The farmworkers wait

Like the cycles of the harvest seasons, each May brings some of New York State’s 100,000 field hands to the Capitol to ask for nothing more than to be treated like all other people in the state’s workforce. Discriminated against by state law — which singles out farmworkers and denies them the right to overtime pay, the right to an unpaid day off per week and the right to organize and bargain collectively — dairy workers from Western New York, apple pickers from Central New York and onion harvesters from the Hudson Valley made the annual pilgrimage. Every year the answer is the same: No. No, despite the fact that the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act passes the Assembly year in and year out, the Senate GOP leadership, in thrall to the Farm Bureau growers’ lobby, refuses to let the bill come to the floor. No, even though there are 30 Senate sponsors and another three, Joe Robach, Carl Marcellino and Phil Boyle, who pledge their votes, making a majority of 33, above the magic number of 32 for passage.

Human rights doesn’t matter. Majority rule doesn’t matter. Only power matters.

Last Tuesday, rallying on the third floor landing of the ornate Million Dollar Staircase — 444 steps carved of stone — farmworkers and their allies were just down the hall from the Senate and the Assembly. Speaker after speaker railed against the injustice of denying equal treatment to the people who do the hard and essential labor of feeding all of us.

Sen. Marisol Alcantara was rightly angry that the farmworkers bill that she passed out of the Labor Committee was sidelined to the Agriculture Committee, in breach of Senate rules. Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan needed no microphone to express her disgust and shame.

But standing there as silent as the 77 stone faces carved into the staircase was state Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon.

Reardon absolutely wants equal rights for field hands, as Gov. Cuomo most certainly does. He has even taken the extraordinary action of refusing to defend a court challenge to a discriminatory law that fails to offer protections to farmworkers who would seek to organize. But their powerful voices need to be heard. They should recall Frances Perkins, appointed Jan. 14, 1929, by Gov. Franklin Delano Roosevelt as industrial commissioner, overseeing the labor department. She also served FDR in Washington.

In the ashes of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which killed 146 immigrate Jewish and Italian garment workers (123 of them girls and women), Perkins teamed with Assemblyman Al Smith and Sen. Robert Wagner to craft the nation’s first workplace protections and wage-and-hour laws.

Perkins, Smith and Wagner became giants of labor in Albany and beyond. Cuomo and Reardon should learn from their predecessors’ example.