And we were not paid overtime."ĭue to a Jim Crow-era exemption in federal law, most farmworkers in the U.S. They said it was an eight-hour shift, but sometimes it was 12. "In that dairy, you had to eat with a taco in one hand and work," he recalled. The lawsuit he filed argued that a failure to provide overtime pay violates state protections against discrimination. "We began to fight and that overtime was born within the state of Washington," he said. So he sought the help of Columbia Legal Services, a law firm in Washington that, in part, focuses on immigration issues. Martinez said that while working, he and his fellow farmworkers didn't get lunch or other breaks. "And that's when I began to do something about the rights that we have as workers in the fields." "At that dairy is when I started to see workplace violations and abuses from the foremen to the workers," Martinez recalled.
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