That’s longer than the overtime pay for all other workers in the state, who get OT after eight hours in a day or 40 hours a week.
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More than 40 years after granting farmworkers collective bargaining rights, the California Legislature on Monday approved a landmark proposal that would extend basic overtime laws to the state’s vital agricultural labor force.
As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the 44-32 vote in favor of the overtime bill led to an outbreak of applause among farmworkers who took time off of work to witness its passage.
Supporters, mostly Democrats, said the issue was one of fairness to farmworkers, who are among the few US hourly workers not paid overtime. If signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, who has not indicated if he will sign it into law. That would give him more purchasing power to buy better food and clothes for his wife and three children and ease his stress over paying down bills. “I think you’ll see growers try to pare back hours and go to mechanization”, he said Tuesday. “When you combine this Ag overtime legislation with the minimum wage increase and all of the other labor issues-the workers comp costs that are imposed on growers-it makes us noncompetitive”, Isom said. Growers, he said, would actually hire two shifts of workers, where now one crew of workers labors throughout the day. “Today, 78 years later, when farm workers are mainly Latino, this shameful legacy of racism and discrimination still infects our society”, UFW said in a statement. “In contrast, this will most likely ensure that employers will limit work hours to 8 hours instead of 10 and avoid expensive overtime pay”. California, the largest agricultural-producing state, is one of the few states to require premium or overtime pay to agricultural workers who work more than 10 hours in a day or 60 hours a week.
The arguments were strong from a farm industry seeking to maintain an 80-year-old exemption from labor laws that created the eight-hour work day for American workers.
Colleen Cecil from the Butte County Farm Bureau said both the county and state farm bureaus do not support this bill. The Fresno Country farmer says he and others he know would respond by limiting crews to eight hours by finding other workers and increasing their use of farm machinery. “The only people getting hurt in this are the workers”.
One farmer argued, farming shouldn’t be compared to other industries, because it is seasonal, susceptible to unpredictable weather and the availability of water, a scarce resource in California.
Farm groups opposed the measure, saying the requirements will put more farm workers out of work and cut their hours significantly as farmers work under increasingly tighter margins.
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AB 1066 would change how agricultural employees are paid during the harvest season.
