Farmworker Overtime Bill Heads to Another Vote

By David Bacon
Capital and Main, August 11, 2016
http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2016/08/farm-worker-overtime-bill-heads-for.html
http://capitalandmain.com/latest-news/issues/labor-and-economy/farm-worker-overtime-bill-heads-for-another-vote-0811/



A farm worker harvests romaine lettuce near Mecca, in the Coachella Valley, where the temperature this summer reached 115 degrees. Workers cutting lettuce in this crew are paid by the piecerate, and work so fast they are almost running through the field, bent over double all day.


The fight for farm worker overtime is going down to the wire in California's current legislative session, which will adjourn at the end of August. And as Assembly Bill 1066, which would require it, moves through the legislature, Jewish and African American organizations have made a commitment to win the votes it needs for passage.

A bill that would have phased in overtime pay for farm workers, Assembly Bill 2757, passed the State Senate earlier this year, but then failed to pass the State Assembly in a vote on June 2. Since then a new bill, AB 1066, has progressed through the Senate's Appropriations Committee, and may be sent to the Assembly within days.

The bill would then need to pick up the four votes by which AB 2757 failed in June. They will have to come from either the eight Democrats who voted "no" or the six who failed to vote at all.

Mexico's Labor Law Reform ?

MEXICO'S LABOR LAW REFORM SPARKS MASSIVE PROTESTS
A plan to gut labor protections has spurred unrest in Mexico's streets.
By David Bacon

Economics students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico march from the Plaza of Three Cultures to the Zocalo to protest a proposed labor law reform and to mark the anniversary of the October 2, 1968 massacre.
     
        MEXICO CITY-As the Mexican Senate tried to convene last week, unionists, youth protesters from the #YoSoy132 movement and social activists of every stripe blocked the chamber's doors, trying to prevent legislators from meeting to consider the reforma laboral. On October 2, tens of thousands marched from the Tlatelolco (Plaza of Three Cultures), where hundreds of students were shot down by Mexican Army troops on the same date in 1968, to the Zocalo at the city center. Reverberating chants signaled an equally massive rejection of this deeply unpopular proposal.
   The Mexican Senate has begun its 30-day consideration of a proposed reform of the country's labor laws. Its provisions will have a profound effect on Mexico's workers, changing the way they are hired, their rights at work, and their wages. Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of one of the country's most democratic unions, the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), calls it "a monstrous law."