To the Editor:
I am addressing the resistance of Republican politicians and predominantly Republican farm owners to lower the recent and current 60-hour threshold for overtime pay for farmworkers to 40 hours.

Overtime hours are paid at 1.5 times your normal hourly rate. For instance, the current minimum hourly wage in upstate New York is $13.20 per hour. So, if you work more than a 40-hour week, you would be paid $19.80 per hour for any additional hours.

The standard 40-hour work week was established in the 1930s and most citizens of the United States enjoy working five days a week, eight hours a day. That leaves two days a week for having a life of your own.

If employers want you to work overtime, it is understood they should pay you extra to buy your free time or to buy your personal life, which was granted by the U.S. Declaration of Independence as the unalienable right given to all humans by their creator, and which governments are created to protect, our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

If you, an employer, want more than 40 hours of work from an employee, it should cost you more!

I have been farming all of my life as a farm laborer. As a teenager, I worked vacations and weekends for neighboring farmers because they were always shorthanded — mostly baling and storing hay as well as taking care of horses and cattle and doing odd jobs.

The help I gave was generally free. You were given lunch and could ride the horses. This is where I learned to back up a four-wheel wagon anywhere. You’re no hay farmer if you can’t back up a four-wheel wagon.

I graduated from Voorheesville’s high school in 1979 and went to work at a local commercial apple orchard, picking apples for the minimum wage of $2.90 per hour.

I became a career farmworker/laborer at that farm and over the 41 years of my service I eventually rose in the ranks from crew boss to farm manager overseeing the growing and harvesting while always continuing to be a farm laborer.

I retired on Social Security Disability in 2020.

If you work as hard as I did, it takes a toll on you physically! I have every paystub from those 41 years minus maybe two or three. As a full-time, year-round employee of local origin I was always paid overtime pay over 40 hours, due to the generosity of my employer. But I did inform my boss/farm owner that, if I didn’t get overtime pay, I would pursue a job elsewhere.

Listen, why would anyone stay in a job that is always minimum wage and no overtime pay?

There’s no future of the American Dream with that kind of work. You can’t make enough money. Year-round workers who were of local origin had the opportunity of pay increases matching responsibility but you could rise just so far.

Only seasonal farm labor was not paid overtime. All of the farm help working in retail sales were eligible for overtime pay if they could get the hours.

Now let me enlighten you to a couple of different perspectives on the hourly wage issue and overtime.

Farm owners don’t want to pay more, for anything! That is understandable!

But to expect human beings of one workforce, singling out the agricultural farm laborers to be paid less than others for their overtime work is immoral and wickedly selfish. This has been the position of the Farm Bureau and Republicans for years. I used to believe they were for farm owners and farm laborers. No, they support only farm owners.

Don’t misunderstand me: I support farm owners in all respects except for when they want the workers to sacrifice advances to their personal lives so that owners can achieve better profits.

Every employer/business owner in any industry would enjoy paying less to their employees so they could achieve a better bottom line on their profits. We often hear of public servants putting in huge overtime especially before retirement at the expense of the taxpayer. How come farm laborers are the only ones denied overtime over 40 hours?

Yes, farms need workers to put in overtime due to the nature of the harvest deadlines and lack of extra help. Why aren’t they getting more applicants for farm work? Because the work is hard and the pay is too low!

How many parents of children in our local school systems want or encourage their children to be farm laborers? I would venture to guess almost none. Parents want their children to be college graduates, earning more than farm laborers. They know farm laborers will struggle financially throughout life. So who will work the nation’s farm as laborers?

Median annual wages for agricultural workers working full-time was $29,680 in 2021. The poverty level in 2021 for a family of four was $26,500.

Let’s talk about the farm laborers that are really the subject matter of the farm owners’ concerns over lowering the overtime threshold. The seasonal migrant laborers as they were called when I started working on the farm in 1979 were mostly Floridian U.S. citizens working farms up and down the East Coast while we were beginning to see half the crew composed of Jamaican workers.

The Jamaicans were later known as “offshore laborers” because they come from outside the country. A government program designed to help farm owners get workers who were unavailable domestically is now called the H2A Guest Worker Program for farm labor.

We’re talking about a labor force composed of people whose origins are from outside the U.S. This labor force is absolutely necessary to U.S. agriculture. These farm laborers who leave their families and home for months at a time make great sacrifices to improve their situations in life.

This is their best and possibly only opportunity for making more money than they could in their home country.

U.S. farmers who participate in the H2A program have to pay money upfront for the workers’ transportation to and from the country of origin; travel visa fees; administration fees, coordinating with the labor department and agreements between countries — and farmers must provide acceptable housing. The farm owners do this because there are no options for U.S. labor to bring in the harvest.

My personal experience over 41 years was that agricultural guest workers, in general, outworked U.S. workers at the same jobs on the farm and would work longer without ever quitting. When the crop is mature and ready to harvest, God forbid the crew should quit.

U.S. American farm workers would often quit two to three weeks into the harvest and were undependable. Some outsiders would criticize why we didn’t hire more U.S. Americans. We said we’d love to hire U.S. citizens — where are they?

We advertised the jobs, brought them here; if they were experienced at farm work, we are obligated to hire them even though we knew from experience, as a general rule, they would not produce as much work product.

The H2A guest workers will never complain about their wages or work situations, or housing, or anything openly, because they are in a precarious position of employment. They need the H2A job desperately and will do nothing to jeopardize being requested for return to the farm the following year.

You’ll notice that all recent reporting on the overtime issue does not include interviewing H2A farm laborers. The H2A farm laborers are in a Catch-22 scenario. They have for years worked 60- to 90-hour work weeks at straight hourly wages during harvest with no overtime given in the past until the 60-hour threshold was enacted in 2020.

If they were to get overtime pay after working 40 hours, the farm owners may limit them to only a 40-hour week, which would seriously reduce their potential income from a time when they worked 60 to 90 hours with no overtime pay. But farm owners are in fear of overtime pay because they know they will be shorthanded and will have to resort to asking workers to put in overtime.

The H2A workers want to work long hours every day. They didn’t leave their homes and families to sit around idle. They want to work every day!

Think about the 60-hour overtime threshold now in place. If you worked seven days a week at eight hours a day, you still only put in 56 hours. Farm owners are asking farm laborers to be paid less than others who enjoy a 40-hour overtime system so that they, the owners, can live better and their farms survive. Let’s face it, the farm owners live better than the farm laborers.

Farm owners and business owners respond saying they work long hours too.

I say, “So what?” You own the business! That was your choice when you started your business or inherited your farm.

Farmers are more often than not, land rich and equipment rich and generally pay themselves enough to make a good middle-class living while also being their own boss. The success of their business relies on their being good managers, hard work, and getting the price they need for what they produce.

This is how you pay the people who work for you the same overtime wages other industries paying overtime do. If your business success works only if you keep the wages of your workers below the standards of the rest of the working-class people, you should be embarrassed.

Farm owners are inherently more prosperous than farm laborers. Why should farm laborers sacrifice their potential earnings when they already earn less and work just as hard as owners but in a different capacity? Farm owners need to charge more for what they produce, not stiff employees out of their earning potential.

Timothy J. Albright

Meadowdale

Editor’s note: See related editorial.