THIS SEASON’S TORRENTIAL, climate-driven rain and floods devastated the Massachusetts farm economy, damaging over 110 farms, 2700 acres and causing millions in crop losses. Fortunately, the state and federal governments, as well as individuals and philanthropies, quickly responded to farmers’ pleas for emergency relief. Those responses should be loudly applauded.

But what about farmworkers? Recall that farmworkers were among those lauded as “essential” during the COVID epidemic for their heroic efforts that kept us all fed.  But collective short-term memory fades quickly. The current emergency farm relief efforts offer no direct assistance to Massachusetts’ 13,000 farmworkers and their families – more than 2,500 who work in Hampshire and Franklin counties alone.

Unfortunately, this is what farmworkers have come to expect.  The state legal subminimum wage for farmworkers remains at $8/hour while other hourly workers in Massachusetts earn $15/hour.  Their workweek is a grueling 7-day, 60-plus hour routine that can extend from early morning to sundown. Yet state law does not require farmworkers be paid at time and a half their hourly rate when working more than a 40-hour workweek unlike almost every other hourly worker in Massachusetts.

The unfairness of the substandard legal wage in Massachusetts is palpable. Seasonal farmworkers are employed fewer than 150 days a year and earn an average yearly income of under $13,000.  Consequently, twice as many farmworker families live in severe poverty than all other families in Massachusetts (17.6 percent compared to 8.3 percent).

And now, as a result of this summer’s floods and rain, many affected farmworkers either lost their jobs or have been able to find only a day or two of work each week. This has created dire financial consequences for all seasonal farmworkers, but especially for those whose immigration status makes them particularly vulnerable and unable to access most forms of government assistance.

Farmworkers’ second-class legal status is longstanding but rarely mentioned.  It has been a cruel feature of the structural racism baked into America’s workplace laws since at least the New Deal era of the 1930s.  At that time, groundbreaking legislation aimed at uplifting America’s workers intentionally and explicitly excluded farmworkers and domestic workers. The New Deal’s guarantee of minimum wage protections, union rights, social security, and unemployment insurance were not extended to farm and domestic workers because at that time they were overwhelmingly African American.

Most states, including Massachusetts, adopted this discriminatory scheme when enacting their own minimum wage laws.  Consequently, in 2023, the legal minimum wage for farmworkers in Massachusetts – now an overwhelmingly immigrant Latino workforce – earn just over half of what state law guarantees other low-wage employees.

It is time to end this legacy of racism. Sen. Adam Gomez and Rep. Carlos Gonzalez, both from Springfield, have introduced the Fairness for Farmworkers Act to remedy this gross inequity.

The proposed law would require that all farmworkers be paid the same minimum wage as other Massachusetts workers.  The act also requires farmworkers employed seasonally receive overtime pay at time-a-half after 55 hours of work each week, to accommodate the unique hours of seasonal agriculture. Those farmworkers who are employed year-round will receive overtime rates after 40 hours of weekly work.

Currently, farmworkers have no legal entitlement to a weekly day of rest. Mandatory seven-day work weeks are the norm in the fields.  And despite a routine that requires 10-or-12-hour workdays, farm laborers are not legally guaranteed a critically needed rest break after their first eight hours of work.

The Fairness for Farmworkers Act will change this. The bill will allow farmworkers the ability to earn paid time off and guarantee a rest break each day after the first eight hours of work. Farmworkers, like other workers, deserve time off to spend time with their families and to recover from the arduous physical labor their job demands.

The bill also directly addresses concerns some farmers have voiced about higher labor costs. It includes significant tax credits for farms that employ farmworkers so that farm employers do not shoulder the entire cost of improving wages and work conditions in the agricultural sector.

Long term, Massachusetts will not be able to create an equitable and sustainable agricultural sector without fair treatment for farmworkers.  Ending the discriminatory, second-class treatment of this essential component of our workforce requires passage of the Fairness for Farmworkers Act this legislative session.

Harris Freeman is a professor at Western New England University School of Law and affiliated faculty at the Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  He is a member of the Fairness for Farmworkers Coalition.