The short article below is excerpted from the research report: “How New York Farmers Adapted to Overtime Requirements in 2020 and 2021.” Important research like this needs participation from farm employers, the project continues now in 2023 with the NY Farm Labor in Transition Survey. New York farm employers, please take about 20-30 minutes of your time to include your response now. All data will be kept confidential, results will only be reported as group data, and no personally identifiable data will be reported. Respondents will receive a summary of the results. Prepare by assembling the following data from your payroll records:

• The number of full-time, part-time, seasonal, and H-2A positions you employed in 2021 and 2022.
• Total regular hours worked by all of your hired employees in 2021 and 2022.
• Total overtime hours worked by all of your hired employees in 2021 and 2022.
• Number of positions filled by owners and unpaid family members, and hours worked by them, in 2021 and 2022.
• Number of employees who left voluntarily or were fired in 2021 and 2022.

Click the button to complete the survey now:

How New York Farms Adapted to Overtime at 60 Hours per Week in 2019 and 2020

One of our survey questions asked farm employers: “How did your farm adapt to the new overtime requirement for farm laborers implemented by New York State in 2020? This is the requirement that overtime (1.5 times regular pay) must be paid for any hours worked more than 60 hours per week.” Table 1 summarizes the responses of specialty crop and dairy farms to this question, and the results are described below.

SPECIALTY CROP FARMS

By far the most frequent response from over 70 percent of specialty crop employers was that they “implemented tighter control of employee performance and hours worked.” The next most common response, at 43 percent, was from farms that continued employment as usual and just paid for any overtime hours worked. It’s important to note here that most specialty crop employers, even before the new overtime regulations, rarely had employees work more than 60 hours per week, so overtime pay was not typical under normal conditions (Wolf et al., 2021).

Other common responses indicated that farms invested in machinery or equipment to boost labor productivity (38 percent), or simply eliminated certain production tasks that were non-essential (31 percent). An “other” option was provided so that employers could write in any other strategies they used that the survey did not specifically list. Multiple specialty crop growers responded that they eliminated crops or left them in the field, and that they used “hard stops” to work to avoid paying any overtime. In other words, work stopped regardless if it was complete.

DAIRY FARMS

Dairy crop farmers also implemented tighter management of employee performance and hours worked, with about 66 percent using that strategy, with results from 74 farms presented in Table 1. Almost half of dairy employers were able to invest in machinery or equipment to improve productivity. This is considerably more than specialty crop employers and may reflect more opportunity to use this strategy for dairy employers. Also, for both employer groups, investments in labor saving machinery and equipment may take some time to plan and implement. This survey covering the first two years of overtime may have occurred before employers could make these types of investments.

Several strategies were written in by dairy respondents with the following two appearing multiple times:

• No change was required as the farm already paid overtime or overtime was not required due to family labor
• Owners, salaried, and part-time workers picked up more work so that hourly employees could stay below the 60-hour threshold

It is important to note that a significant number of both farm employer groups (specialty crop 29 percent, dairy 26 percent) indicated that they “hired additional employees to reduce or eliminate overtime hours worked.” This is the time-honored employer strategy to minimize the cost of overtime by spreading total work hours from a smaller group of employees working many hours, to a larger group working a reduced number of hours intended to stay under the overtime threshold.

Also notable is that relatively few employers attempted to offset the cost of overtime by reducing employee pay or benefits. This strategy, of course, would likely cause serious employee dissatisfaction and possibly workforce disruption.

Table 1.