Employment Reform
By Tom Campbell
1) Unless employees by secret ballot vote to the contrary, time-and-a-half must be paid for hourly-wage employees in California who work more than 8 hours a day. Federal law requires the same after 40 hours a week. The difference penalizes California employers and employees who choose to work four ten-hour days, for instance. California should conform to federal law.
2) For all of its prior history, California exempted agricultural workers from the time-and-a-half requirement after 8 hours. This reflected the reality that farm work needs to be done when the season is at hand. However, this was changed in 2016, phasing in a new system where agriculture is treated no different from other industries. The result is an increase to the cost of growing crops in California.
Employers will incur an increase in cost by undertaking the administrative burden of swapping out groups of workers after 8 hours and bringing in a new group for the 2 hours in a typical 10-hour day during harvest. There is no guarantee that employers will simply pay the time-and-a-half to the original group of workers. Other employers will simply not carry on operations after 8 hours, resulting in a loss of take-home pay for farm workers. This law should be repealed.
3) California law does not require overtime pay for professionals; a 2005 law creates the presumption that an employee making more than $36 an hour is such a professional. However, this requires a huge amount of recordkeeping of actual hours. A simpler approach would exempt any worker making more than $75,000 a year.
4) Under existing law, all workers on "public works" must be paid prevailing wage. This has been defined to mean any project receiving state funding, with the result that volunteers can no longer be used for teaching, environmental clean-up, etc., if the project receives any state money. The law should be changed to allow volunteer teachers and other service-providers.
The above are statements on several public policy issues drafted by Tom Campbell, former US Congressman, former California State Senator, former Director of Finance for California, and currently Interim Chairman of the Common Sense Party. They are meant to initiate consideration of several important issues; they are not the official views of the Common Sense Party. Please feel free to submit your own thoughts on these issues on the Open Policy Discussion Page.
