In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which codified for the first time the basic rights of American workers, including the right to collectively bargain.

Tragically, however, a political compromise left farmworkers excluded from these fundamental labor protections. Why? Because a group of segregationist senators feared that the equal treatment of agricultural workers, then mostly African-American, would eat into the profits of Southern farmers, which were fortified by a legal regime born of discrimination.

Seventy years later, the legacy of these senators stubbornly endures in New York State - only now the demographics have changed.

The vast majority of farmworkers in our state are now Latino, and for decades they have been deprived of the most basic rights afforded to virtually all other laborers. It's long past time to get creative and close an old loophole that has led to a new civil rights problem.

The breadth of the problem is simply incredible, going well beyond the collective bargaining rights at issue in the federal law. Not only can farmworkers in New York be fired for forming unions to improve conditions at any given agricultural site, but they are ineligible for overtime, unlike farm hands in other states, including California, where agricultural workers can collect overtime after 60 hours a week. They do not qualify for disability insurance, unlike farmworkers in New Jersey. And they do not qualify for unemployment insurance, even in the current disastrous economy.

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