In April, members of the Columbia Gorge Fruit Growers Association gave testimony at a Wasco County Commissioners meeting over potential rule changes to Oregon’s agricultural labor housing standards. The growers claim many of the changes are too costly to implement and unrelated to health and safety. Columbia Gorge News recently reported on the meeting amid the yearslong effort by the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division to update agricultural labor housing rules, some of which haven’t changed in nearly four decades.
Also in April, a coalition of labor unions, racial justice and farmworker advocacy groups sent a letter to Gov. Tina Kotek and the Oregon OSHA administrator expressing their disappointment in what they characterized as a “lack of priority” given to improving the “alarmingly outdated” labor housing standards. Aileen Hymas, a freelance journalist based in Southern Oregon, joins us to share more.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. For six years now, Oregon OSHA ‒ that’s the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Division ‒ has been considering rule changes for agricultural labor housing. Farm workers say that the current housing is inadequate, outdated and unsafe. Farm owners say that some of the rule changes being considered are unnecessary and so expensive that they threaten to upend the entire system. Aileen Hymas is a freelance journalist based in Southern Oregon. She reported on this recently for Columbia Gorge News and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Aileen Hymas: Thanks for having me, David.
Miller: Can you explain the basics first? What’s the purpose of this housing? And how does it work?
Hymas: Yeah. So this housing is free for farm workers who spend the growing season traveling between farms for work. Many of them come here from other countries using the H-2A visa, and these workers might not otherwise be able to find or afford housing while they’re staying for such a short time, especially in Oregon where rent prices are so high. Farm workers in Oregon make an average of $20,000 to $24,000 a year. So, this housing is on the farms and it’s typically near the fields or orchards where the farmer is working. It’s exempt from regular building codes and size requirements, and instead all those requirements come from OSHA, which has been working on overhauling these rules since 2018.
Miller: These are statewide rules, but they’re going to have by far the biggest impact on the Gorge, given that two thirds of Oregon’s registered agricultural labor housing is in Wasco or Hood River counties. But there are farms, people are growing stuff all over the state, why is that so much concentrated in this one area?
Hymas: Yeah, Wasco and Hood River County ‒ the whole Gorge area ‒ is known for fruit. And most fruit crops, you can’t harvest them with machines. So if you imagine a sweet cherry, they’re in the stores everywhere right now. If you imagine, then, they’re fairly delicate and they have to be picked by hand and with a really tight harvest window. So by providing housing, growers are securing their workforce to be available right when they’re needed, right when those cherries are ready.
Miller: You’ve reported Oregon farmers have been in talks with OSHA over this on-farm housing for six years now. Why has this been going on for so long?
Hymas: That’s a really good question. So I reached out to OSHA to find out where they’re in the process, and Public Information Officer Aaron Corvin told me in an email that they didn’t make a deadline on purpose in order to do what he called a comprehensive review of the existing rules. So they’re going over everything that’s in OSHA’s rules right now. And part of that process is that advisory committee. So they met with farm worker advocates and with growers and had a series of meetings starting in November 2018. And when we look at those meeting minutes on OSHA’s websites, we see that they took a long time to get through those and part of that is that they’re going back and forth. There’s some contention. In 2022, OSHA actually split and met separately with the growers and with the farm worker advocates. So we’re really not sure when… OSHA is going to publish a draft of these rules and then there will be a public comment period, but we’re not really sure when that process will happen.
Miller: This is a whole complex thing where there aren’t even officially proposed rules yet.
Hymas: Exactly. You’re right. This is preliminary language. And they wrapped up those advisory committee meetings in April. So now we’re just in this limbo period.
Miller: What have you heard about the current state of this housing from workers?
Hymas: So I talked to an advocate, Sam Mario, who was born in farm worker housing and lived his whole life in Hood River County, and he told me that he really wouldn’t want to live with his wife and two year old daughter in the farm worker housing that he’s seen. Back in March, the Columbia Fruit Growers Association hosted three tours of on-farm housing, and Mario told me he saw things that concerned him. For example, on a tour of a farm that houses 60 people at its peak, the group came upon a single washer and dryer. And when Mario pointed this out, the tour guide told him that it was too expensive to add plumbing for another washer and dryer. He also said that he was alarmed at another site when he saw a mixed-gender showering area that had only plastic shower curtains.
Miller: Oregon Housing and Community Services, the agency, did a study of farm worker housing last year. What did the agency find?
Hymas: Yeah. So this document is super fascinating and super helpful. I would recommend anyone who’s interested in this subject to go to the Oregon Housing and Community Services website and look at this farm worker study. It provides really comprehensive information. But they did a survey of 80 farm workers across Oregon, and they found that 83% said they didn’t have enough privacy, 65% said they didn’t have enough heat, 64% described cracked. peeling or chipped paint, 59% lived with mold.
Miller: What are the specific changes that Oregon OSHA is considering?
Hymas: These are really wide. We talked about comprehensive role changes, a wide variety of things that you would look around and see when you’re in a house. So one big umbrella is more fixtures available to the people [such as] sinks, toilets, kitchen burners, separate areas for laundering clothes that have come in contact with pesticides versus regular clothes, having outlets and sleeping areas where each person in the room can plug in their phone. But probably the biggest potential change is an update to a 1989 size requirement for sleeping areas. That requirement is what most of the current housing is based on and that’s 40 square feet per person. So the potential change is to be 100 square feet per person and that matches regular building code.
Miller: Which of these changes are farmers on board with?
Hymas: The growers say they support requirements like air conditioning units, water testing, smoke alarms, things which in their view are focused exclusively on safety.
Miller: And then which ones are they pushing back against?
Hymas: Where they take issue is changes which they say are more focused on comfort and convenience? So they push back against rules that would require larger renovation projects like additional plumbing or new buildings to meet that size requirement. And what they’re saying is that they just can’t afford it. The costs of doing these kinds of remodels are going to put them out of business. For example, one farmer named Dave Meyer in the Dalles testified in Wasco County Commissioners’ meeting that his housing will go down by 75% is what he said. And he illustrated that by saying that one of his rooms where he currently bunks four people would go down to one person. And if he can’t house the same number of people as in previous years, he’s going to go out of business. The really crux of the growers’ argument is that they’d love to provide bigger rooms and more fixtures, but they say they can’t afford it as an industry producing commodities with a fixed price.
Miller: How have farm workers or their advocates responded to this idea about what’s a mere convenience and what’s a necessity?
Hymas: So, it’s interesting that you say what do farm workers say about that? It’s a really tricky point here. I talked to Ubaldo Hernández who runs Comunidades, which is a social justice and environmental justice organization in Hood River. I asked him that exact question, which of these preliminary rules he thought farm workers would be willing to negotiate on. And he said the workers themselves will always defer, saying they’d rather have a job than more kitchen burners and more square footage. But to understand what’s safe and healthy for farm workers, you have to look at their lived experience, he said. He described how workers coming on H-2A visas don’t have their own transportation, so they bus to the grocery store and then they all come back and often have to wait hours to cook. There was also a coalition of farmworker advocates who wrote to the governor’s office and the OSHA administrator, and they said that the potential rules don’t go far enough to provide a dignified quality of life. And they asked for the rules to reflect the quality of housing such that anyone would want to live there.
Miller: One of the new things in your reporting is that you pointed out that state lawmakers budgeted $5 million for agricultural workforce housing grants for the kinds of things to fix the exact things we’re talking about here. There’s also federal tax credit programs. But how much of this state or federal money is actually going to Oregon farmers to improve this housing?
Hymas: Exactly. Well, when I reached out to the Oregon Department of Agriculture, they told me they haven’t been able to move forward with distributing any of that $5 million until these new OSHA rules are codified. So the only money we’ve seen to get to growers for housing is $1.6 million in the Agricultural Workforce Housing Tax Credit through Oregon housing and Community Services. And this year that whole fund went to 11 farms in Wasco and head River County for projects ranging about $100,000 to $200,000.
Miller: What are the roadblocks?
Hymas: The biggest roadblock seems to be the amount of funding. Construction costs have only gotten more expensive since this rulemaking process started in 2018 and $5 million won’t go very far between all the farms that will need it.
Miller: Meanwhile, in the minute we have left, the governor is now involved in this. Has her office given any indication what she might push for?
Hymas: I reached out to the governor’s office a bunch of times and I didn’t get a response, but I did talk to Wasco County Commissioner Stephen Kramer who had told the growers that he would go to the governor on their behalf, and he told me that he tried to reach out to her through the channels made available to the commissioners, but they didn’t connect either. So between him and the letter from the advocates pushing the governor to intervene, it seems like everybody is waiting on Kotek, but it’s unclear exactly how or what she would do.
Miller: Aileen, thanks very much.
Aileen Hymas: Thank you.
Miller: Aileen Hymas is a freelance journalist based in southern Oregon. She reported recently for Columbia Gorge News on the long process to potentially change rules for farm worker housing in Oregon.
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