Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Why, commas not withstanding, should Maine prevent people in the food supply chain business from getting overtime. I am pinko-Euro-liberal and even I think that's government meddling. Is there a historic reason for this if just labour-bashing ?

View on HN

"During the New Deal Era, President Roosevelt struck a bargain with Southern Democrats: they would support worker rights legislation so long as their farmworkers (and other predominantly African-American workers, such as domestic workers) were exempt. Thus, Congress excluded farmworkers from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), the main federal law that protects workers who join and organize labor unions, and from the federal minimum wage and overtime protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938"

https://thenaturalfarmer.org/article/brief-history-farmworke...

> Why, commas not withstanding, should Maine prevent people in the food supply chain business from getting overtime.

This provision doesn't prohibit overtime pay, it excludes that group of people from government-mandated overtime pay. A company could still choose to pay it's workers overtime, or workers could demand/negotiate that.

The government isn't preventing them from negotiating a better contract with their employers, it's just refusing to enshrine their entitlement to overtime into state law. From that point of view, this carve-out reduces government interference in labour relations.

I think it could be argued that carving out an exception counts as increased interference because it means the government is inserting itself between all workers and employers in order to mandate job classifications. Without exceptions, businesses would not have to spend time/money defending their assertion that this worker is A and that worker is B and thus is less entitled to greater pay.

The governments here in the US fill two roles. Oppressing workers and protecting them. You never know what it is going to be from one moment to the next and we all await verdicts to cases like this, not knowing WTF is going to happen.

Unions are protected with various laws...then court cases pops up where there is some debate about if a Union can legally strike or even negotiate.

In my mind it is very clear. Do the workers have leverage? If so, then "the company??" has to negotiate...just like they would with any business partner.

In the end the courts are used as a bulwark against worker rights. Any victories for workers just give substance to the idea of governments intervening in business negotiations when board rooms want to socialize expenses.

Easy to miss line in the article says it’s due to avoiding spoilage in harvested food.

Absolutely labor bashing.

> Lest we lose perspective, this law on the books of the State of Maine applies to people who work with perishable foods, and the point is that pokey employees should not be rewarded for taking their sweet time getting the goods to market.

You could penalize that without penalizing those that work long hours for legitimate reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com