It's more complicated than that... Sen. Saldaña (quoted in the article) has been one of the main advocates for these laws because her parents were (are?) agricu

It's more complicated than that... Sen. Saldaña (quoted in the article) has been one of the main advocates for these laws because her parents were (are?) agricultural workers. The early part of her career was spent doing worker advocacy. So she sees this issue from their perspective. She's urban, female, very sharp, bilingual, and personally connected to this issue. On the other side you've got a whole lot of Eastern Washington old white men, who have done things a particular way for decades and don't want to change anything. From their perspective, things like worker housing should count in the overall pay package to offset overtime. I don't think they are lying when they say they can't be profitable on some of these crops, but the other side of it is that they also aren't thinking real hard about ways to improve efficiency, add economic value, or increase profitability. Many of them aren't bad guys. Even though my politics are very different from theirs, I think too often they get treated like country bumpkins, which leads to resentment. Their core identity is that they like predictability. The problem here is that they need someone to give them an out - show them a business path where they can make money and give workers a better deal at the same time. Unfortunately, you've got two sides that don't quite understand how to get to that place, because in part it is a business problem not a political problem.