Aaron Golladay: Overtime back pay spells doom for Washington agriculture economy

While the COVID pandemic and tax policies are making the headlines from Olympia, farmers and farmworkers have their focus trained on an issue that could devastate Washington’s agricultural economy. A recent state Supreme Court ruling known as the DeRuyter Brothers case did away with a 60-year-old law exempting dairy workers from overtime pay in Washington state. However, this ruling was silent on the issue of back pay and offered no relief or guidance for seasonal or harvest workers. What has filled that vacuum is a bevy of staggering legal suits seeking three years of retroactive overtime back pay claims from farmers across Washington state.

These issues are now casting a long and dangerous shadow over small to mid-size farms. Our state’s agricultural economy needs the legislature to take swift and decisive action to stop this legal onslaught and find a solution that honors farmers and their workers.

To their credit, the Washington state Senate recently passed a bill setting forth a framework for transitioning to overtime hours in the future and providing a “Safe Harbor” to eliminate any obligation related to pay back overtime wages. While “safe harbor” from retroactive back pay claims comes as a welcome development, the bill must also address overtime relief policies for seasonal and harvest workers to fully protect family farms and their workers.

The story of my family farm is one you’d likely find repeated throughout Washington’s agricultural sector, which ranks as one of the state’s most important economic drivers and employs more than 160,000 workers. My in-laws, who founded our farm, both immigrated from Denmark in the early 1960s to form a better life in the United States. Through years of good times and bad and plenty of sweat equity, they were able to acquire a farm unit, begin farming vegetable seeds and grow the land into a sustainable family farming operation. It wasn’t easy, but they persevered, and now Stokrose Farm continues this honest living, raising beef and growing corn and hay.

Over time our family has been able to employ a dozen or more seasonal and permanent farmhands to help with our work. We have always played by the rules and always want what is best for our workers and their families. That is just who we are. We worked hard to build our business, and we believe in treating the people who work for us fairly and with respect.

The elimination of the overtime exemption has indeed been a hard blow to thousands of farmers across our state. Washington has higher labor costs than any other state, with average wages at $16.34 per hour. Farmers already operate on thin margins, and with the price of our goods set by the global market, we can’t exactly pass costs along to the consumer as other industries can.

However, I understand that my farm will need to adapt to a post-court ruling reality. Just as we followed the previous pay and wage laws that were in place for 60 years, we intend to follow the law going forward. But sticking farms like mine with a massive and unforeseen overtime back pay bill after following the rules of the day will have enormous unintended consequences: labor hours will be cut, operations will be downsized, and farms will be lost. Similar impacts will be felt if overtime relief goes unaddressed for seasonal workers and harvest hours.

The legislature is currently considering SB 5172 to address the changing wage and hour laws related to the DeRuyter Brothers court case. As this bill moves forward in the House of Representatives, lawmakers must consider these very real impacts to Washington’s family farms. Eliminating the overtime back pay requirement was an important improvement to this bill, but further changes are needed. Allowing flexibility for seasonal and harvest work would provide the certainty Washington’s small to mid-size farms need to continue operating.

In farming, there are no guarantees. We can’t control the weather, and we are price takers – not price makers. However, one thing our lawmakers can control is finding solutions to the unanswered questions stemming from the DeRuyter case that honor and protect the needs of Washington’s farms and the employees that work them.

Anything less would spell doom for Washington state’s agricultural economy.

Aaron Golladay and his extended family own and operate the Stokrose Farm near Warden, Washington.