02/21/08 Tabling the Bill

Tabling the Bill. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Transporting commodities and the time it takes to do so has been under fire recently. 4 Washington State Democrats with no agriculture in their district had sponsored House Bill 2979. Yesterday that bill was tabled. Dan Fazio with Washington Farm Bureau gives us the background. FAZIO: It was a bill that would overturn a 9-0 state Supreme Court decision that said that people who transport agricultural commodities are exempt from overtime so they normally get paid on a scale that's not an hourly scale so the Supreme Court said there's an exemption from having to pay time and a half over 40 for those folks. According to Fazio Farm Bureau has been working on the issue from another angle. FAZIO: We were disappointed that the State Department of Labor and Industries also supported the bill, principally because we at the Farm Bureau had worked all last summer with L&I on a competing bill  a compromise bill that would have aligned the federal and state agricultural overtime regulations. By supporting this legislation farmers would be hit with unnecessary labor costs. FAZIO: We had the state Department of Labor and Industries that was enforcing standards that did not exist in that law. We told them that, they didn't believe us. They went to the Supreme Court and tried to get a small trucking firm to pay overtime and the state Supreme Court told them no, you have to just read the law. The law says there's no overtime owed for the transporting of agriculture commodities. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.