Since January 1, 2020, farm employers in New York have been required to pay overtime to certain employees for all hours worked over 60 in a week. This issue continues to evolve with a series of wage board hearings and with New York passing an overtime tax credit in 2022.
Recently, Cornell Ag Workforce Development collaborated with Farm Credit East and NY state government to provide an informative webinar about 3 tax incentives available to NY farm employers: “New York Tax Incentives for Farm Employers: Overtime, Investment and Employee Retention.”
We’ve developed some tools to help farm employers consider management strategies to respond to this change.
The Extension Bulletin: “Adapting Your Labor Strategies to New York’s Revised Farm Employment Laws” will help you consider and evaluate possible strategies for your farm.
Download the Overtime Cost Calculator to model your current workforce and to project the effects that the new laws will have on your business. The tool will not be fully functional unless macros are enabled. When you open the file, be sure to click “enable content” on the yellow message bar that appears at the top of the spreadsheet. If you have an older version of MS Office or different settings for your macros, you may need to consult the official instructions to enable macros in MS Office, available here. If for whatever reason you cannot enable macros, the tool will still work for individual employee analysis (employee tab). Examples of overtime cost impacts are also available in the appendix of “Adapting Your Labor Strategies to New York’s Revised Farm Employment Laws”
Consider downloading these additional tools to help you with the Overtime Cost Calculator:
- Data collection form. This is a form to help you gather and organize information for the overtime calculator.
- Data collection sample numbers. This is a copy of the data collection form with helpful sample data as examples.
Please send comments, questions, or ideas to Dr. Jennifer Ifft at jifft@cornell.edu.
