Eltopia, Wash. — For Patricia Mendoza, working overtime was just a way of life.
During harvest season, she could put in 70 hours a week preparing the fields, planting seeds, and harvesting produce at Schreiber Farms in southeastern Washington state.
So she was happy when she learned that starting in 2022, she would be paid an overtime wage like workers in other industries.
In the United States, hourly workers have the right to earn 1.5 times their regular wage when they work more than 40 hours in a week. But under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, agricultural workers are excluded from those protections, a relic of a Jim Crow-era compromise.
In 2021, Washington state passed legislation to level the playing field. Starting last year, farmworkers were eligible for some overtime pay. By 2024, they will finally join other workers in earning time-and-a-half after they reach 40 hours in a week.
For Mendoza, the change brought so much promise.
"I told Alan, 'You're going to have to pay us a lot of overtime!'" Mendoza says in Spanish about her longtime boss Alan Schreiber, who owns Schreiber Farms.
However, it has not turned out that way.
Washington's overtime law included a three-year phase-in, meant to ease the process. Last year, overtime pay kicked in after 55 hours a week. This year, the threshold is 48 hours, and next year it drops to 40.
Schreiber says already, he cannot afford to pay overtime. Instead, he's brought in additional workers to...
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