It’s been nearly three years since Oregon legislators passed a bill requiring employers to eventually pay overtime to farmworkers who work past 40 hours a week. When it passed, advocates said the change was long overdue, while farm groups argued it would hurt their business. Starting this year, employers will have to pay overtime to workers who work more than 48 hours a week.
And now some farm owners say they’re having to make tough decisions.
Cherry harvest in the Columbia Gorge near The Dalles, OR, June 20, 2010.
Andrea Johnson / Oregon Department of Agriculture
Oregon’s $5 billion agriculture industry employs more than 90,000 farmworkers, many of whom are Mexican immigrants or Latino. Unlike most hourly wage jobs, farmworkers have historically been excluded from receiving overtime pay through the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
In 2022, farmworker advocates and some state legislators sought to change that and passed House Bill 4002 to the dismay of farm lobbying groups who decried the bill as out of touch with Oregon’s farming industry.
The change went into effect a year later, requiring employers pay farmworkers time-and-a-half for hours worked beyond 55 hours. As of the start of 2025, that threshold fell to 48 hours, and in 2027 it will be 40 hours.
Agriculture finances not the same as other industries
While 55 hours was manageable, Mieke DeJong, the general manager at Windy Ridge Dairy in Klamath County, said paying time-and-a-half overtime at 48 hours a week will be harder to pencil in.
DeJong, who runs an organic dairy and also farms in the Klamath Basin, employs roughly 100 workers year-round. She said farming is not like other industries with a set amount of hours.
“The list of possible things that could go wrong is endless on a dairy farm,” she said. “And so you can’t allocate for a nine-to-five within that because you can’t just say it takes this amount of time to do a job.”
And she said as a farmer, she can’t set prices for products her farm produces.
“You are expecting a business to be able to conduct the same work that it did, say five years ago,” DeJong said. “Not necessarily getting more [money] as a business because the milk price or say the hay price, income has not changed. Yet fuel prices have gone up, input costs have gone up and now labor has gone up.”
Oregon farmworkers on average make roughly $34,120 a year, or about $16.40 an hour, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
To comply with this year’s 48-hour overtime pay threshold, DeJong said she had to make a decision she does not take lightly. She said she had to cut hours for half her crew this winter, and plans to hire more workers. However, she said she would bring back the workers who lost hours in the winter to come work during peak season in the summer.
“I have no desire of trying to see how little I can pay someone to get the most out of what they can do,” DeJong said. “I care about people and I want to treat people the best that I can, but also with the understanding that there is a business to run.”
But Dagoberto Morales, the director of NOWIA Unete, Center for Farm Worker Advocacy based in Southern Oregon, said he doesn’t buy that all farmers can’t afford to pay their workers more.
“It’s a strategy of these [farm employers] to say they are going to cut hours because they cannot afford it,” Morales told OPB in Spanish. “I don’t believe that is true. Are they going to leave the cows without eating or without milking? That is ridiculous and they are simply crying out, ‘oh poor me.’”
He said he’s not confident the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, or BOLI, which is tasked with investigating wage theft claims, will have the capacity to enforce the overtime policy if an employer decides not to comply with it.
“BOLI cannot handle the work that it already has,” he said. “And they’ve admitted it’s because of a lack of staff.”
Wage theft claim investigations lag
BOLI has publicly admitted it does not have enough investigators and currently has a backlog of cases. That agency currently employs 10 labor standards investigators, each managing a caseload of over 200 wage theft claims.
A reasonable expectation for cases an investigator can complete in a year is 85 to 100, according to Stephanie Lopez, an assistant to the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner at BOLI. That means there can be long wait times on claims.
As part of the overtime policy, Lopez said, the Oregon Legislature established an agriculture compliance and education outreach unit. She said claims from farmworkers are prioritized by that unit, which employs two investigators and a part-time education outreach worker.
Lopez said the bureau recognizes the position some vulnerable farmworkers may be in, which is why the agency has moved to make filling a wage or civil rights claim easier.
“Still, we know that there is a long way to go to ensure Oregon workers, especially the most vulnerable, feel comfortable engaging in our processes and are committed to a future where that is the case,” Lopez wrote in a statement.
That agency will seek a 35% increase in funding when state lawmakers craft the 2025-27 budget, which Patti Verduzco, the communications director for Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, or PCUN — Oregon’s largest farmworker advocacy group — said her group supports.
“Adequate funding for BOLI is critical for upholding farmworkers' rights and ensuring they have the protections they deserve,” Verduzco wrote in a statement.
Some farm lobbying groups have already endorsed revising the state’s farmworker overtime policy this upcoming legislative session, according to reporting from the Capital Press.
These groups say they would like to see legislators keep the overtime pay threshold at 48 hours. Other proposals include exempting overtime pay during peak harvest season.
Jenny Dresler, a lobbyist speaking on behalf of the Oregon Farm Bureau, said it’s not that farm employers don’t want to pay their workers more, but that overtime pay is a tall order based on the specific economics of agriculture.
“Our members are really hurting,” Dresler said. “We’re going to continue to pursue any and every opportunity to try to resolve this issue for them.”