This content provides an overview of key U.S. labor laws and benefits, highlighting their evolution, limitations, and complexities, particularly in comparison to other developed nations. It emphasizes the gap between stated "family values" and the lack of mandated paid leave and comprehensive healthcare.
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1993 the family medical leave act
this was signed into law under president
clinton at the time and
and it
it
requires employers of a certain size i
think the cutoff is 50
to grant an eligible employee up to a
total of 12 work weeks of unpaid leave
during any 12-month period so it didn't
require employers to provide paid leave
but at least you've got your job if you
do something for a sick parent a sick child
child
or go through some other
situation a newborn child and adoption
there are a number of things that you
might have to deal with in your own
personal family life
and the
law now requires that you can come back
to your job or at least
an equivalent job after
you leave they can't fire you or in any
way discriminate against you because of
that leave and
and
as great as that sounds well who can
afford to do that
some people can some people can't some
people have a spouse or other family
members can pick up the slack while
you're taking leave but
it's a drop in the bucket but at least
i would say that a lot of people in
other countries laugh at the united
states about our constant
constant
use of the phrase family values yet
we won't provide health coverage we
won't provide paid leave
the amount of vacations that we allow
families are
pretty limited compared to most european countries
now one of the things just a little
aside when this first happened in 93
there were a lot of companies that
started to do something that is illegal
but they would take employees and
and
switch them over to contractor status
you're no longer my employee
you are a
an independent contract
what does that do that might get their
number of employees down below 50 i
think it is so now they no longer have
to comply with the family medical leave
at so if a company had 60 employees and
they could squeeze
12 of them off the books now they don't
have to comply um
um
or they don't have to provide a lot of
benefits by making somebody a contractor
uh you either are or aren't a contractor
and making somebody who technically is
an employee somebody who works for you
must follow your hours your duties is
under your control they're an employee
entitled to all employee
benefits and protections they're not an
independent contractor
but there was a bunch of companies
across the country that started to do
this as soon as the
family medical leave act was put into
law because they didn't want to have to
deal with it
i think it's a shame i think we should
automatically have paid
leave for
adoptions and
births and
somebody's sick i mean
i don't think we are truly a country of
family values certainly not in terms of
2004
took quite a while to fill in some of
the gaps on
we have the california's paid
paid
family leave law
and so that is a
reduced pay situation
situation
if you are in a company as an employee
under the state disability insurance program
program
you can get a maximum of six weeks of
partial pay
time off of work for very similar
situations as the family and medical
leave at
so how does this all work you've got
disability insurance you've got paid
family leave you've got unpaid family
and medical leave at the federal level
it can be a nightmare to try and figure
out how do i deal with all of this
a lot of good companies have something called
called
uh a human resources department with a specialist
specialist
who is there for
employee rights now
any larger company has a human resources department
department
and even the smaller ones might have a
human resources department or at least
one or two people to run human resources activities
activities
but in a good company
the human resources specialist will help
you navigate this and line up things
where you can do a combination of paid
in order to take to maximize your
ability to get the benefits that you are
entitled to
but it can be very very difficult to
negotiate if your company doesn't have
somebody who's willing to help you
navigate these kinds of things in the event
event
of a birth of a child of
an adoption a sick family member there
labor organizations
organizations
employees and not just ag employees but
any employees um
um
in 2016
just five years ago roughly california
cruz av-1066
authorizing all workers including ag
workers to receive
overtime pay for all work after eight hours
hours
i would think most of you have heard
about this this is a big big deal it was
phased in
over the last several years it became
fully phased in i believe it was january
1st of 2020 and
and
in agriculture that a lot of people were
it's something you have to deal with
it doesn't impact union employees
because union employees have a union
contract negotiated between the employee
group and the company
and so if you're under a contract you
can set up your hours anyway within limits
limits
you know you can't do
23-hour shifts
in agriculture certainly you can do
longer shifts like there are 24-hour
shifts in law enforcement and fire and
things like that because it you need to
you know an active event
um an active fire you know i've worked a
lot of
24-hour shifts when i was
a firefighter back in the day and
and
that's just what you have to do because that's
that's
the requirements of the job
but in agriculture in a lot of other
things that are non-union um
um
eight hours period and
if you are union even though you don't
have to comply with the eight-hour rule you
you
there are lots of other ways to make
sure that
fair compensation and working conditions
now with a union you could do four tents
to get your 40 hours and a lot of people
love that i've got some friends that
just love working for a
organization that has
410 so you work 10 hours a day
monday through thursday and now you got
a three-day weekend every week yay um
now in agriculture you're probably working
working
a lot of 50 hour if not 60 hour weeks
that's kind of normal
especially if your farm manager 60 hours
is just what you do you're there uh
ready to roll at six and you're there
until the sun goes down on most days and um
um
that's life
that you know you need to know what your
at least if you're not covered by a union
union
eight hours
is the maximum before uh
uh
overtime kicks in
with some exceptions as you might
uh unders you might expect
so in federal law the labor
labor
law is uh administered primarily by the
department of labor but labor is
extremely comprehensive and complicated
and so there are lots of other
regulatory agencies besides the
department of labor that get involved in
labor laws uh so for example osha which
i've already mentioned
it deals with safety but is that
overlapping with labor issues oh definitely
um
subject to the provisions of the fair
labor standards act as well as state
laws that's how they determine wages and
and
uh in
states you can either follow
federal law or if you're going to do
something different it has to be the
same or higher
than federal law
so there's minimum wages
which is
i would argue
you can see how over
many many decades
wages have changed
um from
one level to the next but at the federal level
level
there hasn't been any movement in the
minimum wage since
2009 has there been any increase in costs
costs
has there been inflation since 2009 yeah
i would say that 725 is
an embarrassment if
if
federal minimum wages kept kept pace
with inflation we'd be somewhere between
17 and 20 an hour depending on how you
looked at it uh
uh
i understand some of the arguments that
you know there needs to be minimum wage
for training jobs and for
uh entry-level situations but there are
people that work minimum wage for
years and they're not an entry level
fine if you have uh some sort of a
short-term internship
if you have um
um
you know job training period for the
first three months
uh you're a high school student doing
some work studies type
situation i can understand the argument
to have a
a lower wage but if you're an
experienced adult worker who's not in
part of their training
uh this idea that 7.25 an hour even in
the most backwater section of louisiana or
the lowest wage states
in the country probably would be
louisiana alabama
south carolina places that
have these wages 7.25 an hour isn't
isn't enough
enough
it doesn't make any sense you cannot
afford anything with that
so that's the federal minimum wage the
floor is pretty damn low at the federal
california state minimum
is 11 an hour
uh 10.50 for smaller companies um
um
i believe some areas are 13 an hour
i don't think there's been any movement
here i
think this is the industrial relations
this must be current um
san francisco i think is 15 an hour so
depending on where you are because of
local conditions you can
federal minimum wage and overtime pay
does not require severance pay severance
pay is money that you get after you
leave a company
so when you
are laid off a lot of times in higher
level positions the company will give
you a couple weeks or a month of pay
for work that you didn't do
to give you some money to survive till
you get that next job that's called
severance pay
there's no requirement that is used as a
reward to
some employees unfortunately it's
usually only the higher level employees
that get this
what we call the exempt employees which
i'll get to in a minute um
but it's not everybody and it can be
used as a recruiting tool you're trying
to get employees to come work for your
company well if you've got a good
reputation for providing benefits and
severance pay and sick leave and
vacations and holidays all of these
things that are not mandated or required
under law
it can help
attract employees come to your company
for agricultural operations it prohibits
the employment of children under the age
of 16
during school hours and in certain jobs
deemed too dangerous and
and [Music]
[Music]
in agriculture pretty much everything
outside is deemed too dangerous so
unless you're in the front office
working with the payroll folks or
something like that if you're in a
warehouse or you're in the field
it's too dangerous and so
the only time you see people working in
ag under the age of 16
is usually
when it's
on the family farm you're the child of
somebody who owns the farm and then
the rules are a little different for
working on a family farm
uh so there's a narrow gap
16 to 18 that two year window
where it's much easier to get employees
that are in that age group and
not only hiring them getting them on
your insurance and finding work for them
even though it's easier it's still not
easy enough
having a
worker in agriculture who's between the
ages of 16 and 18
for a lot of companies it's not worth it
and i know
several companies that
that
they won't do it it's just not worth it
they will only hire 18 and older just to
avoid the insurance premium you pay more
for having underage workers and all of
the other
liability issues of having an underage worker
worker so
so
you can it's just a little tricky
unless you're on your own family farm
next we come to the word exempt i
mentioned that a moment ago to be exempt
from minimum wage and overtime pay
requirements you must meet certain
requirements so when we say an exempt employee
employee
we're talking about exemption from
minimum wage and overtime now the exempt
from minimum wage really
isn't relevant in the vast majority of
cases because
the people who qualify as exempt employees
employees
with very few exceptions make more than
minimum wage by a lot
so these are executives administrative
positions professional employees sales employees
employees
certain skilled computer professionals
in sales sometimes you get commission
you don't get paid anything you either
sell or you don't
and you get a percentage off of your sale
sale
that is legal um
um
but you have to be careful how you set
that up because there are ways that can
be being illegal for that
so if you are in a position um
of higher responsibility
then you can get uh
uh
in exempt status
the good thing
you're making more money
your salary you don't have to worry
about keeping
track of your hours
and so a lot of people here exempt
employee and what's that salaried
employee oh i know what that is you get
a fixed amount
every week or every month regardless of
how many hours you put it
problem is
regardless of how many hours you put it
because most exempt employees that i know
know
don't work 40 hours and go home some do
yay for you i wish i was in that spot
they work
overtime and they don't get a cent
whether you work
40 50 30 100
100
100 hours a week that is killer
killer
does it happen
oh yeah
i spent
two months doing 100 hours a week eight
weeks straight
and damn near killed me but
not literally but i was
dead to the world um
um
and then when things slowed down i was
only doing 75 um
um
was i being taken advantage of by the company
company yeah
yeah
was there much i could do about it not really
really
was i my own worst enemy
part of the problem no doubt
i let it happen to a certain extent but
god passed the hurdle and
so who else
else
would be exempt fishing operations i
think that's pretty easy to understand
you're out in the ocean on a fishing boat
boat
you can't be clock in the hours that it
doesn't make sense
um what about farm workers on small farms
farms
so you've got
really small companies less than 500
what they call mandates or worker days
to be more politically correct
and modern terminology um
in a calendar quarter if you have less
than 500 days work in three months oops um
um
you're a pretty dang small company so
you might be able to [Music]
[Music]
squeeze in on an exemption
for overtime in that
category you still
in that category would have to comply
with minimum um
um
exempt from overtime pay only but not um
um
not minimum wage uh
uh
auto truck and farm implement sales
persons parts clerks mechanics non-manufacturing
non-manufacturing
or excuse me mechanics um
farm workers right there
um farm workers are exempt from overtime
pay in the federal eyes in
in
california we get overtime pay after
eight hours now unless
it's governed by a union remember you
got to keep these
federal versus state issues
separate i won't try and trick you on
any test but you do have to keep that in
the back of your mind at the federal
level farm workers are exempt from overtime
overtime
but there's still our rules you can't
say oh you're exempt from overtime so
i'm going to work you 14 hour days
no that doesn't work doesn't fly
uh minimum wage we already looked at
that i've been
there is something called piece rate
maybe you've heard of it
instead of paying an employee so many
dollars an hour you pay them for so much
piece of work maybe so many cents per
uh clam shell of strawberries you
harvest and pack maybe so many cents per
length of irrigation pipe you put in the
field irrigate or whatever so the
faster your crew is the better you work
the more you get done the more you get
paid at the end of the day
but if you are on a
piece rate type of position
and things are not going well that day
you can never give them the employee less
less than
than
minimum wage at the end of the day so if
they put in an eight hour day
on piece rate at the minimum what you
pay them has to be if it's in a federally
federally
controlled area 7.25 an hour if it's in
california probably eleven dollars an hour
hour um
um
as a minimum now one of the things that
i did as
an employer
uh occasionally we would have these bad
fields and strawberries there was a
problem we still need to harvest them
but the crew would never make their
piece rate the same in these couple of
fields that had problems and
and
because there were problems they would
be working
the same number of hours but they
wouldn't get as many strawberries
as many flats of strawberries done in a
day so we increased the piece rate in
those fields
we didn't say well you're still making
minimum wage be happy and
go home no
you're going to get unhappy workers and
they're going to leave and labor is
really important not only to be good to
your employees but to keep
workers on your crew and so the
strawberry crew back in those days we
would make sure that we didn't pay them
a piece rate
that met minimum wage we would pay them
a piece rate that would match their
normal piece rate so you know just a
round number if you they normally made a
hundred dollars during a day
and they were in a bad field that
technically they only earned eighty
dollars that day because of the bad conditions
conditions
we bumped it up to 100
so they wouldn't go anywhere it was our
problem it was our fault that they had a
couple of bad feels not the workers fault
other labor laws i'm not going to go
through these we've talked about some of
them already but there are lots of laws
many more than this related to wage payments
health and
benefits um
there are group health plans that are generally
generally
provided for
employees that do get it they can be
provided by the employer or by a union
and the employer might purchase them
through an organization like the western
growers association
that gives them better bargaining power
so you've got hundreds of small ag
companies that all go together and buy
their insurance through western growers
association now western growers
association can turn around to the big
insurance company and instead of
you as a small company trying to say i
want to buy insurance for 25 employees
western growers can turn around on your
behalf and say we want to negotiate a
health contract for thousands of
employees you get a better deal
the union same thing union groups can provide
provide
health benefits for
the employees within the union
erisa the employee retirement income
security act
this provides minimum standards for
pensions and health plans
so it's in this section because of the
health plan portion
and it provides specific
information about what a company must do
in order to properly provide and fund a
pension or a health plan for employees
so it meets standards you must meet
basic standards i'm going to provide a
pension for employees or even a 401k
program which is different rules it's
not erisa but
if i'm going to provide something i have
to meet these minimum standards
i'm going to provide a health insurance
plan i can't just say look at us we're
providing health insurance
and it's basically a bottle of asp
that's all you get
that's your health insurance plan uh you
can't do that if it's going to be call
the health insurance plan it has to meet certain
certain standards
standards
there have been numerous amendments to
erisa because it's changed over the years
years
it's very complicated in terms of
insurance right now and
again i would argue another
international embarrassment how the hell
do we have such a massively
uh successful and wealthy country that
we don't provide health insurance
for our citizens and i don't care which
side of the political spectrum you are i
think it's absurd the idea that we can't
afford to provide health insurance for
as a standard basic right as an american citizen
it's a laughable lie of course we could um
um
we just don't and we don't for many
different reasons
and so what are we stuck with a very
bizarre insurance problem
problem
a quagmire of all of these different
things where some people get great
insurance some people get crappy
insurance some people don't get any
insurance at all some people think they
have insurance that covers things and
so over the years
there have been
efforts to put little plugs in the hole
of all of this we've had the affordable
affordable care act which
maybe you know better as obamacare and
we have covered california which is
our local california versions of
options for obamacare [Music]
[Music]
but other things like erisa have also
been fixed amended tweaked
to try to have something that gets
a lot of people coverage
unfortunately we have millions that
don't have
cobra i never could remember
consolidated omnibus budget
reconciliation act but cobra did
something that i remember when i was
changing from one job to the next cobra
gave me a guaranteed right to purchase
the same insurance as long as i didn't
let it lapse the same insurance as i had
with my employer so i just notified my
employer i want to keep the insurance
that i had with you
and i'm leaving
there's a limit i don't know how long
you can keep it it's only for a few
months but you can keep it um
um
it was very expensive but
my wife at the time was pregnant and um
um
we had to have health insurance and so i
paid this
outrageous amount for
two or three months till i got settled and
and
the health insurance portability and
accountability act allows you to take
insurance with you so you have continued
coverage when you change jobs again it's
very complicated
and it shouldn't be
number one reason why americans go
bankrupt and end up on um
um
government assistance when they weren't before
before
health issues
they have a medical condition or
something that wipes them out wipes out
their savings takes their home takes everything
everything
it's not right so
i think i'll
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