We on the Northampton Agricultural Commission act as an advisory group to the City Council and residents of Northampton on agricultural land use and policy.
We are all farmers — both conventional and organic — who farm right here in Northampton. Our mission is to promote and support agriculture in Northampton and beyond, and especially to help support the next generation of farmers in the Pioneer Valley.
Recently the Northampton City Council passed a resolution in support of the Fairness to Farmworkers Act in the Massachusetts State Legislature. The specifics of the bill are still being negotiated on Beacon Hill, but if passed, the act will require farmers to pay farmworkers the standard minimum wage and pay overtime after a certain number of hours.
We understand and respect our legislators’ desire to raise the wages of Massachusetts farmworkers. However, we would like to elaborate on parts of the legislation that might have some unintended consequences and put Massachusetts farmers at a significant competitive disadvantage.
First, Massachusetts farmworkers work incredible hard and we want them to be protected by state law and earn at least the minimum wage. When farmers find individuals who work well on the farm, they do everything possible to retain them. The vast majority of farmers in Massachusetts pay their workers at least the minimum wage and more. This past growing season most farmworkers made $15 or more per hour.
Additionally, many of the growers who need to hire temporary labor turn to the federal H2A visa program, which requires that workers be paid $14.99 per hour. The H2A program mandates that farmworkers be paid the same regardless of their length of employment. The farmer must provide transportation to and from the worker’s home country and provide housing while working in the United States.
Many Massachusetts farmers, especially farmers who sell into the wholesale marker to supermarkets and food distributors, compete on the national and global market. These farmers are in a tight spot.
While we are not concerned about wage requirements of the act, we fear that the overtime provisions in the law may have unintended consequences. Farming is a unique business as it depends almost totally on Mother Nature to grow our food. Extreme heat, droughts, heavy rains, fungal blights and frosts all conspire to complicate planting and harvesting times.
Farmers work seven days a week during the growing season and frequently work 12-hour days. Sixty- to eighty-hour work weeks are the norm for most farmers. Faced with new overtime wage requirements, they simply cannot charge more for their products because they are competing with places such as Mexico with significantly lower wages, or with states like New Hampshire and Iowa where state minimum wages are $7.25 an hour. If our local farmers’ cost of production exceeds the price they will be paid for their products, they could potentially go out of business.
Of the 50 states in our country, only five currently have these kinds of overtime laws for agricultural workers. Our fear is that some Pioneer Valley farmers will not be able to afford to pay overtime and will thus have to limit workers hours. Because so many farmworkers do want to work more than 40 or even 55 hours a week at the height of the growing season, we are concerned that farmers will lose some of their best workers to other states where they can work more hours in total and make more money.
Massachusetts farmworkers are not without protection. A 2019 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (Arias-Villano vs. Chang & Sons Enterprises, Inc.) set a new standard for the state’s agricultural exemption. The Chang and Sons decision ensured farmworkers were not being taken advantage of and disallowed the overtime exemption for processing the crops for market. Simply put, this means that in a packing house, where the produce is packaged, workers must be paid overtime after 40 hours.
Sometimes the difference between food that is harvested one day or delayed to the next can mean the difference between a marketable crop or one that is lost to spoilage. Timing is so critical in farming because without that extra overtime effort, the window of opportunity to plant or harvest can be lost in a matter of hours.
Massachusetts farmers are some of the most innovative people in the world. They constantly work to adjust to local and national markets, pests, blights and ever-changing weather. They care about their workers.
We know the people of Northampton support our farming community, both farmworkers and the farmers. We fear the overtime provision will put Massachusetts farmers at a competitive disadvantage, and make it more challenging for our farmers to continue to produce some of the best produce in the world, right here in the valley.
We encourage readers to write to our federal legislators to encourage them to level the playing field and ensure that farmworkers make the minimum wage across the United States with uniform overtime regulations.
John Omasta is chairman of the Northampton Agricultural Commission. Richard Jaescke is vice chairman.