California farmworkers deserve OT
Shafter's Dean Florez keeps farmworker issues close to his heart. He's a grandson of field workers and a man who knows how grueling the life of a campesino can be.
So it's no surprise that Florez, the state Senate's majority leader, is the author of a controversial farmworker bill sitting on the governor's desk. Senate Bill 1121 would grant overtime pay to farmworkers after eight hours of work in a single day -- a benefit most U.S. workers take entirely for granted. His bill makes sense.
California farmworkers were exempted from overtime pay until 1976, when the state made them eligible after 10 hours a day and 60 hours per week. All the while, other hourly workers received overtime pay after eight hours a day and 40 hours a week.
Does that sound fair? Of course it doesn't. That's why Florez, who terms out of office this year, put forward the proposal. He's been responsible for other laws benefitting farmworkers, including safety requirements in laborers' work vans and regulations addressing pesticide drift.
Farmworkers do the hard, dirty, dangerous and debilitating work that makes California an agricultural powerhouse the world over -- and they do it for poverty wages. We tend to overlook their role in bringing fresh fruit and vegetables to our well-stocked grocery aisles -- they're out of sight, out of mind. But these workers should not be excluded from the basic rights afforded to other California workers simply because they might not speak English, or because of the nature of their work.
Even so, groups such as the United Farm Workers union and some laborers themselves are wary that growers will react by reducing hours to avoid paying overtime. But the U.S. economy has successfully adjusted to other worker-protection regulations, from child labor laws to the five-day workweek to bans on hazardous substances in the workplace, and though some of those changes meant short-term expense and inconvenience for workers as well as employers, the result was always a safer, more equitable environment. We expect this will be no different.
California is already the only state in the nation that requires farmworker overtime pay of any sort, so growers already are in tune with the challenges of managing schedules within the confines of state-mandated limits, though not to this degree. Still, growers have always responded to market and labor conditions with innovative practices.
Every reform that has ever come to the fields over the past half-century -- from the banning of the short-handled hoe to the adoption of mandatory breaks to requiring water and toilets in the field to protections against heatstroke -- has prompted the same cry from agriculture: that farmers cannot afford such a change, that productivity will be greatly diminished, that the farmworker himself will suffer the consequences. In each instance, the dire prognosis did not come true. The lesson of such reforms in the past is that agriculture will find a way to adjust -- it always has and always will. We expect growers will find ways to make this law work as well.
What work, if not the most grueling, back-breaking labor in California today, deserves to be rewarded with overtime? We urge the governor to sign the bill and give farmworkers a protection that other workers have long enjoyed.
