Seasonal workers sue agricultural giant

Far too many farmworkers tell the same story: a recruiter promises them steady work and good pay, only to leave them more or less stranded in terrible living conditions with little work.  This story reported by The Monitor is just one example of a much larger trend.

As a day laborer, Raul Salas would often have to wait for odd jobs that were never steady and barely allowed him to make a living.

So he says he jumped at the opportunity when, last year on a June day, a fellow laborer named Pensamiento offered him a seasonal job detasseling corn in Indiana.

"He came up to me over there," said Salas, pointing to a spot in downtown Brownsville where day laborers were known to gather to wait for work. "He said it would be really good work for me."

Pensamiento took him and others from around the Rio Grande Valley to the Weslaco Branch of Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., an Iowa-based corn seed producer, Salas recounted, speaking in Spanish. There, a contractor named Juan San Miguel persuaded them to go to the fields near Warsaw, Ind., with the promise of high wages and substantial bonuses, he said.

But Salas, 69, is now one of 20 migrant workers who this month filed a federal lawsuit against San Miguel and Pioneer, which they said failed to pay them minimum wage, took illegal deductions from their wages and forced them to live in rundown, overcrowded hotel rooms.

Learn more about workers and wages here.

CA Governor vetoes farmworkers overtime bill

From the San Francisco Chronicle story:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill Wednesday that would have made California's hourly agricultural employees the only farmworkers in the nation to receive overtime pay after 40 hours a week or eight hours a day.

In vetoing the measure, Schwarzenegger cited the fragile economy and said that extending overtime protections could put farms out of business, or result in lower paychecks for agricultural workers because farmers would hire more people and cut hours to avoid paying overtime.

The bill's author, Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter (Kern County), blasted the veto. In a statement released by his office, Florez said the Republican governor sided "with a labor practice derived from the segregationist South," and that the veto means it is "acceptable to treat one class of people differently from all others."

It's a classic example of agricultural exceptionalism - the practice of treating farmworkers differently than workers in other industries.  

Below is commentary by the LA Times:

It's not really news when a bill fails to become a law in Sacramento. In this age of partisan gridlock, plenty of good ideas are never enacted.

Still, one bill that made it to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk last week, only to be killed by his veto, is worth looking at for what it tells us about how hard it is to clean out even antiquated moral rot, so long as powerful interests profit from it.

The bill, written by San Joaquin Valley Democratic state Sen. Dean Florez and passed by both houses of the Legislature on party-line votes, would have made agricultural workers, just like everybody else, eligible for overtime pay if they worked more than an eight-hour day. Under current law, farmworkers can collect overtime only if they've put in more than 10 hours in the fields. Florez's bill would also have given workers the right to take off one day out of every seven.

At first glance, and second, and third, the bill looks to be an economic and ethical no-brainer. But in his veto message, the governor noted that he didn't want to put the state's agribusinesses at a competitive disadvantage, which could end up costing us jobs.  

Huh? We enforce overtime law on nonagricultural employers who can relocate their businesses to other climes. And farms, it's safe to say, are far less of a flight risk than other enterprises.

More fundamentally, overtime laws exist because we believe the risk of injury and wear and tear to workers rises if they work past a reasonable limit, and because we believe people's lives should include time for rest, family, socializing and off-the-job endeavors. The right to take off one day a week is as old as the Biblical injunction to keep the Sabbath.