Weeks after , Colorado lawmakers narrowly passed legislation Thursday that would require many of those laborers to work more hours before they qualified for overtime.
A divided Colorado House approved on a 33-32 vote. The state Senate is expected to adopt changes made in the House and send the measure to Gov. Jared Polis, whose spokesman said he would sign it into law.
The bill would require that farmworkers reach 56 hours of work in a week before they qualify for overtime, an increase of eight hours in the threshold for those workers operating outside of peak harvesting seasons.
In both the House and the Senate, a majority of Democrats opposed the measure. It passed only with the unanimous support of Republican lawmakers, who are outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 in the legislature.
The bill was backed by the agricultural industry, which warned that several pressures — including increased labor costs — were economically squeezing Colorado’s farmers and ranchers. The bill’s supporters argued that farmers and ranchers have cut workers’ hours to limit overtime and that the state has lost some workers to neighboring states.
While few farmworkers testified on the measure during committee hearings, one, Mike Drieth, said he’d been sent home to keep him below the OT threshold.
“We’ve seen historically low commodity pricing; rising operational costs for fuel, fertilizer and equipment; tariffs — and, of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the historically low snowpack that has led to a shortage of water in the San Luis Valley,” said Rep. Matthew Martinez, a Monte Vista Democrat who sponsored the bill with Republican Assistant Minority Leader Ty Winter.
“All this requires pause and a call to evaluate” overtime requirements, Martinez said.
Depending on the season, farmworkers currently have to work 48 or 56 hours to qualify for overtime through rules set up by a 2021 law. Initially, SB-121 would’ve set that threshold at 60 hours across the board, but the bill’s Senate sponsors — Democratic Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez and Republican Minority Leader Cleave Simpson — pared it back to 56 hours. Martinez and Winter added an amendment tightening penalties for agricultural wage theft.
But the bill was still opposed by labor groups and progressive organizations, which backed a separate measure that would have lowered the overtime threshold to 40 hours. That bill died in its first Senate hearing.
Legislative critics of SB-121 argued that the measure sought to help one industry at the cost of its workers, who — they argued — labored in difficult conditions and were vulnerable both to abusive employment practices and to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
“It is true what our farmers are facing. Costs are up, margins are small. There is no argument about that from me,” said Rep. Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat. “… We need to find a world in which those farms can be sustained so that they can offer hours. But when we are faced with this challenge … we should have an opportunity to address it where we do not pit those against each other. Because costs are going up for everybody.
“Whether you are a farmer or a farmworker, milk is the same price.”
The bill hit on a familiar sore spot within the broader Democratic caucus in the legislature: how to balance business interests against protections for workers.
In a similar fight last year, lawmakers debated whether to cut tipped workers’ minimum wages to help shore up the restaurant industry. That bill’s Democratic sponsors eventually stripped the measure of its wage-cutting provisions and punted the decision to local governments.
In a statement, Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama said the governor “strongly supports” SB-121 and intends to sign it.
“This bill will set a reasonable overtime limit for agricultural workers who want to earn more money and more hours without diminishing worker protections, while increasing the fine amounts for agricultural producers who steal wages from their workers,” Maruyama wrote. “This bill is an important step in the right direction for Colorado agriculture and will create a more economically viable future for Colorado farmers and workers alike.”
The bill’s opponents were less effusive.
“It is shameful that 11 House Democrats voted with Republicans to pass what is quite literally injustice and political patronage masquerading as legislation,” Christopher Nurse, the political director for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, said in a statement. “CIRC and other organizations worked tirelessly to put protections for farm workers into law, only for some of the same legislators who voted for those protections to essentially tell migrant farm workers today that their labor is expendable.”
Once it’s signed, SB-121 will take effect Jan. 1.
