To the Editor:

Re “The Sad Lesson From California” (Op-Ed, nytimes.com, July 16):

While Miriam Pawel is right to praise the grass-roots organizing of the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (recipients of the 2003 R.F.K. Human Rights Award), she is wrong that the historic victory represented by New York’s new farmworker bill of rights “may prove to be largely symbolic.”

Signed into law this month, the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act will be transformational for New York’s 100,000 agricultural workers. Those who pick our apples, harvest our vegetables and provide the milk for our lattes will see their wages increase and their working conditions improve. It will finally be illegal in the Empire State for farmworkers to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week without overtime pay, a day of rest, disability, workers’ compensation or paid family leave.

Rather than a more than 40-year-old law in California that bears little resemblance to New York’s hard-won legal protections, the achievements of the United Farm Workers to pass protective heat regulations (2015) and overtime pay (2016) in California provide more apt comparisons to the types of tangible improvements that are now on their way to farmworkers in New York.