This story was originally published on Civil Eats.
InIn 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.
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