Sponsors of a bill to raise the threshold for agriculture workers to receive overtime pay lowered that threshold slightly but otherwise held strong against an onslaught of criticism over the past two days and passed the bill through the Colorado Senate.
Senate Bill 121, which originally would have reset overtime thresholds for farmworkers to begin only once they’ve worked 60 hours in a week, now would set those thresholds at 56 hours instead. Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, the Denver Democrat who is cosponsoring the bill with Republican Senate Minority Leader Cleave Simpson of Alamosa, said he did not drop the threshold because he needed to do so to get votes but did it just because that seemed to be the fairest overtime starting point.
After two days of intense debate in the Senate in which opponents tried to strip away numerous provisions of the bill, it passed by a slim margin of 19-16, with seven Democrats joining all of the chamber’s Republicans in passing it. SB 121 now moves to the more progressive House, where it could face an even more uphill climb despite House Majority Whip Matthew Martinez, D-Monte Vista, sponsoring the bill.
SB 121 comes in reaction to farm operators and farm workers saying that employees are getting their hours cut after passage of a 2021 law that ended the agriculture industry from having to pay time-and-a-half to workers once they reached an overtime threshold. A Colorado Department of...
A local housing provider has cleared up misinformation circulating online about plans to house immigrants or migrants at a site in Grimsby. False claims shared on social media alleged that a devel...