California Employment Lawyer

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill Wednesday that would have made California’s hourly agricultural employees the only farmworkers in the nation to receive overtime pay after 40 hours a week or eight hours a day.  As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:

In vetoing the measure, Schwarzenegger cited the fragile economy and said that extending overtime protections could put farms out of business, or result in lower paychecks for agricultural workers because farmers would hire more people and cut hours to avoid paying overtime.

The bill’s author, Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter (Kern County), blasted the veto. In a statement released by his office, Florez said the Republican governor sided “with a labor practice derived from the segregationist South,” and that the veto means it is “acceptable to treat one class of people differently from all others.”

By CHARLES H. JUNG