real deterrence to have a reason to stop employers from violating the law. And we will continue to work in this area. Enforcement is a huge priority for the Labor Federation. Thank you.

Ola buenosardes Minobres Birhenia. Soy organisadora paraliders campesinas etravajado Campo antes idurantela pandemia isoitas tigo De La singusticias. Ms Campago emo sufrido De Avusos, Comoro De Sueldo, Acosu Represarias Loreno Esque Organic, segirandu chando parales De rachos humano De Los campesinos. Ohala pronto noes necessarios. Gracias.

Hello, my name is Virginia. I'm an organizer for Via Campesina. I've worked in the field before and.

Sorry, hold on. Do we need to translate zero, you're translating. I'm sorry.

Hi, my name is Virginia. I'm an organizer for La Via Campesina. I worked in the field before and during the pandemic. I witnessed the injustices on a daily basis. My colleagues and I have suffered abuse, wage theft, harassment and retaliation.

One of the programs that we want to highlight is CWAP, which has helped workers living in the shadows with resources, as we work in community. We are essential by putting food on the tables, and many workers do not have enough to feed their families.

Unemployment benefits are not enough to replace the wages that we are not getting. And we deserve protections that are given from the organizations and hope that you're able to help us defend the human rights of the people that are working. Thank you.

Buenostardes minimpresor Antonio ibango Del Conda De Fresno. Ibango De todo. Pero De losia Los travadores El Campo cistan muriendo Del Valajadore Casia.

Good afternoon North Antonio and I come from the from Fresno county with Ms. Naomi and I know that we have spoken about a lot of things today, but what we have not spoken about is the fact that our farm workers are passing away because of valley fever.

And I know we've talked about a lot of issues, but that's an issue we have not covered today. Unfortunately, they give it all for their work, but work is killing them. There are many workers who have valley fever. Thank you.

Buenostard minambresa dubie Santonio Bengal De Fresno, California, Los Angeles. Ola tabla De trenta quatro no pasa inos Para Sakar La Dinero, Parano Karia De Gurdo Contratistas or rancheros. Canos. Gracias.

Good afternoon. My name is Edujes Antonio and I come from Fresno, California. And one of the things that I want to mention is that every year we don't get an increase to the bucket of garlic or table grape. It doesn't go over $0.34 and we have to hustle to be able to earn our money.

And I wish that you could get together or have good communication with the contractors so that we can have a more fair wage or earnings.

Minambre sotilio Tigosa Yevo. This is immediate Sigos Antonces petition esport bibido incarnate hosticia el Robo De Salario Las Elawa kenos potabel paraver banosusios and tonsis eloquemos. Espero este kenostroviamos escuchados Otilia Ortegosa.

My name is Otilia Ortigosa and I have been working in the fields for 16 years and I come here from the community of Fresno to be heard, just like my colleagues who have spoken, because we want our workplace to be secure so that we can keep laboring, so that we can keep working to take money home to our families.

So my petition is because I have lived in the flesh the injustice of salaries and the water, which is not potable. We can't drink it. Dirty restrooms. This is what we are asking for. I hope that our travel here, we are heard.

Hello, my name is Jessica. I'm here with central Vinaciona. I work with them in Salinas in Monterey County. Though I'm thankful that our farm workers have been given the space to share their experiences and concerns.

As someone who has experienced firsthand and who gets to hear the violations of farm workers right, I hope we can work towards real consequences for these employers that actually deter them from continuing these violations as long as all they receive is the equivalent of a slap on the wrist, if that these violations will continue.

I am hopeful that this hearing is the first step towards real justice and protection for our farm worker community. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Kevin Insco. I'm with the Friends Committee on Legislation of California, which was founded by Quakers in 1952. We urge the committee to support the recommendations and solutions you've heard today to improve health and safety conditions and the process of filing complaints such as expert navigators.

And we support an Unemployment Insurance Program for all farm workers, a safety net for all. Thank you.

Hello. My name is Gabriel Afasio and I'm here today representing Sierra Club California. We stand in solidarity with farm workers today and recognize the incredible efforts they had to show up to this hearing hours away from their home to represent their frontline communities.

It is a priority to Sierra Club to support an equitable food system that provides safe working conditions, climate resilience, and linguistic and cultural accessibility to workers.

With that said, Sierra Club California endorses and urges you to support the solutions recommended here by workers advocates and researchers to significantly expand Cal/OSHA's capacity for staff recruitment so that Cal/OSHA can better serve and ensure farm workers' rights to safe and healthy working conditions.

And the call for a publicly funded expert navigators program at community based farmworker organizations to help farmworkers file workplace safety complaints. Furthermore, Madam Chair, I appreciate you for leading this hearing and for sharing the emotions you feel hearing testimonies today.

I just want to remind you that the data, information you are looking for is right here. This room is filled with lives and live experiences as the realest proof of the information that you need.

So I just encourage you to really think about using the available resources, power and dedication you have to take in the real solutions to these issues that workers and advocates have worked so hard to develop and bring to you here today. Thank you.

Good afternoon. First of all, I want to go ahead and say, my name is Yanneli Martinez. I am a community organizer in the Monterey Bay region with Safe Ag Safe Schools. And everybody talks about all the different wars happening all over the world, right?

But nobody really talks about what's happening here in our communities, our communities of colors, where we have our farm workers that are not only working these excess amount of hours out in the fields, horrible pay, horrible working conditions, but at the same time they're being poisoned.

They're being poisoned by pesticides, pesticides that were created by Nazis during the war era that are not allowed anymore in the war but are being currently used out in our fields.

And for me, that is shameful that California is still doing that. And I really want to thank you, Chair Ortega, for making sure that we hold these different agencies accountable, like Cal/OSHA, like DPR.

We need to do better for our farm workers because if it isn't for them, we wouldn't be able to put food on our table. So thank you very much for your time.

Hello. Thank you for having us. My name is Michelle Pereira Ryan, and I'm a nurse practitioner and with the California Nurses for Environmental Health and Justice. And I have cared for at least 25 years for farm workers and cannery workers in our valley.

And these are not new. I guess that's the biggest thing that this has been happening for years and years, and yet we're just making movement on it. That's the part that is not okay.

And so I want to still keep accountability for what people are saying they're going to do because we've heard these stories over and over again. And I just want us to know that in the climate change that is happening right now, these are only going to get worse for farm workers.

I mean, we're seeing smoke and we're allowing the farmers to only provide masks or proper PPE when it's 150 to 500.

We wouldn't allow anybody, but we're allowing them to work and work hard and they don't have to have masks in the heat. We're looking at illnesses that are acute, but there's chronic illness of kidney failure that's happening with our farm workers now, and so we need to protect them and offer the proper PPE that's happening at this point in time.

And the same with Valley fever. We know the spores are going to be higher this year because when there's been rain after drought, spores increase.

And we are not providing the proper PPE for our farm workers and protecting them from the illnesses that are specially to the work that they're doing. And yet they are essential workers who provide the food that we eat every day. Thank you.

Buenos Aires. Minonres Oralia ceramendes travahado Campo De Series cuchados esperamosque estes repeata paracepodamos proposals quesan poriendo despuendo De nemos estado collaborando ecomos siendado propuestas proquestas noemos visto dentro De La Sagencias, Ketanganta De Aser cambios nontunces esueno revisar paraver De La.

Good afternoon. Oralia Macedomendes and I work for centro bi national parel De Saro Nicana, and I really want to appreciate the opportunity to have heard our farm workers today.

And we hope that this is one of the first hearings and hopefully we can repeat so that we can hear some of the proposals that the government agencies have in terms of the advances that will be occurring after what we have heard.

We have to recognize that we have been in collaboration and in previous meetings that we have been in, we have exposed proposals, proposals which we have not seen within the agencies that have, that will to make changes.

So it is good to go back and revise to see what regulations are within the agency that are not working, that are not functioning, so that we can come back to the community with the resources that the state has.

We have also worked with the Labor Commissioner, as we have mentioned. We need to keep recreating those models so that we can continue working with our farm workers.

Minambres Carmela Garcia. Yo benguaqui gracia pros cuciano De bebervinerki lejo. Yes. Parami mucca, osanimaro and beniro familia, pero LA Verda is to beam masjante grass.

Good day. I come here so that you could listen to us. I left my small young baby at home because I feel like there is a need. I have been working in the fields. I live in Fresno and I'm not sure if she said two or 12 years.

So I'll have to reconcile that. 12 years and oftentimes we are female and when we work in the fields we have to walk a long distance to get to the restrooms.

And I just have to say that there are many families that would have liked to have been here, but because of the distance they're not here. But if this hearing was to be held in Fresno, I think a lot more families would be showing up.

Buenosardes Mayamo Vanessa Terran, soy directora De politicas and organization precto mistake Condijena Prefecto miste conditions La unica organization De Cades Clusia mente bordaLa, necessitas onicas De Los imigrantes and dijanasina De La Costa Central De California IO fresco nasra Solutions Juvenile SoLano, Director De organisando comonida una keremos correspondientes Tome response BioLaciones Laboris Castano, Coriando, Diara mente Los Campos AgricoLa and El Venteventite AgricoLas per Dixon La Vida Del condo Santa Barbara porno contarconeliento De Guado and Como manipoLar Las maciinarias inopo demos camos Como proverponostras familias dos Como estado mental resto De La nacion De Vemos program astal Financiado confondos publicos paracrealo que yamamosaqui navigadores expertos El Campo nostros campeSinos Para Apoyaros La Segrida IlbiecoLa iporulti Motanamos Casamolo Mencinamo soy La sage Laborales estatales nobrindan informacion solo derechos De La Sino ketamines temperas personnel cultural elinguistic amenta propialos. Gracias.

Good afternoon. I work with politics, with Mistecoindijena and we are the only organization that is exclusively working with our indigenous communities in the region from the Central Coast throughout California.

And today I am bringing some solutions from our colleague Terrano. One, we want the corresponding agencies to take responsibility on the different violations that are occurring out in the agricultural fields.

In 2023, two Ag workers lost their life in the County of Santa Barbara because they didn't count with the appropriate training on how to be able to work with the machinery and we cannot accept another death happening while they are trying to provide for their families.

Two, they feed the rest of the nation. So, we need to make sure that we are funding a publicly funded opportunity with Cal/OSHA with experts out in the fields that can represent our campesinos, our farm workers, so that we can bite with the needs of our agricultural workers.

And last but not least, as we had mentioned, we need to make sure that our state and federal agencies are not only taking into account the needs, but that they are also prepared to meet the linguistic and appropriate needs of the farm worker community.

Good afternoon. Frayina Guillera with UFCW. I just want to mention this. During 2003 to 2007, I was helping workers from dairy workers on the Tulare County and Kings County, and I was able to file wage theft claims with every Commissioner at the Bakersfield's office.

In some of these cases, the employers, with their dirty attorneys, ended up bringing ICE to pick up the workers from the Bakersfield Labor Commissioner's office. And I wasn't able to present their case because they were taken away from at that office.

So to me you're talking about retaliation. When I got a few workers that are ready to present their case, that their employees are stealing their money, but the employer is using these dirty tools to bring the ICE, the migra, they call it, and take the workers away without presenting the case.

I think that's unfair and it's making the other workers afraid of filing their cases. Thank you.

Got it. Thank you.

Hi. Thank you so much. My name is Asha Sharma. I'm the organizing co Director with Pesticide Action Network, and we're Members of the California Farmworker Advocacy Working group, many of which spoke on the panel today.

I just want to take the time to thank you so much, Chair Ortega, for offering this space where farm workers can come and share direct with you their testimony.

It's very difficult to make it happen in policy spaces and really appreciate the effort that you put in to make this happen and the effort that all the farm workers put in to travel here today, which also is not easy. And I just want to uplift the two solutions that you've heard today.

Number one, we really urgently need to revisit the hiring requirements at Cal/OSHA so that they can hire culturally competent staff and fill those tremendous vacancy rates, and that there aren't barriers, especially educationally, to doing that.

And that we're recruiting people who have direct experience working with farm workers and other impacted communities. In the meantime, given the urgency, we really need investments in community based organizations who can emulate the program that you heard about at CRLA, Inc. So really encourage further conversations on that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Buena Laura Venito Ibango Del Condalo De Madeira, California Ibango exponent.

Good afternoon. My name is Laura Benito, and I come from the Madeira, California, from Madeira County, and I come to expose my experience as a farm worker. Thanks to the Environmental Justice Network, I have been able to receive support. I had an issue at the work site.

I had an injury in the month of September, and it was thanks to Rocio Madrigal that I have been able to have support or guidance because I wasn't receiving any medication due to my illness.

And until now, it is that they are showing some concern for my person. I come here in representation of all of my colleagues because they have never had the courage to expose these type of cases. Thank you.

Thank you. That concludes our public comment, much as graciasio. Keanu Chopara testimonial oi les Quero De La. Gracias. Esto comiti. Thank you all for being here, especially for those who traveled very far.

I know that it's a huge sacrifice to come and testify in a hearing room here in Sacramento, and I really appreciate everyone's testimony, as well as the agencies that we're here to represent. I am committed to working long term on this issue.

We clearly have a lot of work to do and a lot of accountability that needs to happen, not just to those agencies, but to ourselves. So I ask that you also hold me accountable, and thank you again for being here much. And gracias, atolos. With that, we conclude this hearing. It.