The New York State Assembly and Senate have legislation before their respective bodies, Assembly bill 1867 and Senate Bill 2247, that expands the rights of farm laborers, and at the same time has pitted agricultural interests against each other.As Tom Rivers reports for the Daily News online, one side argues the bill puts in place rights for farm workers that some consider long overdue. The rights include giving farm workers overtime pay for working more than 10 hours in a day or 60 hours in a week. Jordan Wells, who is a coordinator of the Justice for Farmworkers campaign says the bill puts in place basic rights and claims the bill is a work of compromise as it includes “feedback from the New York Farm Bureau.”
However, the New York Farm Bureau (NYFB) has a different opinion of the legislation than that of Mr. Wells. The NYFB claims the legislation would put New York farmers and agriculture at a “competitive disadvantage” with neighboring states and Canada. Julie Suarez is the public policy director for the NYFB, and she stated to Rivers that ‘"If this passes we won't be producing things like fruits and vegetables in New York State . . . We'll be doing wheat and oats that can be machine-harvested."
This bill is not new to the New York legislature. The bill was presented and rejected “several times last year [.]” However, Wells is hopeful that the new changes to the bill will lead to its passage, though he is not prepared to make any predictions.
Among the changes to the bill from previous measures, the legislation would not be implemented until 2011 if it passed in 2010. Collective bargaining rights for farmworkers would only be available to workers on farms that have sales exceeding $500,000. Wells claims this exempts 95 percent of agriculture. Additionally, the overtime provision has been changed from 8-hour days to 10-hour days and 40-hour weeks to 60-hour weeks, and on a seventh consecutive day of work before time-and-half pay would kick in. There are also changes on unemployment tax liability wages for guest-workers that could save farmers $1 million, according to the Justice campaign. There will also be exemptions for small farms.
Still, the NYFB is not yet on board. Dean Norton, the NYFB president argues the bill will add $200 million in mandates to farmers and will hurt the Long Island and upstate economies. The NYFB also claims that if the bill passed only California would have stronger farm labor laws.
Other organizations have joined the NYFB in opposing the bill, including Farm Credit East, which conducted a study on New York farm labor costs, based upon the 2007 Census of Agriculture. Farm Credit East found that “New York farmers paid $13.82 for every $100 of production, or 56 percent more than the U.S. average of $8.88.”
To read the Rivers article, click here.
To visit the National Agricultural Law Center's reading room on Farm Labor, where you can find case law and statutes on the issue, click here.
Posted: 1/19/10
