By Rick Zimmerman
The Northeast Agribusiness and Feed Alliance weighed in on New York’s Farm Laborers Wage Board Hearings this month. Established under the 2019 farm labor law, this Wage Board is empowered to render a recommendation to the Commissioner of Labor as to the level the overtime threshold should be pegged at, provided that it is no higher than the current 60 hours per week. Unions are pushing for a 40-hour threshold and the farm community has been engaged in a multi-month campaign to keep 60 at 60. Late last year, Labor Commissioner Reardon announced three Wage Board hearings for January. Danielle Penny Stroop was one of dozens of farmers, farmworkers and industry leaders that took time to participate on one of three hearings. Her testimony can be found here.
Post hearings, the three-person Wage Board will attempt to come to consensus around a recommendation. However, this task will be difficult. The Board is comprised of Denis Hughes, former president of the NY AFL-CIO, David Fisher, President of the NY Farm Bureau and Brenda Mc Duffy, Wage Board Chair, appointed by the Labor Commissioner. Even though the overwhelming majority of hearing speakers testified in support of keeping 60 at 60, the political pressure to move to 40 hours overtime threshold is intense. Despite the fact farmers testified and documented that they cannot afford time and a half wages beginning at 40 hours a week, union representatives repeat the cruel hoax that farmworkers will somehow earn as much at 40 hours as they do at 60. Nothing can be further from the truth.
This issue promises to alter the face of New York agriculture. The Wage Board can make the right decision and allow New York agriculture to remain economically viable in a competitive world market. Or it can choose to add an additional economic burden onto the shoulders of New York’s hard-working farmers and farmworkers. Deciding to go to 40 hours would result in the killing of jobs, and it would force farm family businesses to grow crops that don’t require non-family labor, take acreage out of farm production for solar panels instead, or move their operations to another state. Regardless, it will be the farmworkers that will lose the most.