Who grows your food and what do they deserve?

A bill introduced into the Washington State Legislature Tuesday would grant our state’s farmworkers the same collective bargaining rights you and I share for the first time in our state’s history. But opponents ask: Is it the right time?

Senate Bill 6045, sponsored by Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Seattle, and its identical companion, HB 2409, sponsored by Rep. Sharlett Mena, D-Tacoma, would create a collective bargaining structure for the hundreds of thousands of farmworkers in Washington to band together to negotiate for fair wages, workplace protections, and improved labor conditions. These basic rights are afforded to nearly all workers, but farmworkers have thus far been excluded.

To explain, president of the Washington State Labor Council April Sims led off Tuesday’s Senate testimony with a history lesson.

She reminded the crowd that while the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave nearly all workers in the US the right to organize and collectively bargain for better working conditions, it specifically excluded agricultural work that was typically performed by Black, Latino, and Asian American workers.

“You have a chance to both empower the farm families who supply our food and to correct this historic injustice,” Sims said.

If the legislation passes, farmworkers would gain collective bargaining rights under the umbrella of the Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC), which typically oversees public employees’ union efforts. It’s unusual for private workers to be covered by PERC, but there is precedent, as farmworkers would be joining two other types: symphony musicians and agricultural cannabis workers, strange bedfellows who were pulled into PERC’s jurisdiction together in 2025.

During Senate testimony, farmworkers described their working conditions in terms  familiar to most of us: Trump’s tariffs and inflation are driving up prices, they’re making even less than they made years ago, and they’re under pressure to work faster and longer despite all of it.

But testimony afterwards at the 13th Annual Farmworkers Tribunal, a meeting of farmworkers and allies from across the state, took a more somber tone, as workers recalled being forced to work in extreme weather. When there was flooding in Skagit Valley in December, “They sent us to work as though our lives did not matter to them,” a farmworker named Eduardo said. “We are disposable to them.”

Another speaker, Angelica Ramirez Silva, a 17-year-old senior at Burlington-Edison High School in Burlington, Washington, reminded the crowd of the current of anxiety running through farmworkers’ lives these days. Farmworkers fear for their safety from ICE, especially after independent farmworkers union Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) saw one of its organizers, Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino, detained and pressured to self-deport last year. She said every day she goes to school scared, just hoping her two farmworker parents will be there when she gets back home.

“What if I come home and they’re not there? What if I receive a call that my parents were picked up by ICE?” she asked, stifling tears. “I come here and ask everyone to do everything in their power to make these people’s voices heard and help keep these families together.”

In a text to The Stranger, Edgar Franks, Washington State political director for FUJ, writes that unionizing can help these families in a meaningful way. “We believe that unions can help create safety for immigrants. It is a place people can go to for resources, information, and actions. We would also become part of a labor community,” Franks writes.

“Winning a union contract has changed my family's life for the better in every way,” said Tomas Ramón Vasquez of FUJ. “We're tired of hearing the excuse from the agricultural industry that giving farmworkers the same rights as everyone else will run farms out of business.”

Opponents of the bill claim exactly that.

“Washington's farms finished 2024 with a net negative income of nearly three hundred million dollars,” Pam Lewison of the Washington Policy Center claimed, but neglected to cite her source.

In a follow-up with The Stranger, Lewison passed along USDA data that shows a more complicated picture. Yes, according to USDA data, Washington farmers reported a net loss of $294 million in the last reported year of 2024, but that doesn’t appear to be because they're paying hired farmworkers more. Farmers actually paid these workers $931 million less in 2024 than in 2023. This $294 million shortfall appears to be due in large part to farmers hiring outside laborers, including many H2-A visa–imported workers (up $791 million from 2023 to 2024), increases in electricity and fuel costs (up $33 million), and the significant decrease in government subsidies (down $34 million, and $778 million down from the pandemic subsidies of 2020).

Their money troubles look to be in the rearview now, too, as the USDA is forecasting a 40.7 percent increase in farm profits nationwide in 2025, in large part due to $40.5 billion in government aid, the highest amount since 2020.

Lewison also suggested that this legislation was unnecessary because farmworkers could already collectively bargain. Which is true, technically, but farmworkers unions like FUJ don’t have the protection of the law behind them, making it more challenging for them to organize and negotiate against powerful farm owners.

Sen. Steve Conway (D-Tacoma) then asked Lewison, “What is the enforcement mechanism, if you don’t have a collective bargaining law?”

“We have several enforcement agencies, Senator,” Lewison stammered. “Both Labor & Industries and also the Department of Labor both have the opportunity to enforce those voluntary labor groupings.”

Which they wouldn’t, because farmworkers are specifically excluded from the National Labor Relations Act. But financial concerns continued to come up in opposing testimony, with farmers and their representatives speaking to “horrendous financial conditions,” with one claiming they are just “flat broke.” Too broke to pay a fair wage?

At the end of Senate testimony, Sen. Saldaña spoke to these concerns from the business lobby that times were too tough to offer these workers rights the rest of us enjoy.

“In my father’s time, when he was an agricultural worker in southern Texas and in Oregon, it was not ‘the right time.’ When I was a young organizer working with the farmworkers union, it was not ‘the right time,’” she said. “The way we’re [growing food] right now is not working. It is leaving fruit on our trees. It is wasting thousands of pounds of nutrition. And our supply chain doesn’t work. The retail we’re doing doesn’t work. But it also doesn’t work because the fundamental way we’ve structured this industry is based on exploitation.”