The betrayal Latinos feel tonight

Today will go down in history as the day Colorado lawmakers decided that farmworkers should work 56 hours before they earn overtime pay. 

It is a slap in the face to overworked and already underpaid immigrants who do the backbreaking work this country depends on, work most Americans no longer do.

I do not have easy words to describe what many Latinos are feeling tonight. It is grief. It is anger. It is betrayal. People who have never had their community singled out by hostile policies may never fully understand what that feels like.

The last time I remember this level of harm coming out of the Capitol was during the 2006 special session on immigration, when then-House Speaker Andrew Romanoff with a bloc of Democrats helped push an anti-immigrant agenda that left a lasting scar on Latino communities across Colorado. This vote brings some of those same emotions back.

Because this was not a debate over whether farmworkers should gain a new right. This is lawmakers proactively taking away the rights farmworkers already have. And imposing a discriminatory standard no other group of workers would be forced to accept.

Earlier today, by a one-vote margin, the House approved SB26-121. Speaker Julie McCluskie cast the deciding vote. Ten other Democrats voted in favor, including Western Slope lawmakers Meghan Lukens and Katie Stewart. (Dylan Roberts supported the bill in the Senate earlier in the session.)

To be clear, farmworkers did not cause tariffs, rising fuel costs, or rising fertilizer costs. They did not create the economic pressures hurting an already oversubsidized and overmanipulated agricultural industry.

What makes this even sadder is that SB26-121 will not stop a single farm from going out of business. It will not solve the real crisis in agriculture. It only takes away overtime rights from farmworkers and deepens the exploitation of underresourced, overworked immigrants whose labor feeds this state.

This is a sad day for Colorado. A vote to take rights away from farmworkers is not something Latino communities will forget.

Alex Sánchez is president and CEO of Voces Unidas Action Fund, a nonprofit organization based in the Western Slope.