Aubertine taking heat for farm labor bill hearing

The New York Daily News rips State Senator Darrel Aubertine in an editorial this morning for holding what the paper calls “a Moscow show trial”.

As chairman of the Senate Agriculture committee, Aubertine held a hearing yesterday on a farmworker rights bill that has farmers enraged (and Aubertine, a farmer himself, is opposed to it). Here’s the Daily News take:

The supposed objective was to hear perspectives on a bill to extend basic labor protections to the men and women who pick our food. To give them overtime pay, an unpaid day off per week and the right to organize and bargain collectively – protections enjoyed by everyone else but denied this one group of workers since field hands were excluded from labor rights in the 1930s.

The real goal of farmer-legislator Aubertine: To stymie and stall a measure that has been bottled up for decades thanks to special interest lobbying – and kick off even more decades of delay.

Opponents of the bill – Aubertine included – say it would put scores of farmers out of business.

Aubertine defended himself, calling attacks like those published in the Daily News “wholly disingenuous” at the hearing:

At issue really is a broken system largely beyond the purview of Albany.

The federal milk marketing system doesn’t pay dairy farmers adequately for their labor, let alone a living wage. Food consumers are used to paying prices at the supermarket that are deflated artificially by subsidies. And farmworkers – American-born and immigrant – are suffering due to a lack of action on immigration reform by Congress.

No wonder an attempt to protect farmworkers in New York State can become a circus.