Farmworkers seek overtime protection

Most working-class people enjoy the benefits of overtime pay after eight hours in a day. The exception? Farmworkers who toil in the fields in blistering triple-digit heat.

California State Senator Dean Florez (D-Shafter) has had enough of that exclusion, which was established nearly 70 years ago. He’s introduced California  Senate Bill 1121,  that would grant standard overtime pay to the hundreds of thousands of farmworker men, women and teens. Currently, farmworkers are eligible for overtime after 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week under state law.

“I think it is wrong that we have laws that discriminate against the people who pick and pull crops in the fields by treating them different in terms of pay,” said the Senate Majority Leader whose grandparents worked in the fields.

The bill has passed the Senate and the Assembly and today was taken to the Governor’s office.

Several dozen farm laborers marched to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s office today to deliver a bill requiring overtime pay equity for farmworkers..

Florez was also joined by United Farm Workers president Arturo Rodriguez and Monsignor James Murphy from Sacramento’s Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament. The crowd knelt and prayed outside the governor’s first-floor office, then delivered the official copy of the bill to Schwarzenegger’s office.

Florez’s bill would lift a 1941 exemption in state labor code that excludes farmworkers from getting overtime pay after an eight-hour day or a 40-hour week.

In the photo. Brother Mark Schroeder.