This is the last day of the California legislative session and we need your help now! AB 1313, by Assemblymember Michael Allen (D-Santa Rosa), is United Farm Workers-sponsored bill to grant overtime pay for farm workers after eight hours a day or 40 hours a week. AB 1313 needs a few more votes to make it off the state Assembly floor and go to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk.
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 eight-hour overtime. 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 most farm workers are Latino.
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. Please help the UFW get AB 1313 over this last hurdle and to the governor.
Arturo S. Rodriguez, President
United Farm Workers of America