Keene, CA–United Farm Workers President Arturo S. Rodriguez issued the following statement after the California Assembly in a 34-33 vote on Friday, rejected AB 1313. The measure would have given farm workers the right to receive overtime pay for working more than eight-hours in a day or 40 hours in a week. The bill was sponsored by Assemblyman Michael Allen (D-Santa Rosa) and supported by the United Farm Workers.
"On Labor Day, every Democrat will give a speech memorializing what labor has won for America’s workers. It’s obvious by their votes on the farm worker overtime legislation that only some of them mean it.
AB 1313 was about equal rights and justice. Farm workers were specifically excluded from the minimum wage and overtime protections of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which extended these rights to almost every other worker in the U.S. Most farm workers in the 1930s were African-Americans. Today, most farm workers are Latinos.
With so much talk about the middle class and the one-percent of Americans who possess much of the country’s wealth, it’s easy to forget about those at the bottom of America’s workforce. Every other worker in the U.S. has the right to overtime pay after working eight-hours in a day or 40 hours in a week. Wasn’t it just to extend it to this last segment of the work force?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of terrible reasons why farm workers have been excluded for 74 years. Often people ask us why? As should now be apparent, Democrats are just as vulnerable to big money as Republicans are."
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