California Passes Bill Raising Farm Worker Overtime Pay to Match Other Industries
California’s legislature has passed a bill ending a 78-year-old carve-out in labor law that has left farmworkers waiting longer than nearly any other category of employee to earn overtime pay — legislation that took two attempts, a failed vote, and a tense last-minute standoff to finally clear the Assembly.
A Carve-Out Dating Back to 1938
The exclusion AB 1066 closes traces back to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the same landmark law that established the federal minimum wage and standard overtime rules for the first time. Agricultural and domestic workers were carved out of the FLSA’s protections at the time — a compromise widely understood to reflect the racial politics of the era, since those two job categories were disproportionately held by Black and Mexican workers in the Jim Crow-era South whose inclusion Southern lawmakers in Congress were unwilling to support. Under California’s own labor code, that exclusion persisted for decades afterward: farmworkers only qualified for overtime pay after working 10 hours in a single day, rather than the standard 8-hour threshold that has applied to most other California workers since Labor Code §510 was established.
A Bill That Died Once Before Passing
AB 1066, authored by Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego, wasn’t the legislature’s first attempt at closing that gap this year. A nearly identical measure, AB 2757, failed on the Assembly floor in June by a vote of 38-35 — four votes short of the majority needed to pass, with seven members abstaining rather than casting a vote either way. Rather than abandon the effort, Gonzalez and her co-authors folded the same core provisions into AB 1066 and brought it back for a second attempt.
That second attempt very nearly stalled too. On August 25, tensions flared at the Capitol when the Assembly abruptly adjourned without taking up the bill at all, despite it being the day’s most anticipated item — a delay that suggested, according to contemporaneous Los Angeles Times reporting, that leadership was still short of the votes needed and wanted the weekend to work members over. United Farm Workers leaders, present at the Capitol, exchanged terse words with Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia of Coachella over the decision to wait rather than force a vote that day. The bill finally passed the Assembly on August 29, having already cleared the Senate on August 22.
What the Bill Actually Changes
AB 1066’s core mechanism is straightforward: it phases out agriculture’s special exemption from the state’s standard 8-hour-day, 40-hour-week overtime threshold, replacing it over several years with the same rules that already apply to most other California workers. The phase-in was structured deliberately gradually — full alignment with standard overtime rules wasn’t set to take effect until 2022 — a compromise aimed at giving agricultural employers time to adjust rather than imposing the change all at once.
Advocacy framing around the bill leaned heavily into its historical dimension. Think Progress described California as “poised to close a Jim Crow-era loophole,” while UFW President Arturo Rodriguez, in a statement issued from the union’s Keene headquarters, cast the fight in similarly historic terms once the bill reached the governor’s desk, framing it as ending “78 years of exclusion from overtime for farm workers.”
A Fight That Continued After Passage
Passage in the legislature didn’t settle the matter entirely — Governor Jerry Brown still needed to sign the bill, and his position remained a genuine open question through the final days of August, with the Sacramento Bee running a piece bluntly titled asking whether Brown would “help farmworkers, or stab them in the back.” Federal Labor Secretary Thomas Perez added his own public pressure that week, calling on Brown to sign the measure. Brown ultimately did sign AB 1066 on September 12, formally enacting the Phase-In Overtime for Agricultural Workers Act of 2016.
The bill’s aftermath would prove more contested than its passage. Years after implementation began, agricultural economists studying its early effects found a genuine, uncomfortable trade-off: overtime hours and total farmworker pay declined on average in the law’s first two years, as some employers responded to the higher overtime cost by simply limiting hours rather than paying the new premium — a pattern that would go on to shape a broader, ongoing debate over how to extend labor protections to agricultural work without inadvertently reducing the take-home pay of the workers those protections are meant to help.
For related coverage of labor rights and agricultural workers, see our piece on women in rural India’s expanding agricultural role, or browse our full Labor & Economy archive.