Federal Farm Labor Law Compliance: No April Fool’s Here

It’s April 1st but this is no joke. With Spring just around the corner, farms are gearing up for the 2021 growing season, meanwhile the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division is gearing up for increased enforcement activities in agriculture according to a March 25th press release. The Division is planning to conduct direct outreach to farm workers and advocacy groups in order to identify complaints against employers. Compliance with federal laws surrounding migrant and seasonal labor can be tricky, a press release from March 30th details the penalties that a tomato grower in Maine is facing for H-2A violations.

The Wage and Hour division assists with employer education and outreach, check out the Agriculture Compliance Assistance Toolkit on the Division’s website. Here you can find factsheets,A worker pruning grape vines posters, and other materials that will help you stay in compliance with federal laws, especially the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA), and H-2A, the temporary agricultural foreign guest worker program. Cultivating Compliance: An Agricultural Guide to Federal Law is a particularly helpful and readable publication. It’s worthwhile for every farm employer to review this publication with all of their managers and supervisors each year just to refresh key points about compliance.

Remember that state laws are often more restrictive than federal laws. When this occurs, state law supersedes the federal law. For example, the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 per hour and this is clearly stated in the required federal poster. New York minimum wage, however, is much higher at $12.50 for much of the state, and H-2A wage is at $14.99 in New York.


By Richard Stup, Cornell University. Permission granted to repost, quote, and reprint with author attribution. The post Paid Leave Required for COVID Vaccinations appeared first in The Ag Workforce Journal 

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