State Sen. Adam Gomez and a coalition of legal, labor and health advocates urged the Joint Committee on Revenue on Monday to report favorably on a package of bills (S.2011, S.2012, H.3107) collectively called the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, saying the measures would extend minimum-wage, overtime and other workplace protections to farm laborers long excluded from state law.

The bills would raise the base pay for covered agricultural workers (S.2012/H.3107) toward parity with the state minimum wage and create overtime triggers for primary agricultural work at 55 hours per week and for secondary agricultural tasks at 40 hours per week (S.2011). Supporters said refundable tax credits for employers in the bills would help farms absorb higher labor costs.

The measures, supporters said, are a corrective to centuries-old legal exclusions. “For nearly a century our laws have carved out agricultural and domestic workers,” said Sen. Adam Gomez, the lead sponsor, who described the exemptions’ origins in federal law and called the bills a step toward dignity and safety for more than 14,000 farmworkers in Massachusetts. Legal advocates, public‑health clinicians and civil‑rights lawyers backed his testimony. Iris Coloma Gaines, the statewide language‑access attorney at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, and Dr. Maggie Sullivan, a family nurse practitioner and public‑health researcher, spoke about poverty, workplace injury and heat‑related illness among farmworkers and urged passage.

Opponents from the agricultural sector urged caution. Karen Schwalbe, executive director of the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation, told the committee the state’s farms operate on narrow margins and said many are already struggling with costs driven by inflation, climate impacts, new regulatory requirements and debt. Dan Bosley, the Farm Bureau lobbyist, said comparisons to larger states such as New York overlook scale differences: New York farms are, on average, much larger and can spread costs across bigger operations.

Farmworker advocates said those economic concerns have been discussed with farmers and that the bills were written with implementation supports — chiefly refundable tax credits and a higher overtime threshold than some other states use — to reduce disruption to smaller farms. Claudia Quintero of the Central West Justice Center and Bill Newman of ACLU‑Massachusetts framed the bills as a correction of historic racial and economic inequities and cited other states that have adopted similar measures.

No formal committee action was taken during the hearing. Committee members asked about state experience in other states, enforcement mechanisms and cost modeling. Proponents pointed to a 2020 University of Massachusetts analysis estimating that extending overtime would raise farm labor costs modestly (the study estimated increases in the low single‑digit percentage range of farm revenue) and that consumer price effects would likely be small. Opponents questioned whether the refundable tax credits in the bills would be sufficient to preserve small farms’ viability.

Discussion points: arguments for equity, worker safety and public health; proposed employer tax credits to offset costs; studies estimating modest cost increases; concerns among farmers about razor‑thin margins, scale differences with other states and administrative burdens. No vote or committee referral was recorded at the hearing.