FRESNO BEE

January 19, 2008

Valley labor contractor fined

State acts after the death of farmworker in Fresno Co.; company disputes findings.

By Dennis Pollock / The Fresno Bee

A Kingsburg-based farm labor contractor has been fined nearly $26,000 in connection with the death of farmworker Eladio Hernandez.

Hernandez died while working in a Fresno County orchard May 9.

YNT Harvesting is appealing and disputing findings made by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, said Yolanda Calvillo, who owns the company with Kenneth Anthony Duerksen.

The death pinpoints the need for better enforcement of state laws to prevent fatalities tied to heat stress, said Armando Elenes, a United Farm Workers organizer, and Silas Shawver, a lawyer with California Rural Legal Assistance in Fresno.

Hernandez, 54, died from cardiac arrhythmia while working in a peach orchard in the Kettleman Hills area. The state agency fined YNT for not providing employees with written emergency procedures, for not making sure Hernandez was acclimatized to temperatures in the mid-90s that day and for not providing the crew boss with equipment needed to summon medical help to the remote orchard.

Calvillo said her company has documents showing that training is given routinely on first aid, cardiopulmonary resuscitation and identifying and treating heat stress.

She said there was no phone service at the orchard. "What can we do? We had to drive to an area where there was phone service."

On the matter of not acclimatizing workers -- monitoring them and making sure they are handling the season's first high temperatures -- Calvillo said, "Nobody does that in agriculture."

At a news conference Friday, Elenes said the facts surrounding the death "show a blatant disregard for laws that are there to protect the farmworker."

Shawver said the death "demonstrates the reality of people working in dangerous conditions and employers not following the law. ... There need to be serious consequences for that."

By phone, an adult daughter of Hernandez, Yolanda Hernandez of Delaware, talked of traveling out to the orchard and learning it was chiefly other employees who tried to help her father.

"What the employer failed to do is an injustice," she said.