Agriculture industry representatives are pushing back against a report that highlights horrid working conditions for Santa Barbara County farmworkers. Last month, advocates with Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) convened press conferences in Santa Maria and Ventura, calling for supervisors in both counties to adopt a Farmworker Bill of Rights by César Chávez Day, March 31.
CAUSE’s report comes at a time of an estimated 25 percent labor shortage in North County. But tenuous immigration status coupled with low wages and long work hours create conditions ripe for exploitation, disempowerment, and abuse, CAUSE argued. Of the estimated 17,000 farmworkers in North County, 72 percent, they say, are not U.S. citizens.
The organization focuses on wage theft, which includes being underpaid, working during a break, or unpaid responsibilities before or after work. For starters, farmworkers do not receive overtime unless they work 10 hours in a day — or 60 hours in a week — rather than the standard eight-hour day and 40-hour workweek. This fact, CAUSE argues, is left over from the Jim Crow South. (A few years ago, state legislation to remedy this discrepancy lost by just two votes in the Assembly.)
