Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a bill that allows California farm workers to earn overtime pay in the same way non-farm workers do.
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AB 1066 narrowly passed through the state legislature before making it to the Governor’s desk which he signed into law Monday.
The new law will be phased in beginning in 2019 and take full effect for most farms in 2022 or 2025 for small farms of 25 or fewer employees.
Under current law, farmworkers receive time-and-a-half pay only after a 10-hour shift or 60-hour workweek.
“For 78 years, a Jim Crow-era law discriminated against farm workers by denying us the same overtime rights that other workers benefit from”, said United Farm Workers President Arturo S. Rodriguez.
Currently, if farm employees work a 10-hour day they start accruing overtime pay after those 10 hours instead of eight like most employees in California.
“This is a historic day”, said the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, according to The Los Angeles Times.
“The hundreds of thousands of men and women who work in California’s fields, dairies and ranches feed the world and anchor our economy”, she said in a prepared statement. The farm workers, however, believe they should be accorded the same protections under the law as workers in other industries. “It is a good day”.
Opponents say AB1066 will ultimately backfire against farm workers in California with shorter work weeks and reduced, labor-intensive agricultural production due to higher costs for growers and farmers.
Worker advocates say that better labeling in grocery stores can indicate that they have sourced their produce from ethical growers – including growers who provide workers with fair overtime compensation, as California’s farmers now must do. Republicans in the Legislature were against the bill, saying “it will hurt workers and farmers”, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The bill, which Brown signed September 12, allows for growers with 25 employees or less to delay the increases for an additional five years and the increased wages will go back into local economies, said state Sen. Jerry Brown on Tuesday vetoed bills that would have banned taxes on tampons and diapers, at least one woman legislator summed up the governor’s explanation in a single word: “mansplaining”. An estimated 800,000 seasonal farmworkers are employed in California. “AB 1066 will put some farmworkers out of work and limit the number of hours others can work”.
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Farm work, marked by crushing workloads during specific periods, has always been exempted from some of the labor standards enacted by the federal government beginning in the 1930s, including overtime pay.
