to require overtime after eight hours on the job—the standard for workers in other industries. The law

went into effect

this month, and will be fully phased in by 2022.

In California, however, protections for farmworkers, who support a $50-billion industry, are among the country’s strongest. In 1976, the state ordered overtime pay for farmworkers after they had worked 10 hours in a single day or 60 hours in a week. Forty years later, the state became the first

There appears to be a different, though still legal, pay system for farmworkers, depending on whether or not they are hired directly by a farm operator, or a third-party company, known as a farm labor contractor (FLC), that provides a variety of services for farm companies. Since 2010, FLCs have been California’s largest employer of farmworkers, adding thousands of jobs every year as direct hires made by farm operators have stagnated. Some of these contractors are charged with assembling work crews and moving them from orchard to orchard. Others actually lead and manage them in the fields. Either way, they’re an attractive option for farm operators who don’t have the expertise to staff and manage their workers, according to Anthony Raimondo, a Bakersfield-based attorney who represents FLCs.

The citrus industry had depended on contracted labor since the Bracero program brought temporary farmworkers to orchards in the 1940s and 1950s. Gaspar Rivera Salgado, a project director at UCLA Labor Center, attributes the recent rise of subcontracted farm labor, and the eclipse of direct hires, to several factors, like an uptick in farmworker availability after the 2008 depression and subsequent crash of the construction industry. Salgado also mentions the increasing consolidation of farm companies, particularly in the grape industry, that leaves operators with vast acres of production they struggle to staff.

United Farm Workers of America

“You need huge amounts of labor at specific periods of time,” he says. “And there’s no way that one company can process them. So they’re relying on labor subcontractors who can manage large crews of people.”

Salgado cites liability as an incentive to subcontract farm labor. Since the Reagan administration, employers who knowingly hire undocumented immigrants have been held liable, and can be fined thousands of dollars per worker. In California, where 90 percent of farmworkers were born in Mexico, and 60 percent work here illegally, that liability has evidently been shifted to subcontractors, which helps obscure a farm’s relationship to the pickers working its orchards.

Labor advocates agree that an intermediary allows a farm operator to dodge some responsibility. By the letter of the law, operators are responsible for pickers on their fields, and are thus on the hook for unpaid wages. In practice, pursuing claims on behalf of subcontracted workers can be tricky, because farmworkers—particularly those on citrus orchards, moving from farm to farm, sometimes in a single day—might not know who they’re actually working for, according to a state official who was not authorized to speak to the press.