California has sharply cut its enforcement of heat-protection laws for outdoor laborers while extreme heat has intensified in recent years — endangering farmworkers, construction workers and others who toil in scorching temperatures — an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and Capital & Main has found.

From 2017 to 2023, the number of field inspections conducted by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, known as Cal/OSHA, dropped by nearly 30%, according to agency data. The number of violations issued to employers in that period fell by more than 40%.

Worker advocates say the numbers show a failure to adequately enforce California’s landmark outdoor heat-illness law, which was enacted nearly two decades ago after several farmworkers died in San Joaquin Valley fields. The law requires protections such as providing break areas with shade and “pure, suitably cool” water as “close as practicable” to workers when temperatures exceed 80 degrees.

“We just need Cal/OSHA to be out there more often and do more inspections that hopefully will save farmworker lives,” said Ephraim Camacho, a community worker for California Rural Legal Assistance who visits fields in the San Joaquin Valley and helps workers file complaints. “We are constantly getting calls from workers complaining, specifically, about the lack of shade and drinking water.”

In a statement, Cal/OSHA said that its 2023 inspection numbers were an increase over 2021. But the number of inspections in 2023 also dropped by 15% from the year before, according to the data. The agency said it is improving training and investing in automation.

“The department will continue to ramp up these efforts as we aggressively work to increase hiring,” Cal/OSHA said. The agency said it’s creating a new agricultural unit that will operate in cities including Lodi, Salinas, El Centro and Fresno and “significantly expand enforcement.”

With peak temperatures increasingly topping 105 degrees in July and August through much of California’s agricultural heartland, the state has experienced its six warmest years on record since 2014, climate assessments by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show. At least 17 workers have died in heat-related incidents since 2014, according to Cal/OSHA.

The Legislature is considering a bill by Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose), a former farmworker, that would promote compliance with the state’s outdoor heat regulations and ensure that workers are compensated and receive medical treatment if they suffer heat-related injuries while working for an employer who had failed to comply with the law. In cases where the farmworkers died, their families would be compensated.

For years, Cal/OSHA has struggled with staffing shortages that critics say have compromised worker safety. As of June 30, the most recent figures available, the agency had a vacancy rate of 37%, or 141 unfilled positions, in its enforcement bureau, which oversees workplace inspections. Earlier this year, lawmakers criticized Cal/OSHA for multiple oversight breakdowns during an Assembly hearing in which farmworkers and their supporters accused the agency of failing repeatedly to enforce workplace protection laws.

Capital & Main — an investigative journalism organization — interviewed more than 40 farmworkers across California in recent months. Workers said they often toil without shade and sometimes without water provided by employers. On other occasions, according to workers, there is not enough shade for all employees, and break areas and water may be hundreds of yards away in sprawling fields, making them impractical to reach during afternoon breaks that often last just 10 minutes.

“All that matters is production,” agricultural worker Nazario Sarmiento, 37, said in Spanish. He added that for years he has picked lemons, oranges and grapefruit in San Joaquin Valley orchards without shade and at times with no water provided by employers.

A reporter surveyed agricultural fields in seven California counties this spring and summer and saw workers laboring without shade, including in a grape field on a 108-degree day in Kern County, in citrus orchards on a 99-degree day in Tulare County, in a pepper field on a 91-degree day in San Benito County and in tomato fields on an 89-degree day in Contra Costa County.

In interviews, worker advocates said they have also visited fields that lacked shade, or where water and shade were located hundreds of yards away.

“I won’t say it’s every farm. … But I will say that there is negligence when it comes to protecting the workers, whether they’re hired directly by the farm or they’re hired through a contractor that the farm hires,” said Marivel Mendoza, executive director of Hijas del Campo, which hands out food, water and protective equipment to workers in the fields of Contra Costa and San Joaquin counties.

Workers said they do not complain or file complaints for fear of being targeted by supervisors. “They will say you’re not doing your work and fire you,” a 36-year-old strawberry picker in the Santa Maria Valley said in Spanish.

Since May, the California Department of Industrial Relations, which oversees Cal/OSHA, has refused multiple requests from Capital & Main for detailed breakdowns on outdoor heat-safety inspections, including enforcement actions by industry and region, claiming the records cannot be disclosed due to “privilege.”

A farmworker holds a water bottle containing a chunk of ice while working in a peach orchard in August 2023.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

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Still, the data in the agency’s 2023 annual report show a steady decline in the overall number of enforcement actions during the six-year period.

In 2017, Cal/OSHA inspectors conducted 4,150 outdoor heat-safety inspections and cited employers for 1,996 violations. In 2023, the agency recorded 2,929 inspections and 1,130 violations.

The report noted the importance of outreach efforts to increase awareness about heat-illness prevention regulations and safety measures. Outreach includes educational materials for employers and workers and communications to vulnerable communities. Yet between 2017 and 2023, the number of outreach efforts dropped by 83%, from 1,805 to 308, the report shows.

In 2005, California became the first state in the nation to enact outdoor heat safety regulations.

The outdoor heat law applies to the agricultural, construction, landscaping and oil and gas extraction industries, as well as to certain transportation activities. Employers are required to provide heat illness training and have a written safety plan in English and the language understood by a majority of their workers.

For farmworkers, employers are required to take additional “high-heat” measures when temperatures reach 95 degrees. These include 10-minute “cool down” breaks every two hours and additional breaks while working overtime.

A recent study by the UC Merced Community and Labor Center estimated that 59% of agricultural workers in California were not citizens, the highest percentage of any industry in the state. Many of those farmworkers face language, technological or other barriers to filing complaints, while others are hesitant to speak out because of their immigration status, according to worker advocates. These barriers, advocates say, make it especially critical that Cal/OSHA ramp up enforcement operations.

“These are long-standing issues that have been ignored for far too long,” said Irene De Barraicua, director of policy and communications for Líderes Campesinas, a statewide organization that advocates for women who work in the fields and their families. She said Cal/OSHA needs to leverage its limited resources by partnering with community-based organizations that have the trust of workers and can help conduct outreach.

“If you don’t have these inspectors, or it’s not happening quick enough,” she said, “then there should be more of an official collaboration with community-based organizations that are out there on the ground.”

This story was produced in partnership with Capital & Main, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Vice President Kamala Harris could be “playing politics” by allowing her subordinates to take the lead on her making major policy shifts, rather than pushing them herself, a Republican strategist says.

Unnamed officials for Harris have announced her flip-flopping on key issues that she previously supported during her 2019 presidential run, such as fracking and “Medicare for All,” but Harris herself is yet to be vocal about the position shifts.

While the Harris campaign appears to be pushing a reworked agenda, one political strategist told Fox News Digital that “anonymous on background campaign staffers do not take public policy positions, candidates and elected officials do.”

“The American public should presume that every position taken by Harris during her previous campaign for president and the positions taken by the Biden-Harris administration are exactly hers today, until she herself explains otherwise,” Dallas Woodhouse, American Majority-North Carolina State Director, told Fox. 

KAMALA HARRIS, TIME COVER GIRL: IS HER SURGE AGAINST TRUMP FUELED BY AN ENDLESS MEDIA HONEYMOON?

“The American public will never accept a candidate changing all their stated positions from just a few years ago without thorough examination and explanation,” he added.

Fracking

Harris said that she would ban fracking if elected during her first presidential bid – a key issue among a critical voting bloc in battleground states such as Pennsylvania.

“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, I have a history of working on this issue,” Harris said in 2020.

Republicans, including former President Trump, have used her past comments on the issue to blast her in several campaign ads since she launched her 2024 campaign.

Campaign officials for the Democratic nominee are now saying that Harris will not ban fracking if she’s elected president.

Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz appear on stage together during a campaign event at the Liacouras Center at Temple University on August 6, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  (Andrew Harnik)

“Medicare for All”

Harris published her plan for “Medicare for All” during her 2019 presidential campaign, writing that her goal was to “end these senseless attacks on Obamacare” and that she believes “health care should be a right, not a privilege only for those who can afford it. It’s why we need Medicare for All.”

“The idea is that everyone gets access to medical care. And you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork all of the delay that may require. Let’s eliminate that,” Harris wrote in 2019.

Additionally, then-Senator Harris cosponsored Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Medicare for All Act of 2019.

Despite her past support, a campaign official told Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy that Harris will not push the subject of “Medicare-for-all” this cycle.

AMERICANS CRITICIZE KAMALA HARRIS’ ‘COWARDLY’ AVOIDANCE OF PRESS AS CANDIDATE

Colin Reed, Republican strategist, former campaign manager, and co-founder of South and Hill Strategies, told Fox News Digital that Harris’ shift appears difficult to believe.

WAYNE, MICHIGAN – AUGUST 08: Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at United Auto Workers Local 900 on August 8, 2024 in Wayne, Michigan.  (Andrew Harnik)

“When Vice President Harris ran for the White House five years ago, she was a sitting U.S. Senator and the former attorney general of the largest state in the nation. In other words, an extremely accomplished individual with plenty of time on the national stage to form opinions on the big issues,” Reed told Fox. “The idea that she could over the span of five changes, just change her tune on a dime on a slew of major big ticket items strains credulity,”

Reed highlighted her shift on “Medicare For All,” which he says “would cost $44 trillion dollars – more than our entire $35 trillion dollar national debt.”

“Either she was wrong then or is playing politics now, and voters will figure it out whenever she decides to answer questions in an unscripted setting,” Reed said.

The suggested position shift comes amid Republicans using her past stances on issues, such as fracking, against her 2024 presidential campaign.

Fox News Digital asked the Harris campaign if she will be personall announcing her new stance on the key issues.

The way former President Trump tells it, the United States is a “crime-ridden mess” with “the worst border in the history of the world,” simultaneously headed for the next Great Depression and World War III.

Also according to Trump, electing him to a second term will change all of that almost immediately. Foreign wars will abruptly end as millions of undocumented immigrants are deported. The U.S. will “DRILL, BABY, DRILL!” and the associated revenue will “rapidly” transform a weak U.S. economy into one where “incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before.”

Trump’s critics say that’s all bluster. They say he’s a showman who speaks in lofty, populist rhetoric, but whose policies portend the opposite of his promises. Rather than America’s savior, they say, he would be its destroyer.

They note Trump has admitted he would act like a “dictator” on “Day One,” and warn that multiple conservative playbooks for his next term — including Project 2025 and Trump’s own Agenda 47 — suggest a full-scale adoption of authoritarianism.

They believe Trump would dismantle social safety nets for the poor and middle class, illegally discriminate against vulnerable groups such as LGBTQ+ people, and reduce the rights of women, including to reproductive healthcare. Empowered by a recent Supreme Court ruling granting presidents sweeping immunity, they fear, the twice-impeached, criminally convicted former president who helped incite an insurrection the last time he lost an election would be unleashed — and unhinged — if he wins.

The one thing Trump loyalists and critics agree on is that the candidate has said quite a lot about what he plans to do. How they feel about him often comes down to how they feel about those promises — many lofty, vague or legally dubious — and whether they take him at his word or believe he’s lying.

On immigration

Trump has been heavily focused on immigration, claiming an “invasion” of murderers, terrorists, “insane asylum” patients and fentanyl-smuggling gang members along the Mexico border.

Trump has said he will “seal the border” with a physical wall, finishing a job he prioritized during his first term, and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” He has promised to punish so-called sanctuary cities that don’t coordinate with federal immigration enforcement and to deport immigrants without considering asylum claims.

Trump has said he will order his military to attack foreign drug cartels, and seek the death penalty for “drug dealers, kingpins and human traffickers.” He has also said that on his first day in office, he will issue an executive order doing away with birthright citizenship — contradicting long-established constitutional precedent by simply declaring that the “correct interpretation” of the law is that U.S. citizenship is not granted to everyone born on U.S. soil.

Chris Zepeda-Millán, an associate professor of public policy, Chicana/o studies and political science at UCLA, is co-author of “Walls, Cages, and Family Separation: Race and Immigration Policy in the Trump Era.”

His research has found most Americans did not support Trump’s first-term immigration policies, especially those that separated kids from their families, and do not believe a border wall would be effective. Zepeda-Millán said those who supported Trump’s policies — sometimes despite believing them to be ineffective — also held the “most racist views,” including general discomfort with growing Latino populations.

Trump’s hyper focus on immigrants today is an “anti-Latino symbolic action” aimed at those same people, Zepeda-Millán said — his way of “doubling down on getting the most racist white Americans out to vote.” Trump leads Vice President Kamala Harris in recent polls on who would handle immigration better, including 51% to 46% in a New York Times/Siena College poll of key swing states.

Trump can be counted on to continue using racism to win political points, Zepeda-Millán said, but he doubts Trump will actually try to deport millions of people, many of whom would be farmworkers. “Everyone knows — including Trump — that significant parts of our economy are completely dependent on not only immigrants, but undocumented immigrants,” he said.

On abortion

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he campaigned on overturning the federal right to an abortion under Roe vs. Wade. As president, Trump appointed three of the six conservative Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe in 2022, ushering in a wave of state abortion restrictions and bans.

Reproductive healthcare advocates have blamed Trump for decimating those rights, which most Americans support, and Harris has campaigned on restoring them.

In response, Trump has tried to walk a fine line on the issue, in part by dodging questions or answering them vaguely. He has taken credit for dismantling Roe and returning the power to restrict abortion to individual states, but resisted calls for a nationwide abortion ban. He has said he personally supports exceptions for abortion in cases of rape and incest and when a woman’s life is in danger, but also left the door open to further restrictions on commonly used abortion pills.

Arneta Rogers, executive director at the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at Berkeley Law School, said Trump paved the way for extreme antiabortion laws that are disproportionately harming people living “on the margins” — including people of color and the young, poor and queer — and should be made to own that legacy, because “the stakes couldn’t be higher.”

“When people show you who they are, you have to believe them,” Rogers said.

On the economy

Trump has promised to stop taxing Social Security income for seniors, and to stop taxing tips received by service workers. Both promises would cost the government billions, though the exact price tag is unknowable without more specifics. Harris has also pledged to work to end federal tax on tips.

Trump has said he would pay for his agenda by increasing domestic energy production through drilling and driving down fuel costs, by striking better trade deals with foreign countries and implementing tariffs on those that don’t fall in line, and by eliminating waste in the federal bureaucracy.

Blaming inflation in part on “unnecessary spending” by President Biden, Trump has said he would use a special “impoundment” authority — which presidents do not legally have — to withhold “large chunks” of each federal agency’s budget, regardless of how Congress allocated the funding. He has promised to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.

Susan Minato, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, a union representing service workers across Southern California and Arizona, called Trump’s promise to end taxes on tips a “red herring” that workers recognize as a distraction from his long record of attacking union labor and the Affordable Care Act, which provides many wage earners with vital healthcare.

“Our members see straight through it,” she said — and are spreading out across Arizona, a key swing state, to knock on doors and talk to working voters about Harris being a better option for the working class.

On the climate

Trump has promised to dismantle environmental programs and increase drilling for oil and gas.

Trump has ridiculed wind power as “weak” and electric vehicles as too expensive, and suggested a turn back to fossil fuels will rapidly reduce energy costs. He has promised to withdraw funding from clean energy initiatives under the so-called Green New Deal, ridiculing it as the “Green New Hoax.”

Project 2025 has rejected the threat of global warming outright, calling for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service, to be dismantled as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

On Ukraine and Gaza

During his speech at the Republican convention last month, Trump said, “I don’t have wars,” that he “could stop wars with just a telephone call,” and that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza never would have started were he president.

The U.S. was at war in Afghanistan when Trump was president.

After a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last month, Trump said he would end the war in Ukraine by convincing Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin — who ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — to “negotiate a deal.”

Trump has repeatedly professed his support for Israel’s war in Gaza, which has devastated civilian populations, and said that any Jewish person considering voting for Harris “should have their head examined.” Agenda 47 says Trump will “deport pro-Hamas radicals” from the U.S. and make college campuses — the site of many pro-Palestinian demonstrations — “safe and patriotic again.”

Trump has also said he would build an “Iron Dome” over the entire U.S., referring to Israel’s short-range antimissile defense system. Experts have said building such a system in the U.S. would not make sense given the nation’s size, geographic position and existing defense capabilities, but allowed that Trump may be using the familiar name of Israel’s system as a “metaphor” for a more complex antimissile defense system in the U.S.

The U.S. is threatened by unmanned aerial systems, cruise missiles and other weapons systems, said Tom Karako, a missile defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and is already in the process of building out its defenses.

The Trump campaign did not respond to questions from The Times on the above policy areas.