At 5:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in September, Eliseo Martinez was fresh off his shift. His jeans were covered in dust, his sweatshirt askew, and his sneakers caked in mud. When asked, “¿Cómo estás?” he smiled and said he was “cansado.” He was tired.
Martinez wore the telltale signs of a 10-hour workday in the fields, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at his hands—they were scrubbed clean.
He and his wife have three children: ages 3, 5, and 14, all born in the United States. The year before his oldest came into the world, Martinez emigrated to Santa Maria from Oaxaca, Mexico. He’s spent the past decade laboring in the fields here, his shifts averaging between 10 and 12 hours, his workweeks between 60 and 65 hours.
In any other industry, those numbers would earn some serious overtime—but not for Martinez, and not for farmworkers in general. California growers aren’t mandated to pay their field laborers time-and-a-half until they’ve exceeded 10 hours in a workday or 60 hours in a week, compared with the eight-hour days and 40-hour weeks specified in federal labor laws for everyone else.
But that’s going to change.
On Sept. 12, Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 1066 into law, requiring growers to pay their farmworker employees overtime for workdays exceeding eight hours and workweeks exceeding 40 hours. The new standard will phase in incrementally year by year until 2022, or 2025 for small growers.
California is the first U.S. state to enact such a law, and the bill has gathered mixed reviews. Growers opposed it, saying a seasonal industry shouldn’t be subject to the same standards as year-round industries are, and imploring Brown to veto it. But farmworker organizations and rights activists applauded the new regulations, claiming the current laws are discriminatory and outdated.
Exempt
In 1938, the federal government passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing federal minimum wage and overtime standards for U.S. employees. The act initially excluded farmworkers, a decision which Lucas Zucker—community organizer for the Central Coast Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE)—said traces back to anti-black sentiment in the 1930s.
“In the South particularly, field workers were African-American and a lot of farmers in the South didn’t want them to have equal labor rights,” Zucker told the Sun. “It’s the legacy of racism.”
In 1966, the fair labor act was amended to grant minimum wage rights to most farmworkers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. But the federal government has never granted overtime protection to farmworkers, and only a few states (California included) have passed their own laws doing so.
“As the years have gone by, maybe the skin color of who works in the fields has changed, but the folks who work in the fields have continued to be some of the most disenfranchised and disempowered people in the state,” Zucker said.
And history doesn’t seem to argue. For example, California is the only state that requires employers to provide their outdoor laborers with water and shade to prevent heat illness, and even that standard wasn’t enacted until 2006.
But Claire Wineman, president of the Santa Barbara County Growers’ Association, said exempting farmworkers from overtime laws has nothing to do with racism. She argued it’s actually because of the agricultural industry’s seasonal nature.
“A lot of it is recognizing the seasonal nature of the work, and recognizing that there are certain times of year here where there are higher levels of production,” Wineman told the Sun. “There are highly perishable crops and sensitive crops, and this is in recognition of that.”
The grower perspective
In Santa Barbara County, the agricultural industry grossed nearly $1.5 billion in 2015, according to the annual crop report from the Agricultural Commissioner’s Office. And while agriculture remains the county’s biggest industry, its 2015 numbers were actually down more than $10 million from the previous year.
The crop report cited the drought, increasing land rents, and a severe labor shortage as particularly challenging for local growers. The U.S. Employment Development Department told the Sun the farm labor shortage stems from an aging domestic workforce and a decrease in immigration to the United States from Mexico. Wineman said the expanded overtime laws might make that problem even worse.
“There’s been discussion about decrease in production of crops in response to the increase in cost of labor and the unavailability of labor,” Wineman said. “We can’t pass those increasing production costs to buyers and consumers.”
If growers are unable to continue employing their farmworkers for the same number of hours due to the new overtime regulations, it could result in both a loss in work for agricultural laborers and a loss in production for farmers—a lose-lose situation, Wineman said.
The National Federation for Independent Business (NFIB) shared Wineman’s concerns, according to a statement issued by the organization’s California State Executive Director Tom Scott.
“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,” Scott said in his statement. “In a national and global competitive agricultural economy, AB 1066 only makes our crops more expensive, which will lead to higher prices for working families and lost jobs for agricultural workers.”
With translation assistance from CAUSE Community Organizing Director Hazel Davalos, farmworker Martinez told the Sun that though he generally supports the new overtime protections, he does worry “in a way” about losing work hours.
“We’ve heard some of the growers say that they’re going to bring more workers from Mexico to be able to cut the costs,” Martinez said.
But Wineman seemed more concerned with agricultural companies moving to other states to avoid complying with the new labor laws.
“As [growers’] expenses increase, it’s harder for them to pass those costs along, especially if they’re trying to compete against Arizona and Mexico and other countries,” Wineman said.
She added that it’s important to frame California’s labor laws for farmworkers in the context of other states’ and countries’ farmworker protections. From that perspective, California’s farmworker labor laws are relatively expansive.
The laborer perspective
Despite his reservations about potentially losing hours, Martinez said he’s “very excited” to eventually earn overtime for more than 40 weekly hours’ work instead of 60.
“Some things that I might want to buy that I couldn’t buy before, I could use that extra money,” he said. “I can buy things for my children that I couldn’t buy before, maybe food for the family.”
Pedro Reyes, Santa Maria resident and farmworker rights activist, said that Martinez’s excitement is echoed throughout the farm laborer community.
“For the last 77 years they’ve been literally ripped off of their salaries,” Reyes told the Sun. “They’re excited.”
He said the new overtime regulations might even alleviate the labor shortage issue by making farmworker positions more enticing to domestic workers.
“If you’re working at Target or Walmart or McDonald’s, they’re not high-paying jobs, but if you work overtime, you get compensated for that overtime, versus nothing at all,” Reyes said. “Once people find out that that’s going to happen [in the field jobs], we might see a population change of local workers applying for these jobs more often.”
Zucker said it’s “patronizing” for growers to speak on farmworkers’ behalf, saying stricter overtime regulations could cost them work hours and ultimately hurt them.
“The ag industry has said this is going to hurt farmworkers, and they would love to speak for farmworkers, but the reality is every farmworker organization in the Central Coast region is supporting this legislation,” he said.
He added that increased overtime protections might curb the overwork that tends to occur among agricultural laborers.
“We’re talking about back-breaking labor in record-breaking heat, and every extra hour farmworkers spend in the fields working under those conditions is an hour they’re not spending with their families or helping their children with their homework,” Zucker said. “It’s an hour they’re not spending pursuing higher education and moving into different fields.”
The seasonal nature of agriculture isn’t an excuse for overtime exemption, either, he said. He pointed to the retail industry, in which production flares during the holidays and employers compensate by hiring temporary additional workers.
“I think growers are going to have to pay some additional costs,” Zucker said. “That’s the reality of complying with equal labor protection. This will affect them in the same way as all other employers who currently have to comply with this law.”
A new era
Reyes and Zucker both pointed out an argument for farmworker labor protections that might not have existed in previous decades: These days, people are willing to shell out more money for food they know was produced ethically.
“I think people are now awake,” Reyes said. “There’s a massive movement of consciousness.”
Just as people pay more money for produce they know was grown organically, they’ll pay more for food picked by well-treated farmworkers, he said.
“All the arguments the farmers would have, that produce would be more expensive and we won’t have them year-round, that’s an old paradigm,” Reyes said.
He went on: “There’s a shift in attitude of consumers, and in our entire politics. It trickles down to the farmworkers. People are now willing to support more farmworkers living in decent housing or with decent salaries, versus the quantity or the price of the product.”
Staff Writer Brenna Swanston can be reached at bswanston@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 13-20, 2016.