A legislative committee has recommended that agricultural workers in Vermont should get state minimum wage, and also receive overtime pay after working 60 hours a week.
Puedes leer la versión en español, aquí.
The same committee examined whether farmworkers should have collective bargaining rights — but ultimately didn’t make a recommendation to the Vermont Legislature.
Vermont farmworkers, like all farmworkers nationally, do have a right to the $7.25 federal minimum wage — which hasn’t been raised in 15 years. But they aren’t covered by Vermont’s minimum wage, which is updated annually, and will be $14.01 per hour in 2025.
Agricultural workers are also explicitly excluded from state collective bargaining and overtime laws in Vermont. They can’t unionize, and they don’t have the right to get paid extra for working more than 40 hours a week.
This mirrors the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act, federal laws from almost a century ago that scholars say left out agricultural workers on a racist basis — agricultural workers at the time were disproportionately Black. Today, a majority of those workers are from Mexico, and nearly half are not U.S. citizens.
The committee
The eight-member Agricultural Worker Labor and Employment Laws Study Committee was tasked with looking at Vermont’s labor laws and whether there were ways to better cover agricultural workers.
Lawmakers heard from witnesses across agricultural, labor and racial justice organizations.
They also heard directly from farmworkers themselves, like Newport dairy worker Gamaliel, who wrote in a testimony submitted in October: “Earning the state's minimum wage would send a clear signal that Vermont isn’t just using us for labor, but it will be a sign that you recognize the humanity in us as well.”
In written testimony submitted in November, Brian Carpenter with the Vermont Dairy Producers Alliance asked the committee to “go very slowly and understand that agriculture is already struggling.” He also suggested that the industry, not more laws, was “the best way to manage and regulate for the good of the employees who work on farms.”
“We ask you to let the ‘boots on the ground’ continue the work they are doing while still pulling themselves out from Covid, inclement weather patterns, and fluctuating milk prices,” Carpenter wrote. “We will assure you that we do our absolute best to invest and support our #1 asset, our employees.”
While a majority of committee members voted to recommend coverage of Vermont agricultural workers in minimum wage and overtime laws, several lawmakers disagreed, including Republican Franklin County Sen. Randy Brock. He cited a lack of sufficient information to know the impacts of each measure.
Recent surveys by both Migrant Justice and the Vermont Dairy Producers Alliance have different numbers regarding what percentage of farmworkers already receive minimum wage or above.
According to Migrant Justice, only 13% of 212 Spanish-speaking immigrant farmworkers they surveyed were receiving state minimum wage.
Meanwhile the Vermont Dairy Producers Alliance said 68% of its members provided state minimum wage.
During the final committee meeting Tuesday, Brock particularly focused on the reliability of the Migrant Justice survey.
“The information appears to be conflicting, and whether or not we're getting truthful information — we know that migrant workers lie in order to get a job,” Brock said. “False Social Security numbers is the classic example of that. The numbers don't appear to be issued by farmers. They do appear to be a characteristic of the migrant undocumented worker, a category of people who are working illegally under federal law.”
But Chittenden County Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, a Democrat, objected to Brock’s comment. She disagreed with using someone’s documentation status as a measure of their credibility, and said it was unfair to accuse farmworkers of lying.
“We did not hear testimony to that effect. We would have needed to bring in some kind of immigration expert to better understand what's being characterized,” Ram Hinsdale said. “We have spent a long time talking about the wages, the working conditions, the way the states can help our dairy industry. We did not spend time talking about our broken immigration system.”
The response
Following the committee session on Tuesday, Vermont Public contacted the Vermont Dairy Producers Alliance regarding the final recommendations, but did not immediately receive a response.
Migrant Justice organizer Will Lambek told Vermont Public it was disappointing that the committee didn’t recommend collective bargaining rights be extended to farmworkers.
But he said Migrant Justice welcomes the minimum wage coverage recommendation, and plans to look more closely at the overtime recommendation.
“We think that it's important to end this sort of double standard of farmworkers being treated differently from other workers,” Lambek said.
He added that he hopes the Legislature continues to prioritize hearing directly from farmworkers like this committee did — particularly as the incoming presidential administration threatens mass deportations.
“National politicians gin up anti-immigrant sentiment and nativism and xenophobia. … They do it in order to ensure that there remains this underclass of workers who are experiencing such precarity, who are so fearful about the possibility of detention and deportation and being separated from their families, that they won't speak up and that they'll accept conditions that otherwise no worker would accept,” Lambek said. “The incoming administration should motivate Vermont lawmakers to be even bolder and more ambitious about codifying farmworker rights.”
The legislative committee expects to submit the report to the entire Legislature by the end of this week.
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