Democrats join with GOP to sink farmworker wage bill but pass act to let ag workers unionize
Twenty Democrats in the Maine House joined with Republicans to sink a bill Wednesday night that would have ended an exclusion — rooted in racist policy decisions from the 1930s — that exempts farmworkers from state wage and hour laws.
However, in a separate vote, the House approved a bill to allow farmworkers to organize for the purpose of collective bargaining without fear of retaliation. The bill, LD 151, was then narrowly approved in the Senate, setting it up to be considered for final passage.
The votes on the farmworker bills came after hours of heated debate on the measures during which advocates of the legislation discussed at length the racist history behind exclusions of farmworkers from labor laws. As Beacon previously reported, both the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act, passed in the 1930s as part of the New Deal, excluded farmworkers as well as domestic workers — groups largely comprised of people of color. Those exclusions were no accident, as the historical record shows that Southern Democrats moved to specifically exempt from labor standards groups of workers who were predominantly people of color to keep them in an economically-subservient position.
Republicans in the House, however, took offense to hearing about that racist history, and GOP members lined up during the floor debate to blast the bills, even as the legislation simply sought to provide farmworkers with the same basic legal protections enjoyed by other workers.
Read more: https://mainebeacon.com/dems-join-with-gop-to-sink-farmworker-wage-bill-but-pass-act-to-let-ag-workers-unionize/