Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Those who understand the full weight of his message know that it does not bend on its own. It bends because people, especially people in power, choose to bend it.
That is what makes the passage of Senate Bill 121, which raises the threshold for overtime pay for farm workers, by the Colorado legislature and its signing by Gov. Jared Polis so troubling. On this bill, lawmakers had a choice: They could stand with farm workers fighting for equality, or they could once again make them bear the cost of the agricultural industry’s challenges. Colorado agriculture is carried on the backs of some of the state’s poorest workers.
The recently enacted bill increases the already high 48-hour overtime threshold for agricultural workers to 56 hours — making overtime pay practically impossible to earn. In a half-hearted effort to mitigate the harm the bill caused, lawmakers added a paltry increase in penalties for repeated wage theft, despite robust evidence that workers’ fears of retaliation discourage them from filing complaints.
Let’s be clear: This amendment to a bad law does more for lawmakers’ guilty conscience than for farm workers.
If the agricultural industry is under pressure, lawmakers should pursue structural solutions, not demand more sacrifice from the workers with the least power, the fewest protections and the hardest jobs. No lawmaker would dare solve economic challenges in construction, hospitality, retail or healthcare by stripping those workers of the basic right to an 8-hour workday.
If workers in any industry can’t support themselves and their families on a 40-hour week, the solution is fairer wages, not longer hours. No one who works full time should struggle to survive. This is the bare minimum essential workers living in the wealthiest nation on Earth deserve.
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“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” Whether they belong to a union or not, most workers across this country benefit from the 40-hour workweek. Winning this right was not easy — just look at the 1914 massacre of striking miners in Ludlow who were demanding an 8 hour workday. But nearly 80 years after the New Deal, farm workers remain excluded from basic overtime laws and treated as unequal by lawmakers. Colorado legislators should know better. In fact, they do know better.
Less than a month before Senate Bill 121 passed in the legislature, the Colorado House honored Farm Workers Day, recognizing farm workers as the “backbone of American agriculture” and the “core of the Colorado economy.” Lawmakers praised their labor, their sacrifice and their indispensable role in feeding this state and country.
If farm workers are truly the backbone of the economy, then their rights should not be the first thing lawmakers bargain away when the agricultural industry demands more work for less pay. By stripping farm workers of overtime pay, Colorado lawmakers exposed their earlier praise for farm workers to be rank hypocrisy.
Overtime protections exist for a reason. Farm labor is demanding, dangerous and exhausting. It takes a toll on muscles and bones, kidneys and hearts. If overtime laws mean anything, they should apply where overwork is most harmful.
The historic exclusion of farm workers from federal overtime laws was not an accident, but a racist refusal to extend New Deal labor laws to Black, Latino and Asian workers in Southern and Western agriculture. In 2021, Colorado took a small but important step toward correcting this longstanding inequity by extending overtime protections to agricultural workers. Now even that limited progress is being rolled back.
The bill’s sponsors may believe they put forth pragmatic legislation, arguing that the agricultural industry cannot afford to pay overtime wages. Yet there is nothing pragmatic about deepening racial inequality and calling it an economic necessity. There is nothing responsible about asking the poorest workers to bear the true costs of a powerful and wealthy industry. And it is certainly wrong to tell farm workers, yet again, that the economy depends on their labor while denying them equal rights.
The arc of the moral universe does not bend by itself. It bends when lawmakers choose courage over politics, justice over inequality, and people over profits. Yet if some Colorado lawmakers will not help bend it themselves, then the working people must do it ourselves.
Si se puede.
Teresa Romero, of Tehachapi, California, is the president of the United Farm Workers.
Polly Baca, of Denver, is a former Colorado state legislator and the first Latina to serve in the Colorado State Senate.
Fatuma Emmad, of Denver, Colorado (the ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, and other Indigenous peoples whose lands were later claimed as the city of Denver) is the executive director for Project Protect Food Systems Workers in Colorado.
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