Rick Perry's Opposition To Pesticide Regulations Helped Launch His Political Star

Rick Perry's Opposition To Pesticide Regulations Helped Launch His Political Star: "This became how Perry rises in politics," claims Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a public interest law group. "Perry is the weathervane, pure and simple. He saw where the money was and where the politics were drifting."

In the 1980’s, agricultural workers in Texas didn’t enjoy many of the workplace protections that were taken for granted in other industries. So in 1987, after Harrington’s group had sued the state on behalf of farm workers, the Texas agriculture department developed a law called the Agricultural Hazards Communications Act, known colloquially as Right to Know.

In addition to requiring that field workers be trained on the dangers of pesticides, the law required farmers to maintain a list of the chemicals they used on their crops -- known as the “crop sheet” -- and to provide it to farm workers, along with a notice of their rights as workers. The law also stated that workers couldn’t be forced to handle chemicals that came unlabeled, nor could they be fired or disciplined for filing a complaint against an employer with regards to Right to Know.

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The crop sheet was important because Texas’ heavily Latino farm workforce tends to migrate, handling different crops in different regions during different seasons. A detailed listing of chemicals used and their dangers could help workers pinpoint the cause of an illness. According to Vaughn Cox, who worked in the agriculture department in the late 80’s, Right to Know was a sensible law designed specifically to help the farm worker and the doctors in the event of a pesticide-related emergency.
“If it says cabbage in South Texas is treated with these chemicals this time of year, then the doctor can say, ‘Oh, they used this kind of chemical.’ It could speed up the process of treating them,” says Cox. “So many farm workers were being exposed to chemicals in unsafe ways. They had no training, no protective clothing or anything that common sense would say you should have.”