You can try to call these conditions whatever you want. But, bottom line, this is for slaves.

Right under our New York noses:

In the early stage of the harvest season, Antonio, a farmworker in his 50s, picked peas from daybreak until sundown, 14 hours a day, six days a week, with an hour off each day for lunch.

“I’m tired,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “Right now my knees hurt a lot because all day I work bending over or down on my knees.”

His workweek at a fruit and vegetable farm in Dutchess County will be even tougher in October when the apples are ready for harvest — many of which will be sold in New York City’s popular greenmarkets: He will no longer have Sundays off. For all that toil, he is paid $8 an hour, the minimum wage. The long hours are expected; there is no overtime pay.

While most American wage earners accustomed to a 40-hour week would be surprised at those conditions, for farmworkers in New York it is within the law.

The lack of overtime pay, as well as the absence of rights to disability insurance and collective bargaining, are artifacts of the exclusions of agricultural work from the federal wage, hour and labor relations acts of the 1930s that were adopted by most states and have seldom been changed. Only California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Oregon require time-and-a-half pay for overtime — though in some cases after 60 hours of work a week — and only a dozen states explicitly give farmworkers the right to unionize.

And those nice greenmarkets? All hip except:

Leanne Tory-Murphy, an outreach worker at Worker Justice Center of New York in Kingston, which arranged the interview with Antonio, said, “Overtime protections are put in place for a reason, so workers are not working themselves to the bone.” She takes issue with farms that sell at greenmarkets in the city and flaunt their healthful credentials but do not pay workers overtime.

“A code of conduct is not included under the umbrella of ethical eating,” she said. [emphasis added]