30, 2016, at a field near Mendota, Calif. Farmworkers such as Florentino would be eligible for overtime pay after working eight hours a day or 40 hours a week under a bill.
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But others fear their farmer bosses will respond by cutting back on working hours.
“There may be situations where people may believe that they will lose something in terms of economics, but my father taught me that it was more than about the money, it was about who he was as a man and it was about him being respected by everyone else like everyone else”, said Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego.
“Definitely a historic moment for farm workers”, says Veronica Wilson from UCLA Labor Center, which is focused on organized labor and labor rights. Despite the perceived setback, Rendon and Gonzalez assured the hundreds of farmworkers who took off work that the bill had enough votes to clear the Assembly. For more than eight decades, field laborers were only paid time-and-a-half when they worked more than 10 hours in a day or 60 in a week.
They argued the extra compensation for farmworkers would correct historical wrongs, noting that Congress cut out agricultural workers while guaranteeing other workers extra wages via the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.
“This is not an attack on those who employ farmworkers”, Thurmond said.
“We know this is the right thing to do”, Gonzalez said in a statement after the AB 1066 vote, “and thanks to the hard work of an incredible coalition throughout the state and across the country, we’re now one step closer to finally providing our hard-working farmworkers the dignity they deserve”.
“This bill ultimately will hurt those that it claims to want to help, specifically it’s going to devastate the working families of our farming communities”, said Mathis, vice chair of the Assembly agriculture committee.
Some have even said this will force farmers to leave California for states with more favorable business policies.
Most other states that allow someone to turn in multiple ballots generally limit it to as many as 10 ballots. Isom hopes Governor Brown will see this bill as an added negative impact tied to the recently passed increases to California’s minimum wage. Brown’s desk to be signed or vetoed. In an olive branch to opponents, this version of the bill would give farms with 25 or fewer employees until 2022 to start to complying, while larger farms would need to start paying more in 2019.
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The bill now heads to Brown to put his signature on what many in the Assembly Chambers Monday saw as history.
