On Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, a small band of activists marched past the gates of a sprawling plant nursery in Leicester, North Carolina, outside of Asheville. The sun beat down on rows of steamy greenhouses where workers moved through aisles of houseplants ready for sale. The activists were on their way to deliver a petition to Costa Farms, the world’s largest grower of indoor houseplants.
Oscar Rozo, an Episcopal clergy member who works with Spanish-speaking immigrants in Western North Carolina, was among the leaders of the group. Their petition calls on Costa Farms to ensure that plant nursery workers have sufficient protections from extreme heat, including access to water, shade, and paid breaks. “We’re part of the community,” Rozo said to the Costa Farms managers present. “The nursery industry has been part of Asheville’s economy.”
As the activists lined the hallways, workers in the plant nursery looked up curiously, but kept their distance.
Rozo and the other activists were taking part in a multi-state action organized by WeCount, a worker-led labor and human rights group, targeting the five cities in the U.S. where Costa Farms operates nurseries. “We consider this a very historic day of action,” said Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount, who earlier that day helped deliver a petition to a different Costa Farms nursery in Apotheke, Florida. “And we know this is only the beginning.”
Since 2021, WeCount has been advocating on behalf of outdoor workers who lack meaningful protections from extreme heat. Based in South Florida, WeCount previously campaigned for a municipal heat standard in Miami-Dade County, where deaths from heat exposure are estimated to spike by 600 during extremely hot periods. But those efforts were cut short in 2024, when industry groups complained and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passed a law preempting local governments from enacting their own heat standards. (DeSantis said such regulations could cause “a lot of problems.”)
Planting Justice, WeCount’s new campaign to protect outdoor workers across the South, aims to bring corporations like Costa Farms to the table and create consumer awareness around where their plants come from — and the human cost of growing them.
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This model of mobilizing for stronger workplace protections is known as worker-driven social responsibility. WeCount’s campaign is heavily inspired by the Fair Food Program, which farmworkers have successfully used for years to boost their labor conditions and is considered the highest standard of labor protections for farmworkers in the U.S. The Fair Food Program, developed in 2015 by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, has proven effective as a framework for workers to continually surface and address their needs. For example, while access to drinking water is one of the core tenets of the program, this year, workers won the right to electrolyte beverages or supplements year round.
“We know that every year this crisis is getting worse,” said Londoño, referring to how summer temperatures climb year to year, driven by human-caused climate change. “But increasingly, legislative avenues are more and more limited.”
Heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather. In the U.S., official counts of deaths from extreme heat exposure vastly underreport the scope of the problem, as a two-year investigation by Boston University and NPR recently demonstrated. For years, labor advocates and community groups have pushed for the creation of a federal heat standard — a set of guidelines that would apply to employers across the country designed to reduce workers’ risk of heat illness. While the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — or OSHA, the nation’s workplace regulator — seemed to be making progress toward such a rule under the Biden administration, those efforts have since stalled out. Meanwhile, agricultural workers, a category that includes plant nursery workers who handle the greenery directly, are excluded from federal collective bargaining protections under the National Labor Relations Act. And yet, agricultural workers are also more than 35 times more likely to die from heat-related complaints than workers in other industries.
Katie Myers / Grist
In a statement, Costa Farms told Grist it has received multiple awards for the quality of its workplace protections. “We have a full-time, on-site nurse with a functional medical clinic and our robust heat protection policy is aligned with the proposed OSHA heat safety rules,” said Ariana Cabrera de Oña, the company’s senior vice president, general counsel, and head of human resources. After Hurricane Helene struck North Carolina, Costa Farms rolled out a policy of holding daily five-minute meetings for workers and supervisors to discuss potential health and safety risks, including extreme weather forecasts. When certain wet bulb temperatures are reached, workers are also provided with “increased break frequency [and] additional hydration stations,” according to the company.
The goal of the Planting Justice campaign is for Costa Farms to sign onto a code of conduct developed by workers. The agreement outlines relatively straightforward demands: educating workers and supervisors on the signs of heat illness; providing access to shade, water, and rest breaks; and creating systems for monitoring and responding to heat stress.
Organizers believe the agreement would help directly address issues that workers themselves see on the job. For example, while Costa Farms reports that the company provides access to hydration stations on very hot days, workers have reported water with a strong chemical smell, as well as seeing mold in water coolers, said Londoño.
Alejandro Gonzales, a Costa Farms nursery worker originally from Guatemala, told a Florida rally that the summer days have topped 110 degrees Fahrenheit on occasion. “They don’t give us cold or clean water,” Gonzales said emphatically, in Spanish. “They don’t provide any breaks or shade.”
Eighty-six percent of Costa Farms workers who responded to a survey by WeCount reported dangerous incidents on the job, stemming from heat illness, pesticide exposure, and workplace accidents. Over two-thirds reported being entirely denied breaks and days off. The visa conditions of many houseplant workers – dependent on H2-A or other visas, or entirely undocumented – leave them with few rights to recourse, often entirely dependent on their employers for housing, and unable to rely on much of federal labor law for support should they speak out.
WeCount sees Tuesday’s action as just a start. The group is also calling on major retailers – like Home Depot and IKEA, that buy plants from Costa Farms – to only work with growers who agree to this code of conduct.
Soon after they walked into the Leicester office, Costa Farms’ management asked Rozo and the other activists to leave the premises. They delivered the petition and walked out.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline America’s houseplants come at a steep price for greenhouse workers on Sep 11, 2026.
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