Greenhouse Growers Committed To Helping Windsor-Essex Get To Stage 3

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Area greenhouse say that they are continuing their efforts to keep farm employees safe by ensuring they are treated with respect and dignity, are paid fairly, have access to health care and benefits, and importantly, are safely housed.

According to a news release, farmers say that they remain committed to:

• Informing employees about available testing options and doing their part to make sure employees’ legal rights
  for job protection and income protection (e.g. WSIB) are respected.
• Continuing to work with all levels of government to provide COVID-19 health and safety training guidelines for
  farmers and employees.
• Limiting the movement of local temporary contract employees from one farm to another to reduce the risk of
  community spread and ensuring appropriate protections are in place to limit exposure between contract and
  full time employees to decrease the risk of infection.

“We want to see Windsor-Essex get to Stage three,” says Joe Sbrocchi, General Manager of Ontario Greenhouse vegetable Growers (OGVG). As growers our job is to get food on people’s plates and to keep workers safe while doing so. To open up as quickly as possible, we support the government and local health authorities to act on quickly both onand off-farm testing for all agri-food employees.”

To help expedite Stage three re-opening in Windsor-Essex, the sector calling on government and local health authorities
to action two specific testing priorities:

• Facilitate the availability of local and province-wide proactive testing of all agri-food employees through
  expanded and consistent deployment of on-farm testing resources.
• Promote and strengthen community-based testing in the surrounding area of Windsor-Essex to minimize risk
  of community spread to farm employees.