Currently, if these employees work a 10-hour day they start accruing overtime pay after those 10 hours instead of eight like most employees in California.
Advertisement
California Is Poised To Close Jim Crow-Era Loophole That’s Still Punishing Farmworkers TodayFarmworkers in the California legislature showing support for the overtime bill.
She then waged a social media campaign to pressure Democrats to back AB1066; agreed to compromises to win votes, including giving small farms an extra three years to pay more overtime; and led a squad of Democratic allies in a 24-hour fast, paying homage to the weeks long fast that legendary farmworker leader Cesar Chavez staged when the “Salad Bowl” strike of 1970 in the Salinas Valley initially failed.
Supporters, mostly Democrats, said the issue was one of fairness to farmworkers, who are among the few US hourly workers not paid overtime.
California Farm Bureau Federation President Paul Wenger predicted that it would cut farm worker income by a third.
“The whole world eats the food provided by California farmworkers, yet we don’t guarantee fair overtime pay for the backbreaking manual labor they put in to keep us fed”, said Gonzalez.
Many other industries could step forward and give detailed and extensive reasons why they, too, should be exempt from a type of labor law, whether it be overtime or the minimum wage or the length of the work week. “Supporters of the legislation claim this is about ‘equality, ‘ but AB 1066 would actually hurt the employees it’s meant to help”.
“This mandate does not consider the thousands of agricultural workers who will lose their jobs and the billions of dollars in lost crop production resulting from these new overtime regulations”, NFIB California State Executive Director Tom Scott said in a statement.
“It’s unrealistic to think that farmers are going to be able somehow find the money to pay 20 hours of overtime a week”, said Jeff Merwin.
Leaders of the Salinas Valley agriculture industry responded firmly Tuesday in opposition to a state bill that rewrites the overtime pay policy for farmworkers in California.
Governor Brown has not said whether he will sign the law that would be the first of its kind for the United States.
“We want to pay our workers the best we can and promote them within the company and this puts another mandated restriction on what our workers can work”, he says. Again and again, supportive lawmakers invoked Chavez.
A spokesperson at Bonta’s office said the bill would cost the state about $300,000 to $500,000 a year in administrative costs. Nationally, farm workers earn an average of less than $18,000 a year, according to Farm Worker Justice.
“It is time to have equal overtime protections in all workplaces”, Arambula said.
The bill has the support of the United Farm Workers.
In the end, we believe it is time that as a state – and we hope eventually as a nation – we stop treating farmworkers as a different class of employee.
Advertisement
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
