April 14, 2024
Fairness for Farmworkers Coalition to visit Massachusetts State House April 16 to ask legislators to Support the Fairness for Farmworkers Act
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Agricultural workers in Massachusetts continue to be excluded from wage-and-hour laws.
Massachusetts law still allows farmworkers to earn $8.00 an hour, work all farming season with no required day of rest, and not earn overtime pay despite working on average 60 or more hours a week–and it is perfectly legal. The Fairness for Farmworkers Coalition, with member groups including Center West Justice Center, Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, and ACLU of Massachusetts, aims to change that unjust reality through proposed statewide legislation.
The Fairness for Farmworker Act (FFA), Bill H. 2812, S. 1837, is sponsored by Senator Adam Gomez and Rep. Carlos Gonzalez, with overwhelming support by Senator Paul Mark. “Our farmworker community is grateful to Sen. Gomez and Rep. Gonzalez, and Sen. Mark, for seeing our circumstances and standing with us as we try to achieve recognition and respect for farmworkers here in Massachusetts and set an example for other states across our nation,” said Claudia Rosales, Co-Director of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center. The FFA will remedy the historical injustice and nationwide exclusion of farmworkers from state and federal wage-and-hour laws and include farmworkers under the protections of state minimum wage and overtime laws, provide farmworkers with critical opportunities to rest and recover from their difficult, skilled manual labor, and create a tax credit to help farmers pay their employees more equitably for their work.
“The time has come to recognize the invaluable contributions farmworkers make to the Massachusetts economy, abolish the $8.00 substandard minimum wage that has kept farmworkers impoverished, and allow these workers to earn overtime. Massachusetts farmworkers are employed only seasonally, can earn a subminimum wage, are except from overtime, and as a result their families live in severe poverty — at rates two times higher than the statewide average for other workers in Massachusetts,” say Claudia Quintero and Maya McCann, Staff Attorneys for the Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers Project at Central West Justice Center in Springfield, MA; a result due in large part to the legal exclusions in state law where the minimum wage for farmworkers is 47 percent lower than the state minimum wage.
The Fairness for Farmworkers Coalition will pay the Massachusetts State House a visit on April 16, 2024, to speak with legislators about why the FFA is an important bill and should receive their support. The FFA is currently before the Joint Committee on Revenue where its reporting out date has been extended until April 30, 2024. The Coalition hopes that the Committee will see that this bill is important in bringing Massachusetts on equal footing with other states across the country that already provide and extend overtime and minimum wage protections to farmworkers.
The Fairness for Farmworkers Coalition is a group of organizations and individuals advocating for legislation to improve the lives of farmworkers in the Commonwealth. For more information, please visit https://www.fairnessforfarmworkersma.org/