Agricultural workers in New York were found by experts to be among the lowest paid workers in the state, leading advocates to push for an increase in their wages.
Cornell University recently published a wage atlas that shows farmworkers make an average of $14.65 an hour in New York state. Currently, minimum wage for farmworkers is $15 an hour in New York City, Long Island and Westchester County and $14.20 per hour for the rest of the state.
Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworkers Program, said the problems facing wages for farmworkers begin with the food system.
“The actual cost of what it takes to produce food is offset by certain subsidies, and I think the critical issue is our food is sold at prices that are lower than the cost of production,” Dudley said.
She said wages typically eat up 50% of a farm’s expenses, but as fuel and other costs rise, there is only one place for flexibility: adjusting wages.
“I think the reality is that our food production systems in New York state rely heavily on an undocumented workforce and so that is the workforce that doesn’t often advocate for higher wages,” Dudley said.
Russell Weaver, a quantitative geographer and director of research at the Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab, said the data used to compile the wage atlas came from the U.S. Census Bureau's rolling survey, the American Community Survey and information pulled from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator.
Weaver said there are a couple of...
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