California's Farmworker Overtime Law Cut the Paychecks It Was Built to Raise

In 2016, California became the first state to strip farmworkers of the overtime exemption written into the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.▸ Assembly Bill 1066 phased in time-and-a-half pay over nine years, on the premise that a farmworker's fortieth hour should cost what everyone else's does. The phase-in finished for the state's smallest growers on January 1, 2025. The best available research on what happened next says the law didn't raise farmworker pay — it cut it, because growers responded to a higher hourly price by buying fewer hours.

Before AB 1066, California farmworkers earned overtime only past 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week — already thinner protection than every other industry got under state law.▸ The bill didn't reset that threshold in one move; it lowered it in annual steps, giving growers years to adjust hiring and scheduling before the bill finally came due.

Large operations (26 or more employees) hit the 40-hour, 8-hour-day floor in 2022.▸ Small operations (25 or fewer) got three more years and reached the same floor on January 1, 2025, per the Labor Commissioner's overtime schedule. That last step is why 2025 was the year the law's design was finally complete — and the year its side effects showed up in full.

Alexandra Hill, an agricultural economist then at UC Berkeley, tested what actually happened to crop workers' hours and pay in the law's first two years, using the U.S. Department of Labor's National Agricultural Workers Survey — the only federal survey that asks individual farmworkers what they actually worked and earned.▸ She built a statistical counterfactual of what hours and pay would have looked like without the law, controlling for California's concurrent minimum-wage increases and for pandemic-era shifts using comparable non-adopting states (Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, Texas, Washington).

The result: the share of workers logging 56–60 hours a week — just under the old 60-hour threshold — fell to roughly half of what the counterfactual predicted, a statistically significant drop.▸ Those hours didn't vanish into leisure; workers were pushed down toward the new thresholds instead, with the share working 46–50 hours a week landing more than a third above the counterfactual.

Cut hours, cut pay: the law pushed 10 fewer workers per 100 into the $600–700 weekly bracket and 5 fewer into $700–800, with most of that drop landing in the $400–500 bracket.▸ At the 2020 wage rates then in force at large farms — $14 an hour base, $21 an hour overtime — that maps to a roughly $100-a-week pay cut for a worker who lost five overtime hours. Hill's conclusion was blunt: "this early evidence suggests that the law may not be benefiting the workers it aims to protect."

The fix on the table is a payroll tax credit: let growers deduct the overtime premium they already paid from what they owe the state, so workers keep the extra hour's wage without the farm absorbing the extra cost.▸ State Sens. Shannon Grove (R–Bakersfield) and Melissa Hurtado (D–Sanger) have tried it twice.

The first attempt, SB 628, died on a 4–1, party-line vote in the Senate Labor, Public Employment and Retirement Committee on April 23, 2025, per Ag Alert, the California Farm Bureau's news service.▸ The second attempt, SB 921, was introduced January 28, 2026, and stalled in the same committee at its April 22, 2026 hearing, according to Agri-Pulse reporting. At that hearing, Farm Bureau lobbyist Bryan Little told the committee "every single dollar of the projected $300 to $400,000,000 cost of SB 921 tax credit will go directly to California farm workers," per the committee's public hearing record. Committee chair Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D–Los Angeles) called overtime protection "sacred policy" and voted the bill down anyway — leaving the $300–400 million estimate as an unspent number, not a paycheck.

Hill's hours-and-earnings findings cover the law's first two years (2019–2020) only, using the most recent validated NAWS data available at publication; longer-run effects through the 2025 final phase-in have not yet been published with the same rigor. Pay-bracket shifts are modeled percentage-point differences from a statistical counterfactual, not a literal head count of workers who moved between brackets.