Joshua Solomon reports in the Times Union if you work in a grocery store more than 40 hours a week, you get overtime. But if you work on a farm, say, picking the same fruit sold in that grocery store, you only get overtime wages after 60 hours of work. The New York State Wage Board is meeting sometime before Dec. 15, and voting by the end of the year, about whether farm workers should get the same 40-hour work week as everyone else. Farmworkers only got the 60-hour work week in New York in 2020, after having not been entitled to any overtime pay previously under state labor law. New York’s 33,000 farms cover 6.9 million acres and make $5.7 billion annually. While 20 percent of farmworkers are migrants just 125 farms are run by Native Americans, 139 by Blacks, and 606 by Latinos, according to a recent report from the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets. Some in farming contend a 40-hour overtime threshold would lead to layoffs and shut down farms. "Reducing the overtime threshold will close farms and make the barriers to entry even greater,” said Grow NY Farms, which is supported by the New York Farm Bureau. But groups representing farmworkers have a different opinion. “Do we agree that there are some troubling economics about farming in New York state? Yes,” said Jessica Maxwell, executive director of Workers Center of Central New York, a Syracuse-based nonprofit focused on workplace and economic justice. “Do we think that should be solved on the back of the people who have the least amount of resources and are doing the hardest work, the workers? No. We think we should be looking in the other direction to solve those economic challenges in the industry.” Read more about this story in the Times Union.