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Farmworkers Finally Won Overtime Pay. Now the Industry Wants to Repeal It. [1]
['Grey Moran', 'The Civil Eats Editors', 'Mary-Rose Abraham', 'Alice Driver', 'Twilight Greenaway', 'Mya Price', 'Daniel Walton']
Date: 2023-02-21
In early February, around 2,000 people called in to a hearing on Washington farmworkers’ right to overtime pay. The conversation was tense as farmworkers, advocates, and members of the agriculture industry all weighed in.
The crowd had convened to discuss a Senate bill that would create a “seasonal exemption” to a 2021 law designed to pay farmworkers for overtime. If it passed, farmers wouldn’t have to pay overtime for 12 weeks (of the grower’s choice) per year. Growers saw this as a compromise that would reflect the narrow harvest periods of some crops, like hops and asparagus, while shoring up farm economies. But many farmworker and labor advocates saw this as rolling back the hard-won right to overtime, and perpetuating the inequalities long baked into the laws for farmworkers.
The battle over overtime pay picked up speed in Washington in 2016, when a group of dairy workers there successfully sued the state, claiming that it was discriminatory to deny a largely Latin American workforce protections guaranteed to other workers. This spurred a wider, heated fight that played out in Washington’s Congress, resulting in 2021 in the passage of the strongest overtime law for farmworkers in the nation. After a phase-in period of three years, farmworkers will be granted overtime when they work over 40 hours in any given week, on par with other industries.
The law marked a historic victory for the farmworker labor movement in Washington, including unions like United Farm Workers and Familias Unidas por la Justicia, the Washington State Labor Council, and the dairy workers whose fight for their rights quickly became about more than just themselves. The exclusion of overtime pay for farmworkers is a legacy of slavery that dates back to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which established bedrock labor protections for most industries, but excluded farmworkers, who were, at the time, largely Black.
“It’s hard to come by a more straightforward example of systemic racism, and we must not press forward with this. It’s time to absolutely eradicate it,” said Andrea Schmitt, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services, who represented the dairy workers in the lawsuit challenging the exemption in the hearing.
“It’s hard to come by a more straightforward example of systemic racism, and we must not press forward with this. It’s time to absolutely eradicate it.”
Schmitt pointed to the fact that the federal exclusion arose from a deal President Roosevelt struck with Southern Democrats to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, explicitly designed to exclude Black workers. “They couldn’t exclude Black workers constitutionally. So instead, they excluded domestic workers and farmworkers.” In the dairy worker lawsuit, Washington’s Supreme Court determined that this exclusion violated the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, while also citing farm work’s “extremely dangerous conditions.”
Although it now has the strictest overtime law, Washington isn’t alone in turning the tide on this long-standing federal exemption. It followed in the footsteps of California, the first state to end the exemption in 2016, while Colorado, New York, and Oregon have followed suit with similar laws. Minnesota, Maryland, and Hawaii have at least partially ended the exemption. There’s also a push to amend the exemption on a federal level for all farmworkers, supported by President Biden. “It’s long past time that we put all of America’s farmworkers on an equal footing with the rest of our national workforce,” he said, shortly after Washington passed its law.
Yet the road to ending this nearly six-decade exemption is already proving to be fraught, as the agricultural industry continuously pushes back against new laws, claiming the added cost of labor will irrevocably hurt farms. In addition to efforts to pass more exemptions, one Oregon bill would fully repeal the state’s new overtime law. And New York has faced pushback from farmers trying to circumvent the law, including by strictly capping workers’ hours and preventing workers from trading shifts. Regardless of how it shapes up, it’s clear that larger systemic challenges put workers and growers at odds with one another.
The Cost to Farmers
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[1] Url:
https://civileats.com/2023/02/21/farmworkers-finally-won-overtime-pay-now-the-industry-wants-to-repeal-it/?ref=ambrook
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