Coming soon to a farm near you: new overtime rules for ag workers

In response to last year's groundbreaking decision by the Washington State Supreme Court in Martinez-Cuevas v. DeRuyter Bros. Dairy, Inc., the state legislature recently passed Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill (SB) 5172, amending the state's Minimum Wage Act (MWA) as it relates to agricultural workers and adopting a phased approach for imposing overtime requirements on agricultural employers. The amendments were signed into law by Governor Jay Inslee on May 11, 2021. Long exempt from the MWA's overtime provisions, agricultural workers will be eligible for overtime pay beginning in 2022. And by 2024, they'll be on par with all other nonexempt employees under the Act. The amendments also address retroactivity of the DeRuyter Bros. decision, effectively eliminating any unpaid overtime liability for agricultural employers under the historical exemption.

DeRuyter Bros. decision

When Washington state first enacted the MWA (the state equivalent, in many ways, of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA), it included an overtime pay exemption for agricultural workers similar to the exemption found in the FLSA. As described in the MWA, however, the exemption applied to traditional farmworkers and any workers who package, store, deliver, can, freeze, or process any agricultural or horticultural commodities for market distribution. Thus, even after implementation of modern wage and hour standards, agricultural employers in the state were never required to pay a significant portion of their workforce overtime.