Overtime for farmworkers bill nearing vote

Good morning! It’s almost Friday and almost the end of session, with legislators hard at work. 

After a staged, 24-hour hunger strike, proponents of a bill to increase overtime pay for farmworkers announced on Wednesday the once-dead measure will be on the Senate floor next week. 

The hunger strike was designed link the legislators’ sacrifice of food with the farmworkers’ sacrifice of some overtime pay while plucking the food, bringing attention to the issue in the process.

As the eight or so hunger strikers broke their fast, the bill’s sponsor, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez tweeted — after handing out bread — that Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon reportedly agreed to call the bill to the floor on Monday (a de Leon spokesman could not immediately confirm the timing). 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• When the mayor of South El Monte resigned last week after admitting to taking bribes for seven years, it highlighted the wave of local corruption that’s plagued cities in Los Angeles County over the past few years. CalWatchdog has more. 
• “Two Democratic lawmakers unveiled a $7.4-billion transportation plan late Wednesday, the latest effort to break through a yearlong logjam over the state’s funding woes,” which includes a 17-cent-per-gallon hike in the gas tax. The Los Angeles Times has more.  
• “A vehicle trade-in program for low-income families and projects in poor communities would be among the chief recipients of money from California’s cap-and-trade program under a Senate proposal unveiled on Wednesday amid an attempt to win enough votes to extend the climate program,” writes The Sacramento Bee. 
• A roundup of legislative action from the Senate yesterday includes a bill requiring bartenders and servers to take a responsible beverage servers course. Capital Public Radio has more. 
• “Nearly three-quarters of California’s previously uninsured adults have gained health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act — and most of them, like last year, say their health care needs are being met,” writes The San Jose Mercury News. 

Assembly:

• In at 10 a.m. Two hearings.

Senate:

• In at 10 a.m. One hearing on gambling legislation. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced.

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Obamacare has largely been in effect for more than two years, but it wasn’t until Jan. 1 that employers with 50 to 99 employees were required to provide insurance. In 2015, the cutoff was 100 employees. This hits both farm labor contractors and smaller farmers who do their own hiring, who tend to have much less financial reserves than large agribusiness farms to fall back on to deal with additional costs and often smaller profit margins.

KQED looked at the issue last week:

Farm labor contractors who must now offer their workers health insurance are complaining loudly about the cost in their already low-margin business.

 

Some are also concerned that the forms they must file with the federal government under the Affordable Care Act will bring immigration problems to the fore: about half of the farm labor workforce in the U.S. is undocumented.

 

“There’s definitely going to be some repercussions to it,” says Jesse Sandoval, a farm labor contractor based in Stockton. “I think there’s going to be some things that cannot be ignored.”

 

Sandoval has about 100 workers on his payroll. When farmers need a crew to pick cherries or pumpkins or asparagus, they call him to send the workers. He needs to offer insurance this year, and he’s smarting at the price tag. At $300 a month per employee, he’s looking at a $30,000 monthly bill. …  “The numbers aren’t there. My margin is 10 percent. And I have to increase expenses 10 percent? Well, that doesn’t work.”

Workers struggle with their share of cost

But under Obamacare, the cost of health insurance isn’t entirely borne by employers. The 2010 federal law allows requiring workers to pay up to 9.5 percent of their income to cover the coast of health premiums.

As with small farmers, that’s a cut on the margins that makes life rough for low-paid agricultural workers. As KQED notes …

… for farmworkers who pick oranges or peaches for $10 an hour, [the premium cost is] still too much.

 

Agostin Garcia says the two contractors he works for near Fresno offered him insurance directly. But when he saw the price tag, he turned them both down.

 

“For me, I’m the only one in my house who works. There’s five of us in the family,” he says in Spanish. “It just wouldn’t work. Either I pay for health insurance, or I pay the rent and utilities.”

Grim quality of life for farmworkers

And that rent is often for housing that is in awful condition, according to a 2014 report by the California Rural Legal Assistance group. In These Times offered this summary:

Even today, however, surveys and field reports have revealed that a large portion of workers are squeezed into essentially unlivable spaces. Some dilapidated apartments and trailer parks lack plumbing or kitchen facilities, much less any modicum of privacy; others are exposed to toxic pesticide contamination or fetid waste dumps.

 

Workers can “live in a single-family dwelling with perhaps a dozen to 20 [people] crowding in,” [report author Don] Villarejo says. In some residences, “mattresses are lined up against the wall because during the daylight hours you could not be able to walk through the rooms owing to all the mattresses on the floor at that time.”

Though premium costs may strain the budget of impoverished farmworkers’ families, the Affordable Care Act retains the passionate support of the United Farmworkers Union as a huge improvement over previous health insurance programs for agriculture workers.

Former UFW Vice President Dolores Huerta has used 2016 Republican presidential candidates’ opposition to Obamacare to argue this shows they hate Latinos — to the annoyance of one of California’s most prominent Latino journalists, Carlsbad-based Ruben Navarrette Jr., an unpredictable moderate whose syndicated column is carried by the Washington Post Writers Group.