Isabel Magdaleno, an Oxnard farmworker who often works nine or 10 hours a day picking strawberries, just wants to get by. So does Craig Underwood, a Camarillo farmer struggling to grow his jalapeño peppers at a low enough cost to compete with farms in Mexico.

That common desire to survive has farm laborers and farmers at opposite ends of a fight over overtime pay. A bill approved by the Legislature and sent on Thursday to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would require farmworkers be paid time-and-a-half after working eight hours a day or 40 hours in a week. Currently, they are paid overtime when they work 10 hours a day or more than six days a week.

Magdaleno, who is 37 and has worked for the same farm for nine years, sees the law as fair compensation for hours she and as many as 25,000 farmworkers in Ventura County already put in.

“We would earn a little bit more money and this may help us live a more comfortable life,” she said. “There’s a lack of support for farmworkers. A lot of people don’t care about us. We’re workers and we have rights, but we don’t have a lot of representation or voice.”

The governor hasn’t taken a stance on the bill but is expected to make his decision in the next two weeks. If he signs the bill, it will add more financial pressures on farmers who already feel squeezed by regulations on water quality, fumigants and labor.

Their margins are tight enough that if labor would have cost Underwood 4 percent more last year, his entire profit would have been wiped out. He worries the overtime law will make it even harder to grow fruits and vegetables at prices consumers have come to expect. If prices rise, people will buy crops from other states or countries where workers are paid less and land is cheaper.

“We can legislate better wages and better conditions, but we can’t legislate competitiveness,” said Underwood, adding farmers want to pay their workers more. “I wish the world was different, but it’s not. If we’re not competitive with Mexico, we either don’t grow the crop or we go out of business.”

Farmers say the overtime proposal doesn’t recognize the nature of agriculture in which weather and limited seasons mean eight-hour workdays just don’t work. They also say the law wouldn’t achieve its desired result because they would be forced to hire more workers so that overtime would be as limited as possible.

Instead of getting paid more money, workers might end up losing hours.

“It’s better the way things are now,” said Andres Cortez-Cortez, a 25-year-old farmworker from Oxnard. “At least now we work the eight to 10 hours for sure.”

But the farmers’ strategy bothers Magdaleno.

“We work for them all season,” she said. “For the farmers to hire more people to avoid paying us would be unfair.”

Farmers and other employers say that what some define as fairness is trumped by economic realities.

Terri Ramirez is co-owner of Agricultural Computerized Technology, an Oxnard labor contractor that provides laborers for area farms and employs anywhere from 200 to 900 people. She said there’s no doubt overtime would force some farmers to make difficult decisions like maybe bypassing labor contractors and hiring workers themselves.

“If they want to survive, they’ll have to bypass everything,” she said.