EUGENE — As the former mayor of a major American city, U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh admits he faces a steep learning curve regarding farmworker regulations.

“This area is kind of new to me. They don’t have farms in Boston,” Walsh said Tuesday, Aug. 10, during a roundtable on farmworker protections in Eugene.

However, Walsh said he appreciates the hard work that goes into agriculture, as both his parents grew up on farms in Ireland before immigrating to the U.S. in the 1950s.

“I know that food did not just appear on my plate,” he said. “I know it came from a worker’s hands.”

After hearing from farmworker representatives, Walsh said he planned to look into several problems discussed at the roundtable, such as changing coronavirus restrictions and growing safety threats from heat and wildfire smoke.

“The last 18 months have been completely devastating,” he said.

The lack of higher overtime wages and the powerful role of labor contractors are also unique to the farm industry, he said.

“Rules that apply to the 40-hour worker don’t apply to the farmworker,” Walsh said.

There are currently immigration proposals floating around Washington, D.C., that are specific to “essential workers” and people who arrived in the U.S. as children, but Walsh said he’d prefer more comprehensive legislation to be introduced.

“I think we actually need to go bigger than that,” he said.

Roundtable panelists said the coronavirus pandemic has aggravated problems that existed before in the farm industry, such as workers fearing to report labor violations due to potential retaliation.

The possibility of losing a job doesn’t seem worthwhile when employers would only receive nominal fines for violating safety protocols, said Valentin Sanchez, senior community educator with the Oregon Law Center.

Oregon’s Occupational Safety and Health administration is influenced by the federal OSHA, but that agency’s standards are outdated, he said.

“We are setting the bar so low,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez urged more funding for on-site inspections as well as recognition that many farmers speak indigenous languages, not Spanish.

“We need to develop educational materials in these different languages,” he said.

Farmers are increasingly reliant on labor contractors for hiring, which effectively makes them less responsible for worker safety, said Jennifer Martinez-Medina, a doctoral candidate at Portland State University who facilitated a study on coronavirus impacts.

Though farmers are jointly liable with contractors for following labor law, the system creates another hindrance for workers to report violations, she said.

Labor contractors and personnel agencies are also less accountable for violating regulations, she said. “Farm labor contractors can dissolve and come back with a different name.”

Apart from the farmworker roundtable, Walsh toured a training facility for plumbers and steamfitters in Springfield.

He joked that he’d planned to visit farms unannounced but appreciated the input from the roundtable instead.

“Let me work on this stuff,” Walsh said.