Another legislative session, another pair of bills filed to help farmworkers that will not be moved before bill cutoff.

House Bill 1597 and Senate Bill 5487 were filed in January to address the continued struggles farmworkers are facing now that Washington state’s agricultural overtime law has been fully implemented. Neither bill has been scheduled for a hearing in their respective committees despite bipartisan sponsorship.

Previous iterations of the bills focused on the increased costs for farmers while this year’s efforts have highlighted how the law has affected farmworkers’ income specifically. The intent sections of both bills read, “The legislature also recognizes the economic burden placed on agricultural workers through the enactment of the overtime pay law. Since its inception, the law has had the unintended consequences of reduced hours of employment and a corresponding loss of earned income.”

House Labor and Workplace Standards Committee Chair Rep. Liz Berry and Senate Labor & Commerce Committee Chair Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, a “passionate advocate for working families” and a “tireless advocate for historically oppressed communities” respectively let these pieces of legislation languish. 

Full implementation of Washington state’s agricultural overtime law, the most restrictive version of overtime in the country, has taken income away from historically oppressed working families. Both bills look to address that problem by giving pay back to those workers through a seasonal overtime exemption that would allow for 12 weeks during which overtime requirements would not begin until farmworkers have logged 50 hours during a workweek.

If the overtime law was intended to increase wages, why are farmworkers being paid less, not more, under the current overtime law?

Washington state farmworkers command some of the highest wages in the country before overtime. The 2025 minimum wage rate in our state is set at $16.66/hr. Comparatively, several U.S. states have a minimum wageof $7.25/hr. and only Washington D.C. has a higher minimum wage than Washington state at $17.50/hr.

However, agricultural wages are more complex than simply paying minimum wage. There are layers to our workforce. There are local, documented workers. There are local, undocumented workers. There are also H-2A visa workers. Local workers, documented and undocumented, are the underpinning of wage data for the Washington State Employment Security Department (ESD). 

According to the most recent data available in 2023, the average wage rate for farmworkers in Washington state was $19.02/hr. That same year, Washington state’s statewide minimum wage was set at $15.74/hr. That same year, the federally mandated minimum wage for H-2A visa workers, know as the “Adverse Effect Wage Rate,” in Washington state was set at $17.97/hr.

The overtime law was enacted in 2022 with a phased in approach meaning that in 2023, the threshold for farms and ranches being required to pay time-and-a-half had “stepped down” to 48 hours. Before the overtime law had been enacted, in 2019, the average wage recorded by the Washington State Employment Security Department was $17.85/hr. with farmworkers reportedly averaging 60-hour workweeks, for gross income earnings of $1,071/wk. By 2023, the average hourly pay had increased to $19.02/hr., but many farms had decreased the work week to the 48-hour threshold to avoid overtime because of the cost increase lessening gross weekly income to $913/wk. for many farmworkers. The loss of about $632 a month represents a significant change in income.

Anecdotally, farmworkers were being paid about $21/hr. on average in 2024 for a 40-hour workweek. Even with a $2/hr. increase in pay, farmworkers are still only averaging $840/wk. in gross pay, significantly less than the wages they were making in 2019, pre-overtime. According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, most farms in the United State relied on off-farm income to survive in 2024 and will require off-farm income to survive in 2025. Median total farm gross income was forecast at $100,840 in 2024 and is forecast to be $106,276 in 2025. Median earned farm household income in 2024 was forecast at -$651 and is forecast to be -$328 in 2025.

Paying time-and-a-half on $21/hr. would increase farmworkers’ hourly pay to $31.50/hr. As nice as it would be to offer that wage, it is unsustainable when the average farm is already losing money or barely breaking even. 

By not hearing bills that offer flexibility to our state’s farmers, Washington’s legislators are forcing farmworkers to take less pay for the hard work they do. Despite rhetoric about supporting historically oppressed working families, legislators are instead choosing to ignore the realities of the hard-working people of Washington.