Assembly Bill 1066 will raise overtime wages for agricultural workers incrementally over four years, ultimately matching other industries by requiring time-and-a-half pay for more than eight hours in a day or 40 hours in a week, according to The Sacramento Bee.
The governor of California signed a bill this week that grants agriculture workers the same right to overtime pay as other Californians.
“The bill’s enactment marked a major victory for the United Farm Workers union — and a setback for industry interests — six years after Brown’s predecessor, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, vetoed a similar bill,” write Sacramento Bee reporters David Siders and Jeremy B. White.
The legislation’s author, assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, called it a “truly historic day in California.”
Other lawmakers disagreed. “I wish that the voices of farmers and farmworkers would have truly been heard in this discussion,” Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Plumas Lake, said in a statement. “Instead, the ruling party placated to one union group and the chronic and ignorant misconceptions of a few legislators who have no understanding of the industry and its people. If you understand agriculture, you know that this new law will result in lost wages for farmworkers.”
Assembly Bill 1066 will roll out new rules for overtime in 2019, lowering the current 10-hour-day threshold for overtime by half an hour each year until it reaches the standard eight-hour day by 2022. It also will phase in a 40-hour standard workweek for the first time.
A number of major agricultural producers, led by the California Farm Bureau Federation and including the California Cut Flower Commission, opposed the legislation. A video created by that coalition accuses lawmakers of singling out agriculture and saddling farmers with higher costs that, coupled with increases to the minimum wage, could be “devastating” to companies and communities.
“We are extremely disappointed that this legislation was signed into law, as it will be harmful to farm employees, farmers, consumers and the environment. Those who work on California farms will see reduced paychecks and have their lives disrupted as these new worker overtime rules come into play,” said Paul Wenger, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation, in a prepared statement. “California consumers will have fewer opportunities to buy California-grown farm products that are produced under the most stringent food safety, employment and environmental rules in the world.”
After the California Senate passed the bill in August, Ben Dobbe, COO and senior sales executive of Holland America Flowers in Nipomo, California, told E-Brief editors the bill could ultimately hurt employees “big time.”
Dobbe explained that if the bill passes, employees “will not be allowed to work more than 55 hours per week in 2017, not more than 50 hours in 2018, not more than 45 hours in 2019 and not more than 40 hours in 2020,” he explained. “We cannot afford to pay any overtime, so we cannot allow any of our employees to work any overtime hours.”
Coupled with the effects of the minimum wage increase, he added, “the bottom line for our employees, and likely for employees on most other farms, is that they will lose working hours gradually over the next four years to a 40-hour work week in 2020.”
