Instead of spending summers at camp when she was a child, Blanca Antonio Aquino—alongside other children of farmworkers—worked in the fields to help their families pay bills.
“At age 8, I recall my mom telling me, ‘When you’re picking strawberries, think as if you’re picking up a single cent,” Antonio Aquino told the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors during its Aug. 27 meeting. “As you fill your box, imagine you are filling your box with money, with pennies.”
She was one of several farmworkers who attended the meeting to advocate for the county to create a living wage ordinance for farmworkers and set a $26 per hour minimum wage.
“We’re glad we are able to look to the county as a partner to improve labor conditions for workers,” Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) Co-Executive Director Hazel Davalos said during public comment. “However, if you asked any farmworker in our county what’s the biggest challenge they face, it’s low wages.”
As a result of the public comment, 1st District Supervisor Das Williams and 3rd District Supervisor Joan Hartmann will form an ad hoc committee to gather additional information for an ordinance discussion at a later date.
“This is a critically important industry in our county, and we want to better understand the dynamics and how some people are left behind,” Hartmann said.
Fourth District Supervisor Bob Nelson cautioned his fellow supervisors who wanted to go down this path because it could have a slippery slope effect.
“There’s a lot of workers in this county that are below that [$26] that are also important: health care, food service, tourism—the county has over 400 employees below the standard they are asking for here,” Nelson said.
In partnership with the Mixteco Indígena Community Organizing Project, CAUSE published a report that found that Central Coast workers earned an average of $17.42 an hour, CAUSE Senior Policy Advocate Erica Diaz Cervantes told the Sun.
“A lot of farmworkers were able to recognize that they’ve been recognized as essential workers during the pandemic. A lot of people are aware of how important they are. … Yet they aren’t being fairly compensated for that,” Diaz Cervantes said.
In the report—Harvesting Dignity: The Case for a Living Wage for Farmworkers—CAUSE and MICOP identified that fieldworker conditions are similar to truck driving and construction due to the risk of death and injury on the job; however, truck drivers earned $26.76 per hour on average and construction workers earned $25.04 on average.
“In California, we’ve seen that there’s been different cities and counties that have adopted higher minimum wages in the state due to the high cost of living between the coastal and inland areas,” Diaz Cervantes said.
About 10,000 LA County union hotel workers went on strike to receive higher wages in 2023, and the county ratified a landmark contract that secured a total hourly boost of $10 over the course of the four-year contracts, according to LA Times reporting. Diaz Cervantes said that their wages may go to $29 an hour by 2028.
“With hotel workers, there is a movement statewide, but it started at the local level,” Diaz Cervantes said. “This is something the Board of Supervisors can take on at a local level, they can set a precedent for fair labor practices for all residents in Santa Barbara County.”
Claire Wineman, the president of the Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and SLO Counties, cautioned the supervisors, saying that setting the requested hourly wage would meant a 63 percent wage increase for farmworkers. Instead, Wineman said she wanted to see a solution that could benefit both workers and growers.
“We will continue to pay the most competitive wages we can while also staying in business. We are very concerned with the potential impacts across numerous sectors countywide,” Wineman said. “We want jobs and businesses to stay in Santa Barbara County, this action would only further distance our local communities from neighboring counties, not to mention Arizona and Mexico as growing regions.”
