California would be the first state to pass the bill and give farm workers the same overtime hours as other employees get in other professions.
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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.
Across the country, agricultural workers are required to be paid the minimum wage, but there is no upper limit on how long they work.
If approved, the bill would require the state to phase in time-and-a-half pay for farm workers who exceed eight hours in one day by 2022 on large farms, and by 2025 for farms with 25 or fewer employees.
A almost identical bill fell three votes short of passage on the Assembly floor in May, with 15 Democrats voting against the measure or declining to vote. It is backed by the United Farm Workers, which Chavez helped found in 1962, more than three decades before his death. In 1976, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation establishing a modified standard for these workers still in effect today, with a 10-hour day and 60-hour week. “This means a lot to them – obviously being able to receive overtime means a lot, in terms of dignity, and respect for their work – it means just as much”, Rendon told KCBS.
By excluding farm workers and domestic employees, about two-thirds of all black people were denied FLSA protections, leaving them without any guarantee of a minimum wage or extra pay for working extra hours.
The bill would change their 10-hour day to an 8-hour day and they would start getting overtime after eight hours instead.
Brown, now serving in an unprecedented fourth term as California governor, first ran for the job on the heels of the nation’s largest agricultural labor strike.
Hundreds of agricultural workers were on hand for the vote to, in the words of United Farm Workers of America president Arturo Rodriguez, “be able to witness history”.
We welcome the passage of AB 1066, the overtime bill.
Colleen Cecil from the Butte County Farm Bureau said both the county and state farm bureaus do not support this bill. Brown has sided with farmworkers in the past and was instrumental in passing the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which created bargaining rights and the current overtime laws. Nationally, farm workers earn an average of less than $18,000 a year, according to Farm Worker Justice.
One out of eleven farmers in California is an NFIB member, and they are telling us this bill will have a devastating impact on their small, independent farms and farmworkers.
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But they did not convince Democratic legislators, and they do not convince us, to continue the antiquated system of treating farmworkers as a different class of worker in this state. In what Gonzalez has described as an unprecedented move to revive the bill, she worked around the Legislature’s rules and reinserted the proposal in another bill, angering Republicans who objected to the breach in procedure.
