By Jane Primerano

It has taken months of negotiation to craft a new minimum wage law in New Jersey, and one of the most significant compromises involves wages for farm workers.

The recent agreement, announced by Gov. Phil Murphy, Senate President Steve Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, will make New Jersey farm workers among the highest paid in the Northeast by Jan. 1, 2024, but at less than the $15 minimum wage for the rest of the state.

The farm worker minimum wage will remain $8.85 an hour this year but will increase to $10.30 an hour in January 2020. It will increase again to $10.90 on Jan. 1, 2022, and then by 80 cents an hour in 2023 and 2024, where it will be capped at $12.50 an hour.

By comparison, New York state’s minimum wage will reach $12.50 in late 2020 in areas outside New York City, Long Island and Westchester County. Delaware’s minimum wage will rise to $10.30 by 2024 while Pennsylvania is not scheduled to go up from its current $7.25 an hour, at least not yet.

By March 31, 2024, the New Jersey labor commissioner and secretary of agriculture will decide if the minimum wage for agricultural workers will join the state’s overall minimum wage at $15 per hour. A spokesman for Sweeney says that one of his goals was including the ag secretary in that decision making. The original bill, introduced in the Assembly by Coughlin on Dec. 6, would have only required the Department of Labor and Workforce Development to study the bill’s impact on the farm community.

New Jersey farmers react
The New Jersey Farm Bureau board met Jan. 22 to discuss the minimum wage compromise. Peter Furey, executive director of Farm Bureau, says the board is “accepting of the agriculture carve out” and the fact that “the legislature recognizes the agricultural sector is different, a different economy.”

“It still presents a lot of challenges for many farmers,” he says.

Individual farmers have their own concerns.

John Wyckoff of White Township, Warren County, points out that his farm is about one mile as the crow flies from Pennsylvania, where farmers can put out a cheaper product because of lower costs.

Wyckoff says he has to begin thinking about a price increase on his Christmas trees for 2019. “You don’t start saving for a rainy day after it rains,” he says.

Wyckoff has a few full-time employees and hires high school students for tree-cutting weekends.

“I believe in giving kids jobs,” he says. “Ag life is going by the wayside.”

He notes he has one high schooler who works afterschool and on Saturdays all year.

“He loves being here. I’m teaching him a job and a work ethic,” he says.

But Wyckoff wonders how he can pay a higher wage while training people.

“Labor is one of the biggest input costs,” he says.

During a year when other costs are particularly high, as in 2018, paying a higher wage is going to be difficult. Last year’s excessive rains meant Wyckoff had to spread 600 tons of gravel to keep his fields accessible. That isn’t a cost he has every year.

“Ag is important enough (to) receive the carve out,” he says, adding that the eventual increase is “dramatic.” He noted that funding for mitigation of wildlife damage or the Rutgers experiment station could be reconsidered in light of higher employment costs.

Primerano writes from New Jersey.