Prof. Kaitlyn Alvarez Noli Uncovers Gaps in Federal Safeguards for Farmworkers

Every day, millions of farmworkers, most of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America, go to work in fields across the United States, often exposed to toxic pesticides that can cause everything from acute poisoning to long-term neurological damage. For more than 30 years, federal regulations like the EPA’s Worker Protection Standard have promised to shield these workers from harm. But do these protections actually work?

Assistant Professor Kaitlyn Alvarez Noli and her team at Northeastern’s School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs are asking that question and the early findings aren’t reassuring.

“We’re finding that the regulations designed to protect some of our most vulnerable workers may be failing them in systematic ways,” says Alvarez Noli, whose research sits at the intersection of social science, public health, and environmental policy.

Uneven Enforcement

Using the EPA‘s own enforcement database, Alvarez Noli’s team is mapping patterns in Worker Protection Standard violations across all 50 states, linking them to agricultural production data and workforce characteristics. What emerges is a troubling picture of uneven enforcement that appears to leave farmworkers in some regions significantly more vulnerable than others.

“There’s this assumption that federal standards create a level playing field,” Alvarez Noli explains. “But when enforcement is delegated to states, and states have vastly different agricultural economies and labor forces, that assumption breaks down.” The research reveals wide variation in how aggressively different states pursue violations, investigate complaints, and impose sanctions, suggesting that where you work may matter more than what the law says.

But the problems go beyond enforcement gaps. Through a comprehensive scoping review, the first of its kind, her team is mapping what we actually know about federal farmworker health regulations since 1990. “There’s a gap in the literature evaluating the Worker Protection Standard and its components,” she says. “And the little research that does exist supports what farmworker advocates have been saying all along – that the standard is inadequate.”

Evidence for Policymakers

The goal of this research isn’t just to study the problem, it’s to produce the kind of evidence that policymakers are more likely to act on. “Advocates and farmworkers have raised concerns about the Worker Protection Standard for years,” Alvarez Noli says. “But those firsthand accounts often aren’t always enough to drive change. Policymakers want data. So that’s the foundation we’re building”

As debates over government efficiency and regulatory burden intensify nationally, Alvarez Noli’s work provides crucial evidence about what happens when protective regulations aren’t meaningfully enforced and who pays the price.

For the farmworkers who harvest our food, the stakes couldn’t be higher. “The data we do have are telling us loud and clear,” Alvarez Noli emphasizes. “These protections are not working.”