Today in Binghamton is the second stop of the Hochul administration’s statewide listening tour on the future of farming. It kicked off last Monday on Long Island with Gov. Hochul herself as the headliner. Today, Hochul won’t be there, but her agriculture commissioner will be, along with the chair of the Assembly’s Agriculture Committee and, natch, a representative of the Farm Bureau, the growers’ lobby.

Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado will also partake in some of these sessions, designed “to ensure that the farming community statewide has a chance to make their voices heard,” in the words of Hochul’s press announcement.

Missing in all this are the people who actually labor in the fields and orchards and dairies and greenhouses and vineyards and packing houses, New York’s tens of thousands of farm workers. Is Hochul listening to their voices? Apparently not.

On July 17, 2019, the state Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act became law, granting field hands equal workplace protections with the crucial exception of overtime pay, which was set at the unconscionable 60 hours a week. For everyone else, time-and-a-half kicks in after 40 hours.

After two years of debate, a Department of Labor Wage Board voted on Jan. 28 to lower the ag work OT threshold to 56 hours in 2024, with it ticking down four hours every other year until it’ll reach 40-hour parity with everyone else in 2032. But in the six months since, there is still no written report for the Wage Board to approve to send to...

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