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Tag: coalition of immokalee workers

  • Film shows Florida farmworkers facing rising heat and few protections

    The documentary ‘Without Shade, Without Rest’ examines the challenges of working outdoors.

    The documentary ‘Without Shade, Without Rest’ examines the challenges of working outdoors.

    Six Eye Films

    Florida’s fields feed much of the nation, but for the farmworkers tending the crops, extreme heat often turns a day’s labor into a serious health risk.

    The new documentary “Without Shade, Without Rest” follows residents and advocacy groups fighting for heat protections and examines the challenges of working outdoors amid rising temperatures and weak legal safeguards.

    The film shows farmworkers picking crops and describing their experiences after struggling to breathe under the intense sun in Florida, where the heat index can reach above 100.

    “One of the things that stood out to us while making this film is how cumulative heat exposure can be,” filmmaker José Zaragoza, co-founder of Six Eye Films, told WLRN. He helps run the journalist-led, documentary nonprofit based in West Palm Beach.

    “Sometimes, we think heat exposure might be fainting spells or something we experience and then overcome and recover from,” he said — but it’s much more complicated than that.

    “As you watch the film you’ll know that there’s long-term effects from exposure to extreme heat: kidney problems, vision issues, exhaustion,” Zaragoza added.

    “It’s not just about single dramatic incidents. Heat isn’t just weather, it’s a working condition. And here in Florida, it’s a life or death one.”

    Florida, the epicenter of the U.S. heat crisis, is the hottest state in the nation. The Florida Climate Center, the state’s climate office, reports that since 1950 Florida’s average annual temperature has risen by about 3.5°F, exceeding the global increase of roughly 2.7°F during the same period.

    The data adds an extra layer of truth to the anecdotal experiences, filmmakers said.

    The film highlights farmworkers describing dizzy spells, burns and the fear of losing their jobs, alongside advocacy groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and WeCount, a worker-led organization that is based in Homestead and pushed for stronger heat protections in Miami-Dade County.

    The documentary highlights farmworkers describing dizzy spells, burns and the fear of losing their jobs.
    The documentary highlights farmworkers describing dizzy spells, burns and the fear of losing their jobs. Six Eye Films

    In 2021, WeCount’s national “¡Qué Calor!” (“It’s so hot!” in Spanish) campaign in Miami-Dade came close to establishing what would have been a first-in-the-nation county heat standard.

    But lobbying from business and industry groups delayed the local vote. Before it could pass, the Florida Legislature implemented HB 433, which banned local governments from enacting heat-protection laws.

    In the film, Rick Roth, president of Roth Farms and a former Palm Beach County state representative (2016–2024), criticized any proposed heat rules. He argued that local officials lack the expertise and staffing to enforce them.

    He supports practical safety steps like hydration and breaks but calls climate-change concerns “exaggerated.”

    In the documentary, Rick Roth, president of Roth Farms and a former Palm Beach County state representative, criticized any proposed heat rules. He argued that local officials lack the expertise and staffing to enforce them and calls climate concerns ‘exaggerated.’
    In the documentary, Rick Roth, president of Roth Farms and a former Palm Beach County state representative, criticized any proposed heat rules. He argued that local officials lack the expertise and staffing to enforce them and calls climate concerns ‘exaggerated.’ Six Eye Films

    The film is shot in a fly-on-the-wall style, allowing farmworkers, residents and lawmakers to speak for themselves and enabling viewers to interpret the controversial story without narration.

    Max Maldonado, a visual journalist and co-director of the film, says Six Eye Films wanted to avoid summarizing the experiences of farmworkers “into a neat little box.”

    “Nowadays, [viewers] are educated enough to be able to make those inferences and to also make those emotional judgment calls on their own,” he said.

    A 2024 Tampa Bay Times investigation identified 37 heat-related worker fatalities in Florida during the past decade, double the federal count.

    Just over half of those deaths went unreported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and at least half of the victims were immigrants working in industries like agriculture, construction and roofing.

    Because of reporting failures to OSHA, the true death toll is likely higher.

    Six Eye Films told WLRN it plana to continue screening the documentary across public institutions such as libraries and schools to raise awareness about heat and worker safety.

    Producer and editor Emily Sternlicht, who is based in New York, brought an outsider’s perspective to the project, saying it brings unexpected insight into the produce that she eats.

    “For someone from New York, it’s really important to know that we consume a lot of these fruits and vegetables that come from Florida,” Sternlicht said.

    “It affects everyone in different ways no matter where you are. Things that happen in Florida have repercussions throughout the country.”

    Six Eye Films is working to have more screenings in South Florida. For more information click here.

    This report was produced by Miami Herald news partner WLRN Public Media.

    Wilkine Brutus

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  • Florida filmmakers take ‘human-centric’ approach in documentary on workers’ fight for heat protections



    Six Eye Films, based out of West Palm Beach, produced the documentary Without Shade, Without Rest (2025) Credit: Six Eye Films

    A new documentary from the independent nonprofit Six Eye Films, Without Shade, Without Rest, follows the grueling struggle by agricultural workers in Miami-Dade County to establish the first local ordinance in Florida to guarantee heat safety protections for outdoor workers.

    That fight, years in the making, would have required employers to provide basic protections against extreme heat for agricultural and construction workers, such as guaranteed water breaks and access to shade on the job once the temperature outside reached a certain threshold.

    The ordinance was on its way to passage in 2023 when the effort was stalled by complaints from business owners, who then subsequently lobbied the Florida Legislature to pass a law shortly after that barred any Florida county, including Miami-Dade, from establishing any kind of heat safety mandate.

    Emails and text messages obtained by Orlando Weekly at the time revealed that well-connected lobbyists for business groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industries of Florida pushed Republican state leaders to get the bill across the finish line. “The entire business community is in lock step on this,” one lobbyist wrote in a text to the Florida House speaker’s chief of staff, just a day before the law’s passage. “Thank you for your attention to this concern.” 

    The new 45-minute documentary from Six Eye Films, released this year, focuses less on the government side of the fight, instead zeroing in on the workers themselves. Filmmakers documented the yearslong, worker-led campaign for protections against labor abuses in South Florida’s agricultural industry, primarily organized by members of human rights groups WeCount and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. 

    The filmmakers organized a screening of the documentary at the Orange County teachers union hall in Orlando last Friday, and hope to screen the documentary at other Central Florida locations in the future.

    Editor and producer Emily Sternlicht, who’s worked on projects for major media outlets such as Vice and Frontline, said that organizations, universities and other institutions are welcome to contact them to request a screening of the film.

    Tracing the roots of a historic campaign

    The battle for heat protections documented in Without Shade, Without Rest was directly led by immigrant workers in South Florida, who dominate the Sunshine State’s agricultural workforce, working through Florida’s scorching summers to support their families, either in the U.S. or back in their home countries.

    The campaign was galvanized by Florida’s rising temperatures and a rise in the numbers of heat-related illnesses and deaths suffered by workers on the job, including agricultural and construction workers, who make up the bulk of Florida’s outdoor workforce.

    But film co-director Max Maldonado — a journalist based in West Palm Beach — said the focus of their film wasn’t on the numbers themselves, but rather the faces and the stories behind them. 

    “We really want to show, instead of tell you the problems,” Maldonado told Orlando Weekly. Maldonado, the son of an Ecuadorian immigrant himself, is a co-founder of Six Eye Films, which fellow co-founder José Jesús Zaragoza describes as a nonprofit “dedicated to telling human stories shaped by climate, labor, migration, and the rapidly changing American South.”  

    “We’re really focused on observational films where, you know, you don’t hear someone talking about a story. You witness a story,” Zaragoza told the Weekly.

    A clip from Without Shade, Without Rest (2025) courtesy of Six Eye Films.

    A longtime journalist who grew up in a Texas border town, Zaragoza traces the filmmaking process for Without Shade, Without Rest back to a working relationship he developed with the CIW roughly two decades ago, after he moved to Florida and jumped into editing weekly newspapers in the Lake Okeechobee region.

    “Their [the CIW’s] presence was kind of big in the Hispanic television stations that we used to watch back in Texas, so I was familiar with them back then,” Zaragoza explained.

    The CIW, based in South Florida, is a human rights organization formed in the early 1990s by a group of immigrant farmworkers from Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti who united around the common cause of justice on the job. (Links to just some of Orlando Weekly‘s archival coverage of the CIW can be found at the end of this article.)

    They organized hunger strikes over poor labor conditions and later launched a pressure campaign to get big-name corporations like McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Walmart to sign onto the Fair Food Program — a commitment by buyers to only source produce from farmers who pay and treat their workers well.

    Without Shade, Without Rest traces the history of the fight for heat protections in Miami-Dade County back to this decades-old fight against labor abuses in the fields of South Florida.

    According to Zaragoza, workers involved with the Fair Food Program review the principles of their campaign every few years. And in 2021, establishing heat safety on the job became a pillar of the program’s “worker-driven social responsibility model,” a set of human rights standards that advocates seek to incorporate into corporate supply chains.

    Filmmakers Maldonado and Zaragoza embedded themselves in the lives of South Florida farmworkers over the course of filming, earning (not demanding) their trust, in an effort to show — not tell — the dangerous conditions that farmworkers face in extreme heat, and the impacts of that on both the individual human body and communities.

    “When it comes to doing a documentary, you really want to give people that sense of, they know this person, that they’re understanding their struggle in the moment,” said Maldonado.

    Although Florida, like much of the U.S. South, has weak labor protections, low union density, and no state agency to actually enforce worker safety protections, Zaragoza believes there’s still a message that working people in Florida can take from their film, as WeCount’s fight for workplace justice in the agricultural and construction industries continues.

    “I think what people can take away from that is that there’s always different avenues, different pathways, to achieving what they need, what they deserve,” he said. “I’m hoping that’s at least a takeaway.”

    He pointed out that, in the early days of the CIW, it took time for the worker-led movement to grow strong enough to secure meaningful gains for workers on the ground. “It seems like a crazy exercise, an exercise of futility to year in and year out organize these hunger strikes, expecting that something’s going to change,” he recalled. “But then, it did.”

    Without Shade, Without Rest is Six Eye Films’ first full-length film. Follow Six Eye Films on Instagram for updates on future screenings, and to learn more about their current/upcoming projects.

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    McKenna Schueler
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