Like today, it was the day after Thanksgiving, in 1960, that Americans were exposed to the injustices faced by farmworkers in this country when Edward R. Murrow and CBS News broadcast the documentary “Harvest of Shame,” showing how the people who bring us our food were so badly treated, as migrant field hands followed the crops from Florida to New York.
Excluded from the New Deal labor reforms of the 1930s, including the minimum wage, overtime pay and guaranteeing employees the right to organize and bargain collectively, farmworkers toiled in silence.
While much has changed in these 63 years, full equality has not yet been achieved. However, here in New York, that goal will be reached in eight more years, nearly a century after all other workers won their full rights.
For decades, we have used the Thanksgiving holiday to remind New Yorkers that tens of thousands of farmworkers in this state were victims of discriminatory state laws and advocated to grant them the same protections enjoyed by everyone else. Finally, in 2019, there was a great victory when the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act was enacted and signed into law.
Collective bargaining was legalized and some field hands have since joined together and won recognition for their unions.
The last piece, overtime, will take the longest. From being nonexistent, time and a half pay was written into the new law starting after 60 hours a week, which is very far from the normal OT threshold of 40 hours. A lower OT was...
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