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Tamra Benson is a community organizer for Food AND Medicine. Johnny Sanchez is the volunteer coordinator for Food AND Medicine. This column was written on behalf of the Food AND Medicine Food Council.
In recent years, more workers are forming unions and demanding living wages, benefits and safe working conditions. Food AND Medicine bases its work around the rights of working-class people to dignity and the ability to advocate for themselves. We are heartened to see workers, nationally and statewide, demanding the pay and respect they deserve.
There remains, however, one group of workers here in Maine that has continually been denied access to the legal protections they need to make any such demands in their places of employment: farmworkers.
Farmworkers are exempt from state minimum wage and overtime work laws and have no collective bargaining or unionizing rights. Farmworkers in Maine have no legal means of protecting themselves from substandard pay or being worked overtime without fair compensation. One exception is a carveout law created in 1975, requiring all farms with 300,000 or more egg-laying hens to pay workers minimum wage. This specific category was created only after employees at DeCoster egg farms reported repeated abuse, but excludes all farmworkers.
Regrettably, Maine has repeatedly missed opportunities to extend these protections to all farmworkers in Maine.
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 codified protections for workers in the U.S. such as minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor rules and bookkeeping rules. Farmworkers and “domestic servants” were intentionally excluded from these protections likely because these were jobs overwhelmingly held by Black workers, and, in all but 14 U.S. states, these exceptions still stand. The exclusion of farmworkers and domestic workers continues to uphold harmful ideologies and practices deeply rooted in white supremacy and colonialism in the United States.
Agriculture represents more than 27,000 jobs in Maine, according to the 2017 U.S. Department of Agriculture census. This is no small sector of our population, especially considering these workers are being denied many workers’ rights. Legislators, including Thom Harnett, Rachel Talbott Ross and others, have introduced several bills aimed at giving Maine farmworkers equal rights. These efforts, despite having bipartisan support, have been blocked by Gov. Janet Mills, citing concerns around verbiage, “unintended consequences” and the general public’s understanding of the issue.
Granting farmworkers the right to unionize does not imply that all farm owners are exploitative. We are aware that exploitation and abuse do not occur everywhere. Food AND Medicine works with more than 30 local farms every year. The farm owners we work with are amazing, hardworking people who pay and treat their workers fairly.
Unions are meant to advance the interests of workers, and farmworkers should not be excluded from this right. We want our fellow workers to have legal means for addressing exploitation and abuse, especially within the context of the historical racism behind the farmworkers’ exclusion that occurred in the first place.
Despite vetoing LD 398, An Act To Make Agricultural Workers and Other Related Workers Employees Under Wage and Hour Laws, Mills signed an executive order establishing a Committee to Develop and Implement a Minimum Wage Bill for Agricultural Workers. This committee has since met for discussions and has drafted recommendations for the governor’s office. This means there is potential for farmworkers to gain rights to state minimum wage and potentially other rights they currently lack, in the 2024 legislative session.
A study by the Maine Center for Economic Policy found that “a quarter of farmworkers in the state — many of whom are migrant laborers — live in poverty and that they are 4.5 times more likely to be below the poverty line than other workers in Maine.” We must change this by educating fellow Mainers and collectively contacting our elected officials, especially the Mills Administration, to demand better for Maine’s farmworkers.
Farmworkers have been supporting Mainers for our entire history, and now, we must return the favor by demanding autonomy, living wages, benefits and safe working conditions for Maine’s farmworkers.