This bill amends RCW 49.46.130. It makes agricultural employees subject to overtime pay when employed more than 40 hours in a workweek unless otherwise provided, and it creates a new voluntary waiver: an agricultural employee may waive overtime pay for up to 15 workweeks in a calendar year. Each waiver must cover at least one workweek and may be taken in intermittent or contiguous workweeks as the employee designates. During any workweek in which a waiver applies, the employer must pay at least the employee’s regular rate regardless of hours worked and is not required to pay overtime for that week. Employers must retain records of any waivers in addition to records required under RCW 49.30.020. The bill adds or clarifies definitions for “agricultural employee,” listing farm cultivation, raising/harvesting, livestock and related activities, packing/packaging/grading/delivery, certain commercial processing, and related farm operation tasks, and it explicitly excludes dairy employees from that “agricultural employee” definition. It defines “dairy employee” by reference to NAICS code 112120. Subsection (7) bars awards of damages, statutory or civil penalties, attorneys’ fees and costs, or other relief against an employer to an agricultural or dairy employee who seeks unpaid overtime based on the historical exclusion under former subsection (2)(g) as that subsection existed on November 4, 2020; that bar applies to claims and proceedings commenced on or after November 5, 2020, but expressly excludes dairy employees who are members of the Martinez-Cuevas class. The act includes an emergency clause and takes effect immediately. The amendment references other state and federal statutes for existing exemptions and cross-references to other RCW sections; the extracted text does not show the full prior and revised statutory language, does not define “workweek,” and contains parenthetical deletions and cross-references whose exact effect cannot be fully determined from the provided excerpts.

If enacted, most agricultural workers in Washington would generally become entitled to overtime pay after 40 hours in a workweek unless they voluntarily agree to waive overtime for up to 15 full workweeks each calendar year. Employers would have to pay at least the regular hourly rate in any waived week, would not owe overtime for those weeks, and would be required to keep records of any waivers. That makes overtime costs more likely for employers who do not obtain waivers, and creates a new recordkeeping duty and potential administrative burden for agricultural employers immediately upon enactment. The people most affected are agricultural employers, who face changed payroll costs and new documentation responsibilities, and agricultural workers, who gain a limited option to waive overtime but could lose overtime pay during waived weeks. The law also limits employers’ exposure to many retroactive overtime damage claims that arose after November 4, 2020, except for dairy workers who are members of the Martinez-Cuevas class. Key details are missing from the excerpt—such as how “workweek” is defined and how this amendment interacts with other cited statutes—so some implementation and legal exposure questions remain unclear.