Wage board to submit farmworker overtime recommendation 

The Farm Laborers Wage Board voted 2-1 to submit final recommendations to the state Labor Department that would reduce the number of hours farmworkers have to work to receive overtime pay.

At a virtual meeting Tuesday, the three-member wage board voted on whether to submit a report with recommendations to lower farmworkers’ threshold for overtime pay to 40 hours in a week from the current 60-hour threshold. The suggested changes would bring down the threshold over a 10-year period starting in 2024.

The board must now submit those recommendations to state Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon for approval, at which point she will have 45 days to review the board’s findings and make a final decision on whether the recommendations should be put into effect. 

In January of this year, the board initially recommended that the threshold be lowered by 20 hours over a 10-year period starting in 2024. From then onward, the threshold would be lowered by four hours every two years for a decade.

“I knew the cards were stacked against the position of my organization and what agriculture truly believes is best," said David Fisher, New York Farm Bureau president and the single dissenting vote at the board meeting. 

During the meeting, Fisher took issue with the report's findings, saying "it makes a number of conclusions based on nothing more than opinion.”

“I can’t support this final report as written," he said. 

The other two members of the board — Brenda McDuffie, former president and CEO of the Buffalo Urban League, and Denis Hughes, past president of the New York State AFL-CIO — voted to support the findings of the report. 

McDuffie said the report's recommendations "protects the rights of farm laborers while taking into account the needs of farmers.” She said, "It is our duty to protect tens of thousands of farmworkers and align their rights with those in other industries.”

Until 2020, farmworkers in the state were not entitled to any overtime pay.

When the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act of 2019 was passed, farmworkers in the state became eligible after laboring 60 hours per week, above the 40-hour limit common for many workers.

“Lowering the threshold is going to be detrimental to our business,” said AJ Wormuth, board member of the Northeast Dairy Producers Association, a trade group representing over half of the milk produced in the state.

Wormuth, owner of Half Full Dairy in Elbridge, New York, said the recommendations would not only raise costs for farmers struggling amid inflation and labor shortages, but would also lead to seasonal farmworkers choosing to work in other states where they could work more hours per week.

“It’s going to have unintended consequences on the people it’s trying to help,” he said.

Many farmers throughout the state, as well as some of their workers, worried about the financial impact overtime pay would have on their businesses and wages when the Act first passed.

A report from the state Labor Department released earlier this year suggests overtime pay hasn't had a major impact to employers or workers. In 2020, when farmworkers first became eligible for time-and-a-half overtime pay, they earned $39,137 on average, according to the report. The prior year, average wages were $37,659.

The board first held an in-person public hearing on the overtime issue in 2020. Since then, it has held eight virtual public hearings and four informational sessions. Farm laborers, farm owners, academic experts, elected officials and others offered testimony during the hearings.