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 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.
Subscribe to Orlando Weekly newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Bluesky | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
