I grew up on a farm in Ohio surrounded by friends who were farmers. I have tremendous respect for their profession and I understand how difficult it is to do what they do. But as a doctor who has treated farmworkers for 40 years, I also know how debilitating and dangerous farm labor is.
The painful work farmworkers perform is compounded by the long hours they work, day in and day out. Yet, unlike almost every other hourly worker in New York, farmworkers do not have the right to overtime pay after 40 hours a week.
This month, a state wage board can change that by lowering the overtime pay threshold from where it currently sits — at 60 hours a week — down to 40. This is the only safe and medically sensible thing to do, and we can do it without hurting small farmers.
My first job, when I was 14, was spent bending over 12 hours a day picking strawberries. Then, in college, I worked alongside migrant farmworkers for two summers, harvesting tobacco in Kentucky. I remember how physically exhausted I was. I never did any work as hard and dangerous as those two jobs. So after I became a doctor and started taking care of farmworkers in 1980 in rural Pennsylvania, I could relate to them because I had briefly done some of their very hard work.
Again and again in my career, I’ve seen farmworkers with debilitating musculoskeletal injuries and repetitive stress injuries. They get hurt after harvesting, trimming and loading crops at high speeds for many hours at a time and many days in a...
Case of businessman using AI to generate false letters of complaint against Heaven nightclub part of a growing issue, say police A businessman has pleaded guilty to making false statements in orde...