Farm bill hurts workers | Guest Opinion

“Make hay while the sun shines.”

Plenty of people know this phrase and have some vague idea that it’s about seizing opportunity in the limited time we have.

People like me who have experienced farming understand something more about it — namely, the urgency. Timing is all important in getting those crops in. Everything rides on it. Leave them in the field too long and they can rot or fall victim to pests or natural disasters such as hail and high winds.

Getting those crops in safely takes time: lots of it, in short order. Paul Harvey, in his famous “God made a farmer” speech noticed this.

The broadcaster said that an ideal farmer has to be “willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds.” During “planting time and harvest season,” this farmer might “finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, and then pain’n from tractor back, put in another seventy-two hours.”

Farmers on all but the smallest plots cannot do it alone. They need farm workers as well, who also work long hours in certain seasons.

The Washington state legislature is debating a bill that is about overtime pay for farm workers. The grand compromise that is being considered would shield farms from lawsuits related to a recent state Supreme Court decision that mandated overtime pay for dairy farm workers.

Without getting too deeply into that debate, from what I am hearing the legislators don’t really understand the nature of farm work or why some people would prefer it over other kinds of work.

People like Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Saldana, are trumpeting the Supreme Court ruling and this legislation as a victory for extending the “40-hour work week” into all Washington state farms, not just dairy. In some industries, that may indeed have been a triumph. But in farming it makes little sense.

I have learned that those states that mandate overtime pay for farm workers also took the nature of the work into account when they were passing their laws.

“There are six other states in the U.S. with agricultural overtime wage provisions. All of them have hours thresholds that are 48 hours or more or grant exemptions during growing and harvest seasons,” explains Pam Lewison of the Washington Policy Center.

As a farm worker myself, I know that if Washington state legislators don’t account for this with their current legislation, they could create real problems for current farm workers, who rely on lots of hours in certain seasons to make good money. Dairy farmers had to stop farm workers from working over 40 hours after the court decision. That hurt farm workers because it cut their pay. Many had to find a second part time job to make up the difference.

As a human resources professional for an Eastern Washington family farm, I know the reality of Washington farm life is this: Farmers have a hard time getting and keeping good workers. With the skills they pick up on farms, they can often get good welding, construction, and other jobs instead.

On the whole, Washington farmers have to pay their workers well to hang onto them — close to $20-an-hour on average. Also, it’s a global market for food, meaning that farmers can do little to push up the price of their produce. Before the recent ruling, farmers were already paying about as much as they could afford for help, and hoping the price of their milk and fruit and vegetables didn’t fall too low to stay in business.

What this all means is that the legislative details will make a huge difference. If legislators require overtime pay without any acknowledgment that farm work is different from other kinds of work, then we’ll get fewer hours for workers, of course, but also fewer farms, larger farms, more automation, and more distance from nature.

You see, the 40-hour work week may be a fine thing, indoors. But farming hours are set by nature, and that’s part of the attraction for many workers. Numerous experts have warned that American residents are too disconnected from nature. But not farm workers. They’re right there in the thick of it, learning from the land as much as profiting from it.

As the days stretch out, so does the work. As the light shrinks, many farm workers can take the significant gains that they made during planting and harvest seasons and do what they want: work lighter schedules, travel to visit family, or even get a start on their own future ventures.

My hope is that as legislators craft farming overtime legislation they take some time of their own, to understand the way of life they’re tinkering with.

This story was originally published April 9, 2021 at 11:05 AM with the headline "Farm bill hurts workers | Guest Opinion."