California Mandates $19.75 Farmworker Wage, Growers Warn of Price and Job Fallout

California has signed into law a new wage mandate that will raise the minimum pay for many farmworkers to $19.75 an hour, up from $16.90, and farmers in Fresno County say the move could backfire on the very workers and consumers it’s meant to help.

The law applies to workers under the federal H-2A guest worker program, which brings in foreign laborers for temporary and seasonal agricultural jobs, as well as to domestic farmworkers performing similar work. The wage floor will not remain fixed at $19.75 — the law requires annual adjustments tied to inflation and cost-of-living changes.

State lawmakers who backed the measure say it addresses chronic low pay among some of California’s hardest-working laborers, even though many farmworkers already earn above minimum wage.

“This is a bottom-line wage that’ll help our farmworkers who bring so much to California,” said Assemblymember Maggy Krell (D), the bill’s author. “The truth of the matter is that those who are doing the hard work, waking up before dawn, and working on those farms are barely getting by, and some are not getting by at all.”

But Joe Del Bosque, a longtime Fresno County farmer who employs roughly 150 seasonal workers during summer months, told ABC 30 the timing could not be worse. Farms are already absorbing higher costs for fuel, fertilizer and other inputs, he said, and adding a mandated labor increase on top of that will squeeze operations further.

“People are complaining about affordability. They’re complaining about the cost of food. They’re complaining about job loss and businesses moving out of the state, and then they come up with this bill that is no doubt going to increase the cost to farmers and eventually to consumers,” Del Bosque said.

Del Bosque expects the added labor costs to move through the supply chain and ultimately land on shoppers’ grocery bills. He also warned that some farms may respond by cutting jobs or reducing hours — a result that would hurt the same workers the law intends to help.

Industry groups that fought the bill before it passed raised similar concerns. The Western Growers Association and other agricultural organizations wrote to lawmakers warning that a sector-specific wage mandate would make California farms less competitive against producers in other states and countries, threatening both production and rural jobs.

The Western Growers Association signaled on Oct. 2 that it is weighing legal action against the new law.