(TNS) — Editor's Note: This story is part of the Central Valley News Collaborative — a bilingual, community journalism project funded by the Central Valley Community Foundation and with technology and training support from Microsoft Corp. The collaboration includes The Fresno Bee, Valley Public Radio, Vida en el Valle, Radio Bilingüe and the Institute for Media & Public Trust at Fresno State.
For the past two decades during the harvest season, 58-year-old farmworker Lourdes Cárdenas would wake up at 3 a.m. to get dressed, say her daily prayers and prepare lunch before driving an hour south from her home in Calwa to a farm in Huron. She'd pick crops like cherries, nectarines, and peaches from daybreak until sundown — at least 10 hours a day, six days a week.
There would be days where she wouldn't get home until 7 p.m or 8 p.m., depending on traffic, she said. For many of those years, she was paid minimum wage. There was no overtime pay.
"It's a long work day," she said in Spanish. "I'd get home very late, exhausted. It's very hard work being in the fields."
For years, hundreds of thousands of farmworkers toiling in California's agricultural heartland weren't entitled to overtime pay unless they worked more than 10 hours a day. But that has changed due to a 2016 state law that's been gradually implemented over four years. As of Jan. 1, California law requires that employers with 26 or more employees pay overtime wages to farmworkers after eight hours a day or 40 hours a...
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