SPRINGFIELD — The blueberries in a morning smoothie. The tomatoes in a BLT at lunch. The asparagus on a dinner plate. The food people in Massachusetts eat every day is often grown here. But the people who harvest the crops that feed Baystaters are often paid nearly half of what other workers in the state receive.
The minimum wage for farmworkers in Massachusetts had been $1.60 per hour dating back to the 1960s. It was raised to $8 per hour in 2014 when a state minimum wage of $15 per hour for most workers was passed.
Mya McCann, staff attorney with the Seasonal Migrant Farm Worker Project at the Central West Justice Center, said farmworker families in the state are twice as likely as other families to live in “extreme poverty” with 38% living at or near the federal poverty level.
“The cruel irony is that we’re all struggling to put food on the table. Most of our food comes from our farms, where the workers who are growing and harvesting our crops can’t afford to put that crop on their own table,” McCann said.
Claudia Quintero, co-lead of the Fairness for Farmworkers Coalition and Director of the Central West Justice Center, said the Fairness for Farmworkers Coalition has been working for “equity in the fields of Massachusetts” for the past five years. Joining with state Sens. Adam Gomez (D-Springfield) and Jamie Eldridge (D-Acton), and state Rep. Carlos Gonzalez (D-Springfield), the legislation was crafted to provide compensation equity for the state’s agricultural workers. Since then, state Rep. Frank Moran (D-Lawrence) has also sponsored the bills. The provisions of the legislation have been filed as one joint bill in two previous legislative sessions, but neither version made it out of committee.
The legislation was split into two bills to increase the likelihood of at least one of them passing. The first bill, An Act Establishing Fairness for Agricultural Laborers in Massachusetts, would bring pay equity to farm workers, entitling them to the minimum state minimum wage, currently $15 per hour. It would also institute accrued time off, with a maximum of 55 hours per calendar year, and two paid 15-minute breaks for a shift of eight hours or longer.
In a press release about the legislation, Dr. Norbert Goldfield, attending physician at Baystate Medical Center, emphasized the need for those breaks, saying, “Farmworkers are at critical risk for heat stroke and illnesses related to excess heat. Frequent breaks for hydration are necessary in these times.”
The other bill is An Act Relative to Overtime Pay for Agricultural Laborers in Massachusetts. Primary agricultural workers — those who raise or harvest crops — would be entitled to overtime for working over 55 hours per week. Those who work solely in secondary agriculture, which includes processing agricultural products, would receive overtime after 40 hours of weekly work. A tax credit would help farmers with the transition to paying overtime.
There is precedence for the conditions laid out in the bills. According to the Fairness for Farmworkers Coalition, seven other states pay farmworkers a minimum wage of $15 minimum wage and eight states offer overtime.
At a Jan. 29 press conference at Springfield’s South Congregational Church announcing the filing of the legislation, a member of the audience asked why the bill set a 55-hour weekly threshold over which overtime would be required. Quintero explained that farmworkers average between 55 and 70 hours per week. If the threshold were set at 40 hours, she said the concern is that employers would limit the maximum number of weekly for workers to 40, diminishing their income.
Gonzalez told one of the people in the audience, “We’ve got a hell of a fight on our hands.”
The history of farmworkers receiving a lower-than-minimum wage is long. Eldridge said farmworkers were left out of the provisions in the New Deal programs of the 1930s to allow for a “cheap labor” and “anti-immigrant sentiment.” He said, “More often than not, immigrants are doing the work in our farms, doing the work in our communities, in retail, in the service industry.” Immigrants are the “backbone” of the economy, Eldridge said. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, 46% of agricultural workers in the country are U.S.-born.
Eldridge said there are a “tremendous amount of farms” in Massachusetts. There are 13,000 farm workers in the state on over 7,000 farms, which span over 400,000 acres. A substantial portion of those farms are in Western Massachusetts.
The fact that farmworkers are paid less than minimum wage with fewer workers’ rights than other industries is “unacceptable,” Eldridge said. “These are our neighbors. These are our friends. These are our loved ones. Massachusetts should be better than that.”
At $8 per hour, Gonzalez said, “The farmworkers are going to work for half a living, not a living.” He went on to say, “Not one person in America is not affected by this bill. Sometimes, we do sit at that kitchen table or go to the supermarket, and we forget how that food got there.”
Gonzalez related the story of farmworkers he spoke with who begin their day at 4:30 a.m., getting their children ready for school before dropping them off with a friend so they can take a bus to their farm site. They then work until 6 p.m. before picking their children up to take them home. He said, “Even at $15, as blessed as we are here in Massachusetts to some degree, it’s not enough.”
McCann said the experience of the farmworkers Gonzalez spoke to is common. Most of the farm workers, particularly in the Pioneer Valley, do not live on the farms where they work. Instead, they often travel from the Springfield area to Hampshire or Franklin counties. The transportation to the farms is also often paid for out of their pockets.
Gonzalez said recognition of the importance of farmers is important, “particularly in this day and age” when President Trump’s administration is “impeding the rights of individuals” who “may look like [they] may not be from this country.”
Quintero said she is also concerned with “the administration’s lack of concern for more vulnerable populations, whether that be gender, national origin, immigration status, socioeconomic status.”
During his remarks, Gonzalez rhetorically asked, “Fairness — who could be against that?” However, he later told Reminder Publishing that, despite working with farm owners when crafting the legislation, there has been pushback from the industry. “We’ve had to have some honest conversations with farmers. We have to understand the living conditions of some of our employees.”
Those conditions are why issues such as time off were included in the legislation. “What if you’re sick — or your kid is sick — especially, for a single mom, especially if your other partner is working on a different farm, or the same farm? We have to think of this [from] a humanistic perspective. As a parent who owns a business,” Gonzalez said, “you got to understand your employees’ situations, and these are the sad situations that they’re facing.”
Claudia Rosales, executive director of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, knows about those conditions firsthand. She spent six years as an agricultural worker. Rosales spoke via Zoom through an interpreter.
“We need better salaries for these workers so they can have a better life and afford food and housing, and a sustainable wage that they can live off of, and vacation that is paid so they can spend time with their children,” said Rosales. She said that during the summer growing season, farmworkers often work 11 hours per day, seven days per week.
“Agricultural and field workers are the true heroes but they are invisible because there’s no proper recognition for them,” she said.
