Farm workers again excluded

In the first week of January, the state Department of Labor placed legal notices in 22 newspapers across New York inviting written objections to the Dec. 31 Farm Laborers Wage Board’s tremendously unfair recommendations that farm workers continue to only be granted overtime pay after 60 hours a week, which is effectively no OT, compared to everyone else who earns time and half after 40 hours.

We didn’t see the notice (it wasn’t in the Daily News, Times or Post). The farm workers didn’t see it because they were busy harvesting food for millions during the pandemic. Neither did their advocates nor the labor movement. There was not one objection received in the 15-day statutory period.

Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon then issued an order on Feb. 19, accepting the unfair report denying equal pay and directing the Wage Board to reconvene at year’s end to look again at reducing the OT threshold. Another round of legal notices followed, this time in 15 newspapers, with

Reardon’s order to become effective 30 days later, which is March 27.

In all, lots of formal steps to tell field hands to get lost. The Legislature must undo this injustice with a bill setting OT at 40 hours, otherwise it could be another round of nothing next winter from the three-member Wage Board, with the representative from the Farm Bureau growers’ lobby saying more time is needed and the appointee from labor demanding equality and Reardon’s pick again making the call.

To its credit, the Farm Bureau has been vigorous during COVID in seeking safer working conditions in the fields and orchards and packing houses and greenhouses and dairies.

There was some noise that New York had first included agricultural employees in the 1b group of persons eligible for COVID vaccines and then reneged, but it’s not so. Farm workers still wait for vaccines, like they wait for equal pay. These are the most essential of all essential workers: No farm workers, no food. And yet they are forgotten.