Opinion: New overtime rules for farmworkers are long overdue

Gov. Jerry Brown this week signed into law a bill that would gradually correct a decades-long wrong, extending the eight-hour day, 40-hour workweek to California’s farmworkers. It is a good and overdue change that puts the people who supply a large share of the nation’s food on similar footing with other hourly workers.

The overtime protections, included in Assembly Bill 1066 by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), are hardly onerous. Beginning in January 2019, the current 10-hour day and 60-hour week will shrink in decrements until they reach an eight-hour day and 40-hour week in 2022. So growers have more than two years before they begin slowly having to pay their workers time and a half for overtime, and six years before it’s fully in place. Small farms have even longer to comply.

That phase-in is good for the businesses, but is too accommodating given that it comes at the expense of farmworkers. Which is why it’s hard to give much credence to complaints by Central Valley farmers and executives in the $54 billion agriculture industry that putting farmworkers on the same overtime footing as other hourly workers threatens the industry. Yes, it may cost employers more for labor, and they should pass those costs along to consumers. But it’s a weak argument to insist that workers must be treated unfairly for the sake of lower prices and a profit margin.

The agriculture industry has argued for years that the unusual nature of the industry means it should get special consideration for labor protections. And it is an unusual industry. During the peak harvest times, days are long because the produce won’t wait. During the winter the need for labor shrinks, depending on the type of farm. That all makes sense.

But it’s still not sufficient cause to treat farmworkers, who historically have had little political power, unfairly just because of the nature of the work. If it takes more than eight hours in a day to harvest strawberries during peak season, so be it – pay the overtime and reflect the added cost in the consumer price.

It is understandable that farmers want to keep their labor costs as low as possible – in that they align with just about every other employer in the country. But when profitability depends on rank exploitation of workers, then the problem isn’t labor costs, the problem is the business model. And yes, that gets us into the free-trade agreements. Pacts that mean American businesses must undercut wages and worker protections to be competitive are pacts that achieve the wrong ends.

So why weren’t farmworkers already covered by the eight-hour day? When the Roosevelt administration pushed the Depression-inspired Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, the president omitted farmworkers (and domestic workers) from its protections in part to obtain the votes of then-powerful Southern Democrats, a decision that has to be read through a racial prism – most farmworkers in the South were black. The law was amended in 1966 and its minimum wage provisions were extended to some farmworkers, but the overtime protections were not.

So California’s law builds on the Fair Labor Standards Act, and lowers the current threshold for paying overtime to mesh with the rest of the wage-earning world. The better fix here, of course, would be to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to end the carve-out for agricultural labor nationwide, but that’s not likely to happen. So at least California can take some pride that it has done right by the farmworkers, even if our produce might eventually cost a little more.

Scott.Martelle@LATimes.com

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