STUYVESANT, NY — Harvest season means long days for American farmworkers — but usually no overtime pay. Federal law exempts farms from rules that entitle most workers to 1.5 times their normal wages when they work more than 40 hours a week.
New York now joins several states that have begun to change the rule.
The state labor commissioner on Friday approved a recommendation to phase in a 40-hour threshold for farmworker overtime over the next decade. Currently, New York farmworkers are only eligible for overtime pay after they have worked 60 hours per week.
Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon called the plan “the best way forward” for fairness for farm workers and the success of farm businesses.
Washington, Minnesota, Hawaii and Maryland have also granted forms of overtime rights to agricultural workers. California, an agricultural giant, this year began requiring farms to pay overtime to employees who work more than 40 hours a week.
The changes have excited workers, who say they badly need the extra cash, but have alarmed some farm owners, who say extra labor costs could wipe out meager profits.
Some advocates in the labor movement fear that workers’ hours will be capped.
According to Elisabeth Morales, this is what happened in the vineyard where she works in the Central Valley of California. After the state’s overtime rules changed, the vineyard reduced its hours to a maximum of 40 hours per week and hired more laborers so it could complete the work needed without having to pay overtime.
Morales, a mother of four, said she has to take a second job at McDonald’s to supplement her wages at the vineyard, which is $15 an hour for tasks such as weeding plus 40 cents for each box of grapes that she picks up.
“I would prefer to work overtime even if they don’t pay us overtime,” Morales, 43, said in Spanish.
There isn’t much national data yet to say for sure whether lowering the overtime threshold will be as bad for farm outcomes as agribusiness predicts, or as good for workers as the labor movement hopes so.
Farm workers were excluded from overtime pay in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and some union rights advocates say it’s a legacy of Jim Crow.
The overtime rule change is aimed at people like Doroteo, a farmhand at a Long Island vineyard who works nearly 60 hours a week during harvest season, supplementing his wages with landscaping work to the side.
Doroteo trims and weeds crops for $15 an hour. His salary peaks at $800 a week in the summer when the most work needs to be done. He earns less in the fall, which makes it more difficult to send money to his three children in Guatemala. He asked that his last name not be published because he feared being fired for talking about his job.
But farm owners say farming has been exempted from overtime rules for a reason.
“There has to be some common sense as to what people expect when they go to work on a farm, and that’s quite unique compared to other areas of work. It’s not something that can be done 40 hours a week and have weekends off,” said Nate Chittenden, owner of a mid-size dairy farm in Stuyvesant, New York.
In addition to his family members, his farm has 10 full-time employees.
“No farm wants to see people taken advantage of. We value the people who work on our farms. We want to allow them to earn a living while they work on our farm,” Chittenden said.
The New York state government created a tax credit to help cover the cost of overtime for agricultural employers, which Chittenden says would help somewhat.
In Washington state, this year saw the first harvest where farm workers were eligible for overtime pay after 55 hours worked. This threshold will be lowered as part of a phased introduction that will make workers eligible for overtime after 40 hours worked by 2024.
In California, as more workers have become eligible for overtime, some farms have switched to less labor-intensive crops like walnuts and almonds, which can be harvested efficiently using manual equipment, said Brian Little, director of employment policy at California Farm. Office, which represents farmers.
He also said some growers are turning to machines, rather than people, to do things like prune trees.
“It can work for hours. It doesn’t matter if it’s 95 degrees outside. He doesn’t take a lunch break and it doesn’t matter if he works nine and a half hours in a work day,” Little said.
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Maysoon Khan is a member of the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places reporters in local newsrooms to report on underreported issues. Follow Maysoon Khan on Twitter.