More than 74 years after enactment of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act granting wage, hour and overtime rights to nearly all American workers, farm workers are still excluded from receiving overtime pay after eight hours a day or 40 hours a week. That exclusion was due to nothing more than racism. It was the price President Franklin D. Roosevelt paid to win the support of Southern lawmakers in 1938, when most farm workers were African Americans. Today, of course, most farm workers are Latino.
On Monday, Aug. 20, the state Senate passed AB 1313, by Assemblymember Michael Allen (D-Santa Rosa). It would end the exclusion of farm workers from overtime pay after eight hours in California. AB 1313 is expected to pass the Assembly and soon go to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk.
Farm workers do not belong to a lower class of workers. They are men and women who take some of the hardest jobs in America, often for pay and under conditions other American workers won’t tolerate.
Now is the time to finally end once and for all this vestige of the caste system for farm workers. The shameful exclusion of farm workers from overtime after eight hours was wrong in 1938. It is wrong now. The time has come for it to end. Gov. Brown will soon be able to do just that.
Arturo S. Rodriguez, President
United Farm Workers of America