Committee Reaches Compromise on State Minimum Wage for Farmworkers
The Maine Legislature’s Labor Committee voted five to one in a bipartisan vote on Tuesday to finally apply the state minimum wage to farmworkers. The amended version of LD 589 An Act to Make Agricultural Workers and Other Related Workers Employees Under the Wage and Hour Laws would require that agricultural workers be paid at least the state’s minimum hourly wage of $14.65 per hour. The measure would also ensure that farmworkers receive annual cost of living adjustments to keep up with inflation. The deal was struck between farmworker advocates, legislators, the Governor’s office and agricultural interests.
“This has been three years that we have been working on it,” said Sen. Mike Tipping (D-Penobscot), the Senate co-chair of the committee. “I feel like this is the closest we have come and I hope we’re in a good place to finally pass a basic minimum wage for agricultural workers, one that most of the stakeholders agree with after that very long process last time and the unfortunate disagreement over one aspect of the bill.”
In 2023 and 2024, the Maine AFL-CIO was part of a broad stakeholder group that held dozens of meetings to develop a bill that applied the state minimum wage to farmworkers. But the Governor opposed it because it included a right for farmworkers to seek justice in court if they were not paid the minimum wage — a right most other workers enjoy.
A 2024 report from Maine Department of Labor’s (MDOL) Bureau of Labor Standards Wage and Hour Division found that the overall likelihood of a business being inspected in a given year was just 0.31 percent because it only had one wage and hour inspector for every 69,177 employees. In 2024, the most common labor violations found by MDOL involved failure to pay wages on time and in full, with $1.7 million in unpaid wages identified.
“I realize that in legislation we have crawl before we can walk sometimes, but we have been crawling for an awful long time,” said Rep. Amy Roeder (D-Bangor), the House co-chair of the committee. “That being said, I will support this bill. I just want to once again reiterate that all people who work for a living should have these same rights.”
Nearly 90 years ago, farmworkers were exempted from wage and overtime protections in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. They are still not eligible to be paid overtime when working over 40 hours a week and are not considered employees under Maine law, so they are not currently eligible for the state minimum wage and are not entitled to overtime when working over 40 hours a week.
A disproportionately large share of Black, Latino, and Indigenous Mainers work in farming. Farmworkers earned 40 percent less than comparable nonagricultural workers in 2022. About one-quarter of Maine farmhands live in poverty, earning roughly 4.5 times as likely to live below the poverty line as other Maine workers.