On first impression, the fight for farmworker overtime In Oregon looks like a struggle to claim 20th Century labor standards for a historically marginalized workforce. True enough.
But it’s also another example of how blue state legislatures have begun to use their lawmaking powers to improve conditions for workers in every nook of the 21st Century economy.
As legislators enacted HB 4002, I see more than a potential win for some 86,000 farmworkers in Oregon. I see a new path to make jobs better for working people – a path that diverges from an outmoded 1930s bargaining structure that makes little sense today.
There was a time when some labor unions were wary of legislating terms of employment for private sector workers. They wanted to bargain for the “union advantage” and let workers come to them for the benefits.
That way of thinking persisted, even as union membership declined.
By the mid-1990s, I was still hearing concerns from older union leaders about efforts to raise the state’s minimum wage, as if gains from legislation would somehow compete with gains from bargaining.
But as private sector unions shrank and public sector unions grew, the political organizing tactics of the latter began to pay dividends for workers that far exceeded what could be accomplished in isolated bargaining units.
The union movement in Oregon managed to secure increases...
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