They pick your fruit and veggies, but NJ doesn’t protect farm workers from rising heat

Beyond the high-rises of New Jersey’s cities and the sprawling suburbs that make it the most densely populated state in the U.S., large swaths of the Garden State are dedicated to agriculture.

Yet there are no heat-specific federal or state laws regulating conditions for the roughly 25,000 farmworkers in New Jersey — even as state environmental experts expect the number of heat-related deaths to double over the next three decades. This year is on track to be the world’s hottest on record and climate experts agree scorching summers will only get worse.

New Jersey’s $1 billion farming industry depends on seasonal and migrant workers during the hottest months of the year. But unlike a handful of other states, New Jersey doesn’t have requirements for employers to provide paid breaks and access to shade during excessively hot days — or any proposed legislation to do so. The Biden administration in 2021 began developing a federal heat safety standard that could ultimately limit working hours or mandate breaks when temperatures climb beyond a specific threshold, but that process generally takes seven years.

Until that happens, labor organizers have limited tools to leverage local change.

Farmworkers are excluded from some of the most basic labor protections nationally, such as the right to unionize. Unlike New York, New Jersey does not extend bargaining protections to farm workers, making it harder to organize a socially isolated, transient workforce that doesn’t always speak English and generally cannot vote in the state.

But as New Jersey’s annual average temperatures rise even faster than the global average, there’s renewed urgency to prevent heat-related illnesses and deaths.

“People are going to have more and more issues from heat because we need to eat. We need to grow food,” said Dr. Lori Talbot, who recently retired after providing health…