Farmworker Overtime Across the States
Across the United States today, well over a quarter of a million farmworkers go without any federal guarantee of overtime pay. For the majority of these workers, this lack of protection can result in laboring for fifty-five or sixty hour workweeks at straight pay. With no reform to farmworker overtime on the horizon in Congress, labor advocates have brought their overtime reform efforts to state capitols across the country. This article surveys the rights to agricultural overtime pay as they currently exist at state law in California, Minnesota, Hawaii, New York, and Massachusetts. These six statutory frameworks illustrate the spectrum of agricultural overtime policies in place across the country. *** In 1938, in the midst of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) into law. The legislation, which is still in force today, focuses on protecting the average American worker—it provides for a national minimum wage and requires overtime pay for those working beyond forty hours per week. Placed into the FLSA, however, is a provision excluding agricultural workers from the legal right to receive overtime pay. Since passing the FLSA, Congress has not removed that exclusion. Therefore, for American farmworkers, the legal right [read more]
