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Farmworkers inch toward equality: N.Y. must defend the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act in federal court [1]
['New York Daily News Editorial Board']
Date: 2023-11-24
Like today, it was the day after Thanksgiving, in 1960, that Americans were exposed to the injustices faced by farmworkers in this country when Edward R. Murrow and CBS News broadcast the documentary “Harvest of Shame,” showing how the people who bring us our food were so badly treated, as migrant field hands followed the crops from Florida to New York.
Excluded from the New Deal labor reforms of the 1930s, including the minimum wage, overtime pay and guaranteeing employees the right to organize and bargain collectively, farmworkers toiled in silence.
While much has changed in these 63 years, full equality has not yet been achieved. However, here in New York, that goal will be reached in eight more years, nearly a century after all other workers won their full rights.
For decades, we have used the Thanksgiving holiday to remind New Yorkers that tens of thousands of farmworkers in this state were victims of discriminatory state laws and advocated to grant them the same protections enjoyed by everyone else. Finally, in 2019, there was a great victory when the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act was enacted and signed into law.
Collective bargaining was legalized and some field hands have since joined together and won recognition for their unions.
The last piece, overtime, will take the longest. From being nonexistent, time and a half pay was written into the new law starting after 60 hours a week, which is very far from the normal OT threshold of 40 hours. A lower OT was left to the discretion of the state Department of Labor setting up a Farm Laborers Wage Board. The board met in 2020, but punted. They tried again last year and recommended slowly moving from 60 hours down to 40 over the course of a decade.
That first step-down, from 60 hours to 56 hours, happens in less than six weeks, on Jan. 1. In two more years, it will become 52 hours and drop four hours every other year until reaching 40 in 2032.
However, some of the growers launched a federal lawsuit in Buffalo last month claiming that foreign seasonal farmworkers here under the federal H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers program should be exempt from the new state law. That’s nonsense and state Attorney General Tish James is defending the law, with a first hearing before a federal judge in January.
New York law applies to people who are in New York, be they commuters from New Jersey, tourists from other states and visitors from overseas. Guest workers are no different.
Many, many years ago, when he was paying us one of his annual visits, we asked Sen. Pat Moynihan if Congress would ever grant farmworkers full and equal labor rights, undoing the terrible wrong that excluded them in the 1930s. “No,” he said, “but that’s what states are for,” and that New York could and should set a level playing field.
It was many years after that conversation with Moynihan that New York acted. But New York did act, and the senator was correct, that each state has the authority to set higher labor standards than Washington does. A federal court cannot undo that.
On Jan. 1, the 56 hour OT begins for farmworkers. The judge, during the Jan. 19 hearing on the lawsuit, should tell the growers to get lost.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/11/24/farmworkers-inch-toward-equality-n-y-must-defend-the-farm-laborers-fair-labor-practices-act-in-federal-court/?ref=ambrook
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