Dr. Richard Stup, CCE-Agricultural Workforce Development Program, Ithaca, New York

New York’s state government took another major step toward reducing the farm laborer overtime threshold on September 30, 2022. Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon issued a press release and official order accepting the findings of the Farm Laborer Wage Board report. The NY State Department of Labor will now begin a rule making process to make the Commissioner’s order formally a state regulation, this process will include a 60-day public comment period. This is the conclusion of a long and controversial political process that started with the 2019 passage of the Farm Laborer’s Fair Labor Practices Act (FLFLPA) in 2019, and continued through 14 lengthy public meetings and hearings of the wage board.

What changes will happen and when?

The overtime threshold for farm laborers is currently at 60 hours per week. This will not change for the rest of 2022 and for all of 2023. The overtime threshold will begin to decline on January 1, 2024 by dropping to 56 hours per week, and then it will continue to decline by four hours every other year after that until it reaches 40 hours per week in 2032. Here is the schedule:

• January 1, 2024, the threshold declines to 56 hours;
• January 1, 2026, the threshold declines to 52 hours;
• January 1, 2028, the threshold declines to 48 hours;
• January 1, 2030, the threshold declines to 44 hours;
• January 1, 2032, the threshold declines to 40 hours, and remains there.

Farm employers will be responsible for paying farm laborers 1.5 times their regularly hourly rate for any hours worked above the weekly overtime threshold. Note that overtime is only payable to those who meet the definition of “farm laborer.” While this includes most farm employees, it does not include many family employees who are related to a farm owners, and some employees who are exempt from overtime due to their status as executive, professional, or administrative employees. Visit this page on the Cornell Ag Workforce website to view a presentation that explains this in more detail. One key point to note, just paying an employee via salary DOES NOT exempt them from overtime, they must qualify to be exempt from overtime based on their relationship to the owner or their job qualification as executive, professional, or administrative.

Where do we go from here?

New York farmers are intelligent, resilient, and adaptable, all of those qualities will be required in abundance for the years ahead. The best farm managers will continue to sharpen their leadership and employee management skills in order to recruit and retain the most effective and productive employees. New York farmers will adopt technologies and automation when it makes economic sense, and that automation will replace some farm labor, while it augments and increases the value of other skilled farm labor that remains. The state tax credit will shift part of the cost of overtime to the people of New York, rather than causing farm employers to bear it alone. This shift will benefit farm employees who will likely work some overtime hours in New York, rather than face the serious reductions in work hours, and weekly income, that California and Washington farm employees are reportedly experiencing.

Going forward, as it has been in the past, the theme for farm employers will be to adapt and create something new, even in the face of adversity.