Other Programmatic Elements Identified by the Committee - Agriculture Forestry and Fishing Research at NIOSH - page 132

tional Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences, state departments of agriculture, the Cooperative
Extension Service, and state and local health agencies), veterinarians, agricultural
engineers, and state and local agencies that provide essential services, such as
healthcare providers and forest firefighters. But engaging those additional stake-
holders would supplement, not substitute for or in any sense replace, the engage-
ment of directly affected workers. The committee here distinguishes between the
working population directly engaged in AFF production and people engaged in
support activities, including research.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, NIOSH needs to consider five types of directly
affected stakeholders in each of the agriculture, forestry, and fishing sectors: self-
employed workers, unpaid family workers, direct-hire workers, contract-hire work-
ers, and workers employed by larger-scale businesses. Other persons may be at risk
owing to their living on or adjacent to worksites because AFF workplaces are, by
their relationship to natural resources, extensive as opposed to localized. The ad-
ditional persons may include children, spouses, or other relatives of AFF workers.
The National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety has
been effective in reaching out to and engaging all five categories of workers, albeit
with considerably greater success among some categories than others. The fishing
program in Alaska has been particularly effective in directly involving various cat-
egories of workers in addressing occupational safety in a localized fishery industry;
however, some categories of workers may have been underrepresented.
Organizations representing self-employed and unpaid family workers in agri-
culture are relatively highly developed, especially nowadays with the proliferation
of commodity-based groups; there is relatively effective involvement of some of
these groups in the AFF Program, as was clear at the Seattle National Occupational
Research Agenda (NORA) session in January 2006. Despite those successes, both
hired and contract workers have been underrepresented throughout the brief
history of the AFF Program. The fault is by no means to be placed only on the
program, as there are substantial barriers to engaging hired and contract workers,
including language and cultural gaps. Compounding the problem is the relative
absence of involvement of most hired and contract workers in any organization
that directly represents workers. Labor unions represent only a very small fraction
of hired and contract farm workers—no more than 30,000 of a national hired
workforce estimated to be of 1.3-2.25 million workers (Villarejo and Baron, 1999).
The record of labor unions in the AFF sector is spotty: some have had a strong
commitment to making the workplace safer, but others have demonstrated little
interest in this issue. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations' Department of Occupational Safety and Health has recognized
that “NIOSH is valuable in that it can address new, unregulated hazards such as
ergonomic problems” (Factor and Uehlein, 1990).