End the Discriminatory Treatment of Farmworkers
in America’s Employment Laws.

1. Overtime pay, under federal law, does not apply to farmworkers. They deserve time-and-one-half pay after 40 hours per week, like everyone else. California farmworkers receive overtime after 10 hours per day or 6 days in a week.
2. Federal child labor law permits children to work at younger ages and at more hazardous tasks in agriculture than in other, less dangerous occupations. Farmworker children deserve at least the same protection as other children.
3. Access to sanitary facilities at work – toilets, handwashing facilities and drinking water – should occur at all farms. The ability to wash one’s hands with soap and water is one of the great health advances, limiting the spread of disease. Access to toilets during work is not only a serious health issue, but also a question of human dignity. Yet an annual rider on OSHA’s appropriations severely restricts the "field sanitation standard" to farms with 11 or more employees.
4. Unemployment insurance compensation is denied to many seasonal farmworkers despite their need for such coverage. The Unemployment Advisory Council appropriately recommended that Congress eliminate the Federal Unemployment Tax Act’s exceptions for agricultural employers, including those which pay less than $20,000 in payroll in a calendar quarter, or use farm labor contractors (growers could use crewleaders but should be jointly liable).
5. Workers’ compensation is unavailable to many injured farmworkers due to state laws that exclude or discriminate against farm work, even though farmworkers cannot afford health care and suffer higher injury rates than most occupations.
6. Many farmworkers are excluded from the minimum wage of $5.15 per hour and other labor protections through various special exemptions for agriculture that should be ended. For example, the wage-hour laws exclude agricultural employers who did not, in a single calendar quarter during a year, use more than 500 man-days of farm labor (e.g., about 6 full-time workers during a 3-month season).
7. Federal law does not protect agricultural workers from retaliation against labor organizing and union membership. At a minimum, the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (AWPA) should prohibit employers from retaliating or discriminating against workers for their union membership, labor organizing or similar activities to protect workers’ interests.
8. Attorneys fees are available to most successful litigants workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act and civil rights law, but not to farmworkers under AWPA. Attorneys fees awards should be available to attract private attorneys to farmworker cases.
9. Guestworkers under the H-2A program are excluded from AWPA, the principal federal labor law for farmworkers. Consequently, H-2A workers are not entitled to disclosures of job terms during recruitment, transportation safety requirements, or access to federal courts. Such discrimination is an incentive for employers to replace U.S. workers with guestworkers, and violates NAFTA’s labor side agreement, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, which prohibits discrimination in labor laws against "migrant workers."