Legislators in New York are beginning to push for a bill requiring farmworkers be paid overtime. Farmworkers were excluded from protections for overtime pay in the wage and labor relations acts of the New Deal, in part to win support among Southern lawmakers in the Jim Crow South. Republican lawmakers, backed by the Farm Bureau have pushed hard against any such legislation, but Democrats are hoping to win a majority in the NY Senate in the fall to get a bill passed. The Farm Bureau has argued that granting overtime pay to farmworkers would sound the death knell for the family farm in New York State.
See "Long Days in the Fields, Without Earning Overtime", Joseph Berger, The New York Times, August 7, 2014