I don’t think you folks are reading this completely prior to posting your comments. For the most part, they did have wage and hour documents. The government challenged the validity of them based upon their stupid unbased assumptions.
The farmers were paying correctly.
I’ve run into this in wage and hour audits with L&I on piece rate work. They assume everyone is lazy and can’t make rate!
If you follow the calculations, Labor & Industry was stating that the piece rates or pounds picked were too high for one person and thus were dividing them in half based upon their assumption that two workers were on one ticket. If half of the production X the rate per pound did not make minimum wage the employer was hit with an assessment.
60 lbs per hour X .28 = $16.80 per hour.
If you divided that in half 30 X .28 = $8.40 and thus the employer must pay a pickup amount on the original and imaginary employee.
$16.80 is not a bad hourly rate for unskilled farm labor.