The overtime threshold for farm workers in New York would be reduced from 60 to 40 hours a week over the next 10 years, if a recommendation from the state’s Farm Laborers Wage Board is adopted by the state.
If the recommendations are enacted, the threshold would be reduced by four hours a week every two years, starting in 2024 and ending in 2032.
The board, under the Department of Labor, voted 2-1 on Jan. 28 in favor of resolutions authorizing the recommendations to be presented to Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon in a report. Once Reardon receives the report, she has 45 days to consider the recommendation before making her recommendation to Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature.
Similar to the board’s vote, the reception their decision received was split between the opinions of workers’ rights activists and farm owners.
New York Farm Bureau President David Fisher, who was the sole dissenting vote on the wage board, said the organization will continue to fight to stay at the 60 hour overtime threshold.
“In the end, the decision was made with little deliberation or reflection of the testimony. I would have hoped my fellow board members would have considered more of the impacts that this will have on agriculture,” he said in a statement.
Fisher said the decision would “negatively impact farms operating under thin profit margins as well as New York’s food system and access to local food.”
The Farm Bureau said about 70% of the testimony during the four public hearings on the change was in favor of keeping the overtime threshold at 60 and that the change would mean “fewer hours, less income and force those wanting to work more to find a second job or leave New York State for employment.”
The wage board advised against lowering the threshold from 60 hours a week in their last recommendation, citing the financial stress that the COVID-19 pandemic put on farmers.
On the other side of the argument, New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman urged Hochul and Reardon to adopt the recommendations into law. She said the change in overtime hours will “bring an end to the Jim Crow-era injustice and discrimination against farm workers that the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act was intended to reverse.”
“New York’s agriculture industry must no longer depend on the continued exploitation of farmworkers,” Lieberman added. “The NYCLU will continue to stand with farmworkers in the fight for equal workplace protections, fair compensation, and basic rights across New York State.”
The wage board’s recommendation is another in a string of wins for farm labor rights activists following the 2019 appellate court decision that granted farm workers the right to organize and collectively bargain, something they were denied previously under a 1937 state law exempting them from that right.
The Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act, which was enacted following that decision, guaranteed that right and expanded their employment rights further, including the requirement that employers pay overtime to employees working more than 60 hours per week and for work performed on their designated day of rest. Farm workers at Pindar Vineyards on the North Fork became the first to form a union under the law.
Hochul is proposing new and expanded tax credits to farmers to support and sustain food production in her 2023 executive budget proposal, including doubling the farm workforce retention credit and creating a refundable tax credit for overtime hours. The total farm-related tax credits total $16 million in the budget proposal.
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