Agricultural Overtime - "The real minimum wage is always zero"

 

A hearing was held by the Senate Labor & Commerce on 2/9/2023 to allow testimony on SB 5476.  The Chair and Vice Chair of the meeting were seeming unwilling to listen to the concerns from constituents who were farm workers.     

SB 5476 – 2023-2024 (Video of hearing is available near the bottom of this link starting at ~1:12) – Authorizing agricultural employers to select 12 weeks a year to employ workers for up to 50 hours a week before overtime applies.  This bill was introduced by Sen. Curtis King and sponsored by Senators King, Mullet, Torres, and Warnick.  

SB 5476 being proposed is part of the common story of good intentions causing more harm than good.  We must step back to look at SB 5172, which was passed and signed into law in 2021.  SB 5172 ended the overtime exemption for agriculture workers in Washington state.  It set Washington up to be the first state to mandate overtime pay for agricultural work performed over 40 hours per week, which will occur on January 1, 2024 (yes Washington state is even ahead of California with this implementation).  

In a vacuum, mandatory overtime seems like it would be beneficial to agricultural workers.  We do not live in a vacuum.  Washington agricultural products compete in a global marketplace where farms must take into consideration the cost of raising their crops.  Every crop we have in Washington can be grown in another state or country.  

Agricultural workers who once found themselves able to work as many hours as they chose, will now likely be faced with situations where they will be offered 48 hour a week positions in 2023 that will become 40 hour a week positions in 2024.  This puts pressure on them to find a second job to obtain the same amount of income as they did in prior years, which requires more commuting (which eats up both time and money, it also may increase emissions).  

At the end of the day mandatory overtime is just the minimum wage paid for hour 40.01+… as Thomas Sowell put it in Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy, “Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.” 

Let us not forget, Washington state has the highest 2023 minimum wage of any state at $15.74/hr. (D.C is higher, but it is not a state and little to no farming occurs there).  

We could even go down the rabbit trail of increased CO2 emissions due to having to import food that was once grown in our state from Mexico or Peru.  If we run the scenario out further either food production will slowly be driven out of our state/country (maybe, they will clear out some rainforest somewhere to grow our food inefficiently for us?) or our food will cost significantly more than it does today (causing farm workers to use a similar or higher percentage of their pay to put food on the table).  One step ahead and three steps back…