ALBANY — As New York’s Farm Laborers Wage Board holds hearings on the 60-hour overtime threshold for farmworkers, state Sen. George Borrello joined colleagues and farmers in calling for freezing the threshold at its current level to enable more fact-finding on its impact.
Borrello, ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, has introduced legislation (Senate Bill 8944) that would delay the board’s recommendation until 2024.
The measure would also require the board to consider additional factors in its decision-making, including wage and overtime rates in neighboring states, the impact that COVID-19 has had on the agricultural industry, total compensation, including other benefits such as housing and insurance and the supply and demand of farm employees.
Senate Minority Leader Robert Ortt, R-Tonawanda, said New York is just eight months into the implementation of mandates that included the new overtime threshold, “during one of the worst seasons farmers have seen, and already a wage board is contemplating making even more harmful changes to hours employees can work.”
Especially in light of COVID-19, Ortt said new mandates must be delayed so that more insight can be gained on how seasons and conditions change from year to year.
Borrello said farms in the state have not yet completed even a single growing season under the mandates that took effect on Jan. 1.
“(Farmers) are still grappling with the changes and trying different strategies to comply with the 60-hour threshold while trying to keep their operations afloat,” Borrello said. “It is incomprehensible that they are already being confronted with the possibility that the threshold will be lowered even further.”
While repeal of the farm mandates is the ultimate goal, Borrello said, the effort right now is to prevent further mandates and bring “common sense to this issue by delaying any decision on the 60-hour threshold until 2024.”
Passed in 2019, the Farm Workers Fair Labor Practices Act granted year-round and seasonal farm employees many of the same labor rights and benefits as workers in other industries, included collective bargaining, housing protections, enhanced worker’s compensation protection and overtime pay of one and a half times an employee’s regular wages after 60 hours of work per week and/or if they choose to work on a designated day of rest.
The bill also mandated that the state labor commissioner establish a farmworkers’ wage board to examine the overtime pay threshold and consider whether it should be lowered even further.
The current three-member board includes former New York State AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes, Buffalo Urban League President Brenda McDuffie and New York Farm Bureau President David Fisher.
Despite the insistence of farmers that the measure could put them out of business with a projected increase of wage expenses by 44%, the bill passed in the Democrat-controlled Assembly and Senate. Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law July 17, 2019, in New York City.
Dale Hemminger, primary owner of Hemdale Farms and Greenhouses in Seneca Castle, expressed the frustration that he and many of his peers in the farming community are experiencing as they rearrange their operations to comply with the law and the resistance they are encountering from farmworkers to the changes.
“Every day my son and managers are juggling plans, schedules and responsibilities trying to comply with the overreaching, ill-conceived Farm Labor law,” he said.
Alfredo Mejia, a 21-year employee of My-T Acres in Batavia, recounted how the new overtime mandate has hurt his earnings during the peak season on the farm. He manages the potato storage and shipping and helps supervise the H2A workers that come each season.
“The farm has had to reduce the number of hours I am working during the busy season because of the new overtime rule,” he said. “This has reduced how much money I am making.”
