The Legislature is debating a farmworker labor bill in Albany that will cost New York’s family farmers millions a year and surely shutter farms across Upstate and Long Island.
The special-interest groups most fervently lobbying in favor of the bill are closely tied to the unions, who are desperate to bolster their ranks as major industry flees the hostile business climate in New York.
On the surface, it may seem perfectly reasonable that farmworkers should have the same employment rights as employees in many other sectors. In fact, the unique nature of producing food makes that unworkable. That’s why long-established local, state and federal laws take a different approach to ensure our workers are compensated and treated fairly.
The special interests are pushing three things: overtime pay for farmworkers, the right to collective bargaining and an unemployment-insurance tax. Here’s why family farmers are against all three:
Overtime pay simply isn’t workable on a farm. Wisconsin tried mandating overtime for farm employers — and repealed the law in 2003 because of the damage it did to the state’s dairy economy and consumers.
At harvest time, farmers and their workers have to scramble to bring in the crop on days of favorable weather. If we’re limited in the number of days or hours our workers can work, then we’d be limited in our ability to bring in the crop before it overripens and rots.
Along with the devastation to the farm economy and to the farmworkers themselves (since their hours will be cut), the losers would include consumers who prefer locally produced foods.
Collective bargaining presents similar problems: A strike in the middle of harvest would put us at an unfair disadvantage in any collective-bargaining negotiations since, we are at the mercy of harvesting a perishable product.
Unemployment insurance is already mandatory for medium and larger farm operations per federal requirements. But this bill demands it on even small farms — like the ones found in the New York City Greenmarkets, who employ just a worker or two for the planting and harvesting seasons.
And those small-farm workers move around from state to state — so they wouldn’t be eligible to ever collect unemployment insurance in New York even though the family farmer would have to scrimp to figure out how to pay the tax.
This bill threatens our ability to provide local food for local people.
Please realize that New York farmers already pay their workers well, between $10 and $15 per hour on average. We also provide free housing, transportation, utilities, child care and other perks.
Ninety-nine percent of New York’s farms are owned by family farmers who already have to deal with all sorts of challenges like the weather, high taxes and global competition. As commodity prices collapse in this recession, it’s not a stretch to say many farmworkers in New York are making more than the farmers themselves.
Far from the “factory farms” label our opponents are fond of slandering us with, the true face of agriculture in New York is one of families working hard, struggling not only to deliver quality food products but also just to make ends meet.
Indeed, this bill would force our family farms to become more like “factories” in order to fit into these new labor mandates.
New York Farm Bureau will continue to vigorously oppose this bill to keep our families farming in New York, and to help keep agriculture a major economic engine for the state. We’ve watched manufacturing leave Upstate; we don’t want our farms to be the next victim of Albany’s overreaching desire to regulate everything away.
Dean Norton is president of New York Farm Bureau and a dairy farmer from Bata via.