The free market wins!
Is anyone surprised?
In 2021, Washington state passed legislation to level the playing field. The law began phasing in last year, and by 2024, farmworkers will finally join other workers in earning time-and-a-half after they reach 40 hours in a week.
For [agricultural worker Patricia] Mendoza, the change brought so much promise.
"I told [farm owner] Alan [Schreiber], 'You're going to have to pay us a lot of overtime!'" Mendoza says in Spanish about her longtime boss Alan Schreiber, who owns Schreiber Farms.
However, it has not turned out that way.
Of course it didn't. Agricultural workers put in very long hours. Many of them sometimes approach double a 40-hour workweek, at least during the busiest seasons. If you're paying a worker time-and-a-half on a full-time pay sheet, you are spending a lot of money. And if you're a farm owner, you have a lot of people to pay at that rate.
So owners are responding predictably. In this case, Schreiber had to bring in more workers to "spread the hours around." Think about that: It's cheaper for this guy to bring in a bunch more employees than it is to try to meet the state's new hourly wage mandates.
And we're not even at a 40-hour overtime threshold yet! The overtime law is being gradually phased in, and the higher wages as of yet only kick in at 48 hours. And this farmer still can't afford to meet that requirement. How bad do you think it will get at 40 hours?
In many cases we're talking serious change here. Schreiber, for instance, offers $30 an hour to some of the more skilled workers. That's great money. It's hard work, yes, but the pay is very good. Yet $45 an hour is a different ball game: That kind of huge additional cost can quickly eat into a farm's operations and pull the rug out from under everything.
During the busy season, workers could take home up to $1,400 a week. Yet those days are gone:
[N]ow, with workers capped at 48 hours a week, no one is even reaching $1,000.
This is what happens when you tip from basic regulation (ensuring fair play) to totalitarian regulation that rigs the game. It never works (look at what happened to jobs after Obama required healthcare insurance for employees working more than 30 hours a week).
Patricia Mendoza was, at first, all for the new law. Now she has a different opinion:
"Take away the overtime," she says.
That's up to state Democrats.
