As expected, New York’s Farm Laborers Wage Board voted Tuesday to approve its report and recommendation to phase in overtime pay after 40 hours a week for field hands. It’s been a very, very long time coming, more than 80 years after all other employees won that basic right — and it’s still going to take 10 more long seasons of hard labor of planting and harvesting and milking and cultivating before farmworkers will be treated like everyone else.

For now, and until Jan. 1, 2024, the threshold will remain at 60 hours, which effectively means no time-and-a-half. Only then will it tick down to 56, with further decreases of four hours every other year until parity is finally achieved on Jan. 1, 2032. That’s when there should be a celebration. Maybe it can even be on the clock.

And all this assumes that state Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon accepts the report and recommendation, issuing an order putting it into effect. By law, she has until Oct. 21, 45 days from Tuesday, to accept, modify or reject the proposal. Prediction: She will accept the report. Another prediction: Reardon will wait until after the public comment period ends on Sept. 26, allowing her and the Labor Department to review the input.

The Farm Bureau growers’ lobby will flood Reardon with sob stories, as will their allied pols from farm country. The poor growers just won’t be able to treat their employees fairly, even though Gov. Hochul persuaded the Legislature to enact a refundable tax credit to make whole the growers for every penny of OT paid to workers. Bosses in every other sector of the economy would love to have government absorb their OT expenses. Only agriculture insists that if it is forced to pay workers what they deserve, it can’t compete.

Farm Bureau President David Fisher, who cast the Wage Board’s sole dissenting vote, said workers should instead bargain for better pay. But the Farm Bureau fought against farmworkers’ right to organize and bargain collectively. How soon they forget.