New York Daily News

Farm workers forgotten

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On this feast day, when we gather around the table to celebrate regardless of religion or background or political persuasion, we partake of the bounty harvested by farm workers, without whom there would be no food. The 100,000 field hands in New York don’t have today off. Working on industrial-scale agricultur­al combines, they never have a day off. They have no right to overtime for their backbreaki­ng labor. They have no right to form a union.

Under New York law, none of those basic labor protection­s the rest of us rely upon are guaranteed. Has been that way for generation­s, despite voices as powerful as Cesar Chavez and Robert Kennedy demanding change. New York, in 2017, is better than this. While farm workers today milk the cows and feed the geese and harvest the onions and pick the apples, two people who do have the holiday off have the most power to change the immoral status quo. They are Marisol Alcantara of Washington Heights, and, 160 miles up the Hudson, Richard McNally of Rensselaer County.

Alcantara chairs the Senate Labor Committee. Elected last year as a Democrat, she caucuses with the Independen­t Democratic Conference, which shares power with the GOP.

In Alcantara’s campaign and since, she has pledged to fight for those who toil in the fields, as her grandparen­ts and in-laws once did. She is the prime sponsor of the bill to end the farm worker exclusions, called the Farmworker­s Fair Labor Practices Act. The Assembly is ready to pass it, and Gov. Cuomo is ready to sign it.

But Alcantara has never had a hearing on her bill. Or brought it up for a committee vote, where it would surely pass. The identical bill passed the Labor panel last year under a Republican chair.

She is not alone. There are 30 Senate Democrats, both IDC and mainline, who have backed the bill in the past. Only half are currently cosponsors due to intra-party feuding. Shame on them, too, including mainline Democratic leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and IDC chief Jeff Klein.

If the 30 Democrats unite, upright Republican­s Joe Robach, Carl Marcellino and Phil Boyle are enough to provide a majority for passage.

It will be resisted by Majority Leader John Flanagan, who was once the prime sponsor of this very bill but has since turned his back.

The other person in focus today is McNally, the state Supreme Court justice who is deciding the case of fired dairy worker Crispin Hernandez.

Hernandez is suing the state in Albany court because the bar against organizing is clearly at odds with the state Constituti­on, which says that the “labor of human beings is not a commodity nor an article of commerce and shall never be so considered or construed,” and that “employees shall have the right to organize and to bargain collective­ly through representa­tives of their own choosing.”

That’s the Constituti­on, and the Constituti­on supersedes the law, as McNally surely knows. Cuomo agrees and is not defending the statute.

But though the judge has had the case for more than a year and a half, he still hasn’t ruled.

The farm workers, having been left out of the law’s protection­s for decades, are patient. But right is right.

Enjoy your Thanksgivi­ng, your honor.

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