Farmers who oppose these bills testify they have laborers’ best interests in mind, but the campesinos tell a different story
State Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis (R-Millersburg) knows what’s best for workers on her family’s Linn County farm, she told her fellow Oregon lawmakers March 8.
One thing they neither want nor need, Boshart Davis testified before the House Business and Labor Committee, is the same overtime compensation guaranteed to practically every other worker in the United States.
“Agriculture is simply different,” she said. “Anyone who has ever worked in ag knows this. There are lots of reasons, but for us, it revolves around the weather. We have a small window to do a lot of work. We can have a crop ruined overnight. We maximize every hour we can to get the work done. Those who choose this job, this career or this life know and understand this. It’s truly not for everyone.”
After 15 years working in the fields, Minerva Vasquez knows very well agriculture is different. For her and her family, it’s not a career or lifestyle choice. It’s survival.
“During the harvest season, we work up to 10 hours a day, sometimes starting at 5 in the morning, including on the weekends,” she told committee members during the same hearing. “It’s pretty difficult physically because we have to wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning to get ready for work. We’re exposed to different things like extreme weather conditions and toxic pesticides.”
The overtime pay proposed in House Bill 2358 seems a small request for the people who live on minimum wage so they can help put food on other people’s tables, Vasquez said. “We’re trying to cover our basic needs with very few resources and many limitations for our future,” she said. “Having overtime resources is very important for our families.”
Dozens of Oregon farmers testified this session against H.B. 2538, most of them claiming to have the best interests of their workers at heart. They argued providing overtime compensation would force them to limit workers’ hours and pay.
The farmers who testified had something else in common. None of them evidently came from the impoverished Latino farmworker families they purported to champion. The people they talked about, the people supposedly motivating their concern, told very different stories.
STREET ROOTS NEWS: Oregon farmworkers lack safety net as pandemic threatens jobs, health (from April 2020)
Marela León testified March 29 that she began working in the fields 17 years ago and already has the body of an elderly woman. She tested positive for COVID-19 three months ago. “I have aftereffects I still feel now, like headaches, stomach and chest pains,” León said.
“For many years, I’ve worked earning the minimum wage, doing very heavy work and working long hours and even without having my rights respected,” she told the Business and Labor Committee. “Farmworkers work under very difficult conditions, even under the conditions of the bosses. We suffer many injustices, and out of fear, we do not say anything.”
Life on farmworker wages leaves her living day to day, she added. “I could not save because I could not earn enough. I am worried about my future. Because we have no retirement and less financial aid, this law will help us pay for our daily expenses, rent, food and bills.”
Many bills before the Legislature directly and profoundly affect Oregon’s estimated 174,000 farmworkers, the majority of whom come from low-income Latino families. Most of the voices speaking about all this proposed legislation come from legislators, lawyers, lobbyists, activists, social agencies and businesses.
BILL TRACKER: 2021 legislation affecting Oregon’s farmworkers and low-income Latino community
Raul Esparza wants lawmakers to know what agriculture work is truly like. He spends his days feeding livestock.
“My shift is from 5 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., approximately, or until I finish feeding all of the livestock, which there are approximately 40,000 head of livestock, and this is six days a week,” he said in written testimony to the Business and Labor Committee on March 8.
“On holidays, Saturdays and Sundays, I work between 11 and 12 hours a day,” he said.
“For me and my family, and so many other workers that are in the same situation in the state of Oregon, the payment of overtime would be an improvement to our economy as well as an act of social justice,” he added.
Social justice dominated Cindy Avila’s comments when she testified March 25 before the House Judiciary Committee on House Bill 3265, which would prohibit government agencies and local police from working and communicating with federal immigration agents.
The bill means a lot to her family, Avila told lawmakers.
“My life has been shaped by my campesino/farmworker/immigrant parents,” she said. “Our story is one of great defiance and dogged determination in the face of great odds. It’s a struggle of trying to succeed in a new country with little more than modest means, big hearts and a willingness to succeed.”
Avila said she realized she and her family were living in the country without legal permission when she was in second grade. “Even though I didn’t have academic language to describe the systemic factors of this fraught situation, I felt and continue to feel its impact,” she said.
Life during the COVID-19 pandemic makes living in a mixed-status family even more precarious, she testified.
“The virus has shed new light on the depths of the disparities of our marginalized communities of color, and the increased collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement in our nation has resulted in a flux of racial profiling,” she said.
“I’ve seen the devastating effects of this increased collaboration and presence in my role as an educator here in Oregon,” Avila added. “Many parents and families are often afraid to attend school functions or obtain valuable community resources that affect the social, emotional and academic learning and development of children. These are members of our community who have resided in Oregon for many generations and are fundamental to the fabric of our society.”
H.B. 3265 is one of the measures members of the Woodburn-based farmworkers union PCUN (Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, or Northwest Tree planters and Farmworkers United) are tracking this session.
“Public records back up what community members have been saying for years,” PCUN leaders posted on their Facebook page March 25. “Police, sheriffs, jails, district attorneys, probation officers and others routinely collaborate with ICE officers to help them identify, locate and arrest community members.
“We’re all Oregonians, no matter where we were born or how we came here,” the statement added. “Yet holes in Oregon’s sanctuary law are allowing state and local government agencies to routinely assist ICE agents in targeting and unjustly arresting immigrant Oregonians.”
Martha Sonato, PCUN’s political director, told Street Roots that union members also advocate passage of House Bill 2819, which would allow otherwise qualified individuals to claim earned income tax credit under an individual taxpayer identification number in lieu of a Social Security number.
The bill could bring in an average of $3,000 per qualified family, Sonato said.
“That can make a huge impact on a family that’s low income,” she said, adding union leaders have been working on the bill with Gov. Kate Brown for the last two years. “That impact is even greater if people are part of a mixed-status household because one person who is undocumented can make the entire household ineligible.”
House Bill 3073 would make the union’s employment-related day-care program more accessible by increasing eligibility to an entire year — an important factor for migrant families. PCUN leaders are pushing for child care that is universally accessible. The bill is a step forward, Sonato said. “Child care is a very hot topic right now, especially with the pandemic,” she said. “We’re definitely committed to getting closer to that vision.”
One bill PCUN leaders pushed this session already died in committee. House Bill 2205 would have allowed individuals and groups of plaintiffs to bring legal action in the name of the state to recover civil penalties for violations of state law.
The bill never made it through a March 17 work session before the House Subcommittee on Civil Law.
“We have a lot of great labor policies, but unfortunately, a lot of them aren’t being enforced,” Sonato said. “Especially with the pandemic, we heard so many stories from people about workplace violations.”
However, a legislative work group will revisit the bill at the end of the session. “We’ll be working on that through the interim,” she said.
PCUN leaders continue to track House Bill 2096, which would provide potential developers tax incentives to construct low-income farmworker housing. However, Sonato said the bill isn’t one of the union’s major priorities. It might help provide housing in the long run if developers take the incentive.
Margaret Solle Salazar, the executive director of the Oregon Housing and Community Services Department, was bullish on the idea when she testified before the House Revenue Committee on March 25.
“This is a proven state income tax credit given to those who incur cost to construct, install, acquire or rehabilitate housing for the agricultural workforce,” Salazar told committee members.
She cited the findings of the Oregon COVID-19 Farmworker Survey Research Team (a consortium of 11 farmworker organizations and academic researchers from Portland State University, Oregon State University and the University of Oregon) to illustrate the critical need for low-income migrant housing.
Ronald Mize, an ethnic studies professor at Oregon State University, has studied Latino agricultural labor for the past 25 years and was part of the research team. The findings are truly dramatic, he told members of the House Business and Labor Committee March 29.
“COVID is really exacerbating what we already see as the vulnerabilities many farmworkers experience in the state of Oregon,” he testified. “In the survey we conducted, the majority of farmworkers — 52% — lost months or weeks of work, 12% lost days. Less than a third were not impacted by COVID.”
Farmworkers are going to find it hard to rebound from the pandemic, he added.
“When you compound that with the fires in Southern Oregon and the fires that affected the Willamette Valley as well, we’re seeing farmworkers losing wages this year in the height of COVID that they’re never going to be able to make back,” said Mize.
More than 54% of farmworker families regularly relied on food banks during the past 12 months, according to the study.
“Families are just barely getting by,” Mize said. “You add the compounding impacts of COVID, and many families currently aren’t getting by. We’re still seeing families struggling to get back to work to this day.”
Farmworker Lino Juares told members of the Business and Labor Committee in written testimony March 8 that such hardships make House Bill 2358 and the overtime compensation it promises essential.
“I support overtime because, primarily, farm work is very difficult,” he said. “If I could earn overtime pay, it would help me and my family economically. My shift is from 5 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., which is an average 11 hours a day, five or six days a week, depending on how much work there is to get done.”
Maria Calderon, a farmworker for 20 years, told committee members overtime pay would help her family tremendously.
“I have also worked in many different harvests and never as a farmworker have I been paid overtime,” Calderon said. “I think that it is time that farmworkers in the state of Oregon get paid overtime hours.”
Rep. Boshart Davis said the bill simply doesn’t work. “Farmers can’t afford this,” she said.
“This bill hurts those who beg me for as many hours as they can get,” she added. “If this bill passes, I will have to split the workforce and will be forced to limit hours to 40 hours per week. It will take extra work on my part with scheduling to do it. With the global competition forces, in addition to the highest regulatory and costly burden in the United States, and an increasing minimum wage, it simply is not an option to pay overtime.”
Mark Brenner, an economist at the University of Oregon’s Labor, Education and Research Project, said Boshart Davis’ laments sound eerily familiar. “This is a tradition that goes way back,” he told Business and Labor Committee members March 29.
“I really have to try to separate some of the fact from the fiction,” said Brenner, who has been studying wage policies for the past 25 years. “At least since 1912, when Massachusetts enacted the country’s first minimum-wage law, employers have appeared before committees just like yours and claimed the sky will fall if you enact labor standards of any sort.
“Aside from the restaurant industry, no one’s cried wolf more than our growers and agricultural industry lobbyists,” he added. “In 1975, when California was considering banning short-handled hoes, which they eventually did, a very prominent grower said this will bankrupt our industry. And of course, it didn’t.”
When Washington state lawmakers required overtime for dairy workers, dairy owners warned they would go bankrupt. “But to date, as far as I know, the Washington State Dairy Federation hasn’t identified a single dairy employer that has gone out of business as a result of paying overtime,” Brenner said.
“The reason for all of this is fairly straightforward because labor costs are a small share of agricultural employers’ overall costs,” he said. “Overtime coverage for farmworkers will not significantly raise costs for employers, but it will be a tremendous benefit for farmworkers. The relevant empirical research shows this is true.”
Last year, according to Brenner, economists at the University of Massachusetts estimated paying farmworkers overtime would increase the cost of labor by 5% — or 1.6% of the average farm’s revenue.
“In plain terms, this is about seeing the cost of an average gallon of milk go from $3.50 to $3.52 or a pound of asparagus go from $2.50 to $2.51 or a pound of blueberries going from $2 to $2.02,” he said.
“By contrast, the benefits for farmworkers are very large,” he added. “For those who are working overtime hours, their pay would go up by about 16.5%. Here in Oregon, the costs are likely to be even lower because labor costs are actually a smaller share of overall agricultural operations costs than our East Coast neighbors.”
State Rep. Andrea Salinas (D-Portland) testified March 8 that she heard other familiar echoes in opposition to paying farmworkers overtime.
“We cannot have a discussion about overtime pay for farmworkers without acknowledging the racist and exclusionary origins of this policy,” Salinas said.
Farmworkers were explicitly excluded from overtime regulations in the 1938 federal Fair Labor Standards Act as well as the 1938 Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers Protection Act. In the 1930s, more than 80% of farmworkers were Black, and white Southerners at the time made it very clear Black farmworkers were excluded to promote white supremacy.
“The agricultural sector in the United States is racist and honestly rooted in white supremacy and slavery,” University of Oregon student Odalis Aguilar-Aguilar testified March 29. “This country has actively sought out members of minority communities to labor at jobs which seem undesirable for others.”
PCUN Executive Director Reyna Lopez said such exploitation has to end.
“The nature of the farm work and its dependence on the season is not an excuse to refuse agricultural workers the right to overtime pay,” she testified March 29. “Every single industry from construction to retail to landscaping has peaks in their industry time. They have to hire more workers, and yes, they have to pay them overtime pay when they work extended hours.
“As a society, we’ve been accustomed to profiting and benefitting out of the expense of farmworkers, and it’s really shameful to hear opposing arguments about how this would cost business thousands,” she added. “I urge you to look at this from the perspective of the workers.”
Rep. Teresa Alonso Leon (D-Woodburn) fought back tears March 29 as she talked about her own family’s experience in the field.
“From the time our family moved to this country, I remember waking up as a little girl in our car, being surrounded by fields of fruits and vegetables,” Alonso Leon said. “I saw my parents hunched all day in the sun and under the hot rays of summer afternoons. Although I was in elementary school, I understood how much our family struggled. Working as migrant farmworkers afforded our family a single bedroom in someone else’s apartment or a tiny studio apartment.”
She watched as other children enjoyed their summer vacations.
“Every summer, instead of summer camps or summer fun, we packed our little car up with our entire family around 5 in the morning as we searched for a berry patch for all of us to work in,” she said. “I knew they couldn’t afford to buy me school clothes or my school supplies or anything I dreamed about having as a young person, so I worked alongside my parents in the fields to help us get by.”
All farmworkers want is what others call the American Dream, Alonso Leon said.
“We all want to achieve the American Dream, but how can the American Dream be achieved equitably if we don’t acknowledge just how invaluable our farmworkers are in our country, especially here in Oregon, by offering them overtime pay like we do with all other jobs?”
Daysi Bedolla Sotelo told committee members in written testimony March 8 that all she wants after spending her entire life in the fields is a little equity.
“Farmworkers have put their lives on the line for the past year,” she said. “They have not been able to work at home, and are constantly being left behind. By moving this bill forward we will ensure that they have a greater benefit for not only themselves but their families as well.”
Rep. Rick Ruiz (D-Gresham) told the Business and Labor Committee March 8 that he hopes members listen to the testimony of the campesinos.
“Ranging from child labor laws to medical and family leave and worker safety standards, good thing happen when we listen to our workforce,” he said.
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