Last year, New York joined a handful of other states, including California, Minnesota, Hawaii, Washington, and Maryland in granting overtime pay to farm workers. Yet as the law took effect on January 1, 2020, there was already a hitch: Workers would only receive time-and-a-half pay after they had already worked a 60-hour week, 20 hours higher than the threshold that governs virtually all other categories of employees in the United States.

The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act established several of the workplace protections that continue to define work in the U.S. today: The minimum wage, the 40-hour work week, overtime pay, a ban on child labor. Arguing against the bill, Senator “Cotton” Ed Smith of South Carolina said that “any man on this floor who has sense enough to read the English language knows that the main object of this bill is, by human legislation, to overcome the splendid gifts of God to the South.” Farm workers were excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) back in 1938, the result of a political compromise to secure the votes of Southern Democrats who represented farmers who relied on cheap Black labor. Decades later, the vast majority of states have still not extended overtime pay to farm workers.

Now, for the first time in years, it seems possible that efforts to reverse the Depression-era carveout might gain political traction at the federal level. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has twice introduced legislation, dubbed the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, which would mandate overtime for farm workers and end a handful of additional minimum-wage and overtime exemptions. Her home state of California passed overtime pay for farm workers in 2016. Its plan involves gradually reducing the hourly threshold by five hours per year until it hits 40 hours in 2022. President-elect Joe Biden endorsed the policy during his campaign.

Read the full article about overtime for farmworkers by H. Claire Brown at The Counter.