SECTION 1.
The Legislature finds and declares all the following:(a) California’s agricultural industry is facing historic economic challenges. A few thousand California farmers and ranchers will likely go out of business in the next two or three years.
(1) Climate change-induced drought has caused California’s irrigated farmland to shrink by 752,000 acres in the last five years. According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, the number of California
farms fell 10.5 percent between 2017 and 2022, a decrease of 7,387 farms. In 2024, the United States Secretary of Agriculture called the numbers in the 2022 Census of Agriculture a “wake-up call.”
(2) The Department of Food and Agriculture reported that in 2023, California’s farms and ranches received $59.4 billion in cash receipts for their output. This represents a 1.4-percent increase in cash receipts compared to the previous year. This was significantly behind California’s inflation rate in 2023 that was 3.9 percent as measured by the California Consumer Price Index. This means that in 2023, California’s agricultural industry was $1.5 billion behind simply keeping up with inflation, which would have been breaking even.
(3) In January 2024, at the State of the Industry at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium, the California wine industry was urged to remove 50,000 acres of
grapevines statewide to correct the oversupply issue. In 2024, the French government saw the same problem and allocated €120,000,000 in subsidies aimed at funding the permanent removal of vineyards. Their objective was to remove up to 100,000 hectares of vineyards in France. In 2023, the French government provided $215,000,000 in funding to wineries to sell off their surplus wine. To date, California has provided no similar financial support for California wineries and vineyards that are competing in a global market.
(4) In August 2024, AgWest Farm Credit reported high interest rates, falling farm income, shifting water availability, and regulations are among the main drivers lowering agricultural land values in California.
(5) In September 2024, AgWest Farm Credit conducted a profitability analysis of its core commodities and reported that only the cattle industry is
“profitable.”
(b) California’s 400,000 agricultural employees face incredible challenges and need help.
(1) The Public Policy Institute of California in 2022 reported, “A trend taking shape over decades is the increasingly settled nature of farm work, with workers living in the United States year-round. In the past, patterns of settling were quite different by immigration status.” This report highlights the need of agricultural employees for year-round services including health care.
(2) A November 2024 report from the Rural Health Information Hub stated, “The challenges that rural residents face in accessing healthcare services contribute to health disparities.” The barriers to healthcare access include distance and transportation, healthcare workforce shortages, cost of insurance, and lack of access to broadband,
privacy, and health literacy.
(3) Work in vineyards, orchards, and fields is hard work. Section 858 of the Labor Code states, “Agricultural employees engage in back-breaking work every day. Few occupations in today’s America are as physically demanding and exhausting as agricultural work.” Yet Section 3441 of Title 8 of the California Code of Regulations is a barrier to using technology to make the work safer and less labor intensive.
(4) Agricultural employees have a difficult time finding housing in California as the state has some of the highest housing prices in the nation. In the coastal area of the Counties of Monterey and Santa Cruz, a consortium of local agencies released a housing report in 2018 that found that about 73,000 agricultural employees live in the Salinas and Pajaro Valleys year round. An estimated 77 percent live in overcrowded or extremely overcrowded
conditions, with multiple families sharing bedrooms. Little has been done by the State of California to help create new agricultural housing.
(5) (A) Recognizing the needs and importance of supporting its agricultural employees, the Oregon Legislature approved House Bill 4002 in April 2024. The measure requires agricultural employers to pay certain workers for overtime hours worked and created a refundable personal or corporate income tax credit for employers for a percentage of wages paid as overtime pay to agricultural workers for calendar years 2023 through 2028.
(B) The State of New York has also created a farm employer overtime credit. The credit is 118 percent of the overtime hours the agricultural employer paid multiplied by the difference between the employees’ overtime rate of pay and their regular rate of pay.
(c) In 2016, the Legislature passed legislation that was intended to increase the take-home pay of California agricultural employees who are working overtime.
(1) It was the intent of the Legislature, “to enact the Phase-In Overtime for Agricultural Workers Act of 2016 to provide any person employed in an agricultural occupation in California, as defined in Order No. 14-2001 of the Industrial Welfare Commission (revised 07-2014) with an opportunity to earn overtime compensation under the same standards as millions of other Californians.”
(2) According to a 2023 study by the University of California, Berkeley, California farmworkers have made less money since the Phase-In Overtime for Agricultural Workers Act of 2016 became law. The study concluded, “This early evidence suggests that the law may not be benefiting the
workers they aim to protect.”
(3) The USDA Farm Labor Survey found that the average weekly hours of directly hired California workers fell relative to the average weekly hours of all United States directly hired farm workers. In 2016, California’s directly hired farm workers averaged 2.7 more hours a week than all United States farm workers. That fell to 1.9 more hours a week in 2019, 0.1 more hours in 2021, and one less hour in 2023, which means that directly hired California farm workers averaged an one hour less per week in 2023 than all United States farm workers.
(d) As California’s agricultural industry faces economic challenges causing the reduction of overtime hours available to employees, the unintended consequence of the Phase-In Overtime for Agricultural Workers Act of 2016 is that employees are losing money. Therefore, it is in the public interest to support
agricultural employees through public financial support of overtime wages.
(1) The intent of enacting Section 13200 of the Unemployment Insurance Code is to recognize the findings and declarations in subdivisions (a) through (c), inclusive, and to provide a much-needed investment in the well-being of agricultural employees.
(2) In September, 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom stated, “Farmworkers are the backbone of California’s nation-leading agricultural industry and play a critical role in ensuring the stability of the state, nation and world’s food supply. Investing in their well-being is investing in California’s success.”