Episode links:
Cornell Farmworker Program website
Episode transcript:
PAUL TREADWELL: Welcome to Extension Out Loud, a podcast from Cornell Cooperative Extension. I'm Paul Treadwell.
KATIE BAILDON: And I'm Katie Baildon.
PAUL TREADWELL: We got a chance to sit down and talk to--
KATIE BAILDON: We talked to Mary Jo Dudley. She's senior extension associate and director of the Cornell Farmworker Program in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University.
PAUL TREADWELL: The format of this episode is the result of us wanting to give Mary Jo a platform to explain the Farmworkers Program in some detail.
MARY JO DUDLEY: My name is Mary Jo Dudley. I'm the director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, which is a university-wide program. And my faculty appointment is in the Department of Global Development, which is in the College of Ag and Life Sciences. The Cornell Farmworker Program has quite a long history. It actually started under the name of the Cornell Migrant Program over 54 years ago when students, in order to graduate, needed to work on a farm.
So for students who were from farming families, they would work a full semester on a different farm. But students who hadn't grown up on a farm would work a full year on a farm. The program was born out of student activism. Because at this time, a Cornell alum donated a large apple orchard in Wayne County to the university, and it became one of the first experiment stations.
So many students worked on that farm, and they lived in migrant housing and worked alongside migrant farm workers who, at that time, were primarily Southern Blacks. This had a deep impact on the students. They were surprised about the situation of farm workers, in particular migrant farm workers. And they went to the Cornell Faculty Senate, along with their faculty mentors, and the senate approved a resolution that Cornell should have a program specifically dedicated to the needs of farmworkers and their families.
So with that background, our program really focuses on farmworker-identified needs and opportunities. The program is dedicated to improving the living and working conditions of farmworkers and their families. But we also seek recognition for their contributions to society and their acceptance and full participation in local communities. So this includes things like equal protection under the law, earning a living wage, living in safe and comfortable housing, and more importantly, receiving respect as workers and as individuals to allow them to participate fully in their communities.
So how do we understand what farmworkers need? And the way that we approach this is direct interviews with farmworkers in the format of a needs assessment. The interviews examine where the workers originate. Why do they migrate? How do they get here? How do they find their employment? What is their job? What is their day to day? What do they enjoy about their job? What do they find challenging? What do they do during their time off?
How do they interact with others in local communities in the rural areas? And what are their goals for the future? And this aspect of understanding where they came from, why they came, how they located employment, and what their goals are for the future drives the agenda of the Cornell Farmworker Program, because we look at how people assess where they are today and where they'd like to be in one year, five years, 10 years. And so we can look at the current challenges and go from there to how to address those challenges.
So who are the farmworkers in New York state? Currently, most of the farmworkers are undocumented workers that come from rural areas of Mexico and rural areas from Guatemala. And we have a small portion of workers who come from Jamaica through the temporary guestworker program. When we talk about farm workers, we often talk about seasonal or year-round and temporary guestworkers who come through the H-2A program.
And those workers come with a visa with a beginning date and an end date. And they also have a very specific wage rate, which is higher than the New York state minimum wage for farmworkers. The 2017 ag census estimated that New York state has approximately 56,000 hired farmworkers and an additional 40,000 unpaid workers, which typically refer to family members. In addition, we have over 1,100 workers who work in packing plants, in the apple packing plants and in other packing plants.
So when we talk about farmworkers, it's important to think about, who are we including in that pool? In New York state, we had a major transition around 2000. And preceding 2000, about 2/3 of our workers were migrant workers, people who followed the season and followed the crops. And about a third lived year round. But starting in 2000, that shifted dramatically.
So currently, we have about 2/3 of the farmworkers live year round, and about a third migrate. And that's directly associated with the changes within the dairy sector, in which a workforce that had been a family workforce or locals, neighbors, cousins transitioned to an immigrant workforce, with those workers coming primarily from rural Mexico and Guatemala. And that is a heavily undocumented population.
If we look at agriculture in New York state, because of our prevalence as leaders nationwide in apple production-- we're the second-largest apple-producing state, in pumpkins, in maple syrup. We're the third-largest dairy-producing state, and we're third in cabbage, grapes, cauliflower, and fourth in crops including pears, tart cherries, sweet corn, snap beans, squash, and we're fifth in onions. These are all very labor-intensive crops.
So traditionally, that large group of farmworkers were referred to as migrants, those people who followed the crops. So they would begin in Southern states and work in harvest activities in Southern states and follow the harvest up the coast. For those who were what we call the Eastern migrant stream, they would work in the Carolinas, come to New York state. And once the harvest had been completed in New York state in November, typically around Thanksgiving, they would return to Southern states.
We saw a change in this since 2000, where rather than follow crops, there was a transformation within the farmworker population where they would work on more than one farm and engage in agricultural production activities following the season of the year. So we find in upstate New York, we have people in the winter months-- January, February-- who are tying grapes, and later in the spring, they might be planting apple trees.
And then, later, they are pruning apple trees, for example. And they will eventually move on to harvest activities and post-harvest packing plants. So by working in different farms on different commodities, they can basically find employment in agriculture year round. And agriculture has always been an entry point for recent immigrants because you don't need to know how to read and write in English to do agriculture.
So if we look historically, it began with former African-American sharecroppers, and we've had any number of immigrants coming to the US that entered employment through farmwork, Italian immigrants, Finnish immigrants, German prisoners of war, coal miners. The [INAUDIBLE] who traveled the freight trains often lived from doing agricultural work. This changed with the introduction of guestworker programs.
So the guestworker programs were actually a newer version of what is called the [SPANISH] program. When we have a labor shortage, and we can certify that there's a labor shortage, we can bring workers from other countries to do that work. And they come with a work visa referred to as H-2A temporary guestworker visa. And their visas are issued with a beginning date and an end date.
Initially, we saw workers who were coming from Jamaica and other Caribbean Islanders. Later, we had US workers coming from Puerto Rico under contracts. They didn't have the visa because they didn't have to worry about citizenship. And currently, our H-2A guestworker program has workers from Mexico, Jamaica, and Guatemala.
So in the '80s, between the 1980s and the 2000s, farmwork became an area for entry into the workforce for recent refugees. We had Haitians who arrived in Florida because of changes in Haiti. We had Guatemalans and Salvadorans who fled violence in Central America as well as coming from the other sides of the globe, refugees from Bangladesh, Southeast Asian women, Cambodian women. So it's important to understand that immigrants have always been a critical part to farmwork.
For those workers who have lived in New York state for an extended period of time, they have created families here. Many of them have US-born children. That dynamic changes in that this pattern of migration-- moving north and south, returning to home countries-- has diminished significantly. It also raises different priorities among the farmworker population. The primary priority that we have learned about through our research is the heavy weight of immigration concerns among this heavily undocumented population.
But those who have children also want to understand how to navigate in their communities-- what is appropriate in our actions with schools, how to locate daycare centers. We don't have statistics on how many people have families and how many people do not. But in general, those people who are living and work in fruit and vegetable year round are more likely to have family members. And dairy workers, which are obviously year-round workers, may or may not have family members.
The major factor in this is that dairy workers typically have employer-provided housing. So some employers are not interested in housing a family, and their housing might not be appropriate for anything other than single men. So it varies tremendously. And we don't have statistics and don't intend to collect statistics on that because that changes constantly every day. But what I would say is that as we see more families, the interest in learning how to navigate in their communities comes to the fore.
Most of the farmworkers who are here currently are here to work. And that's something that our research showed, that the farm workers come to work. And when you talk about their future, their plan is to return home. They don't come to stay. Over time, their personal situation may change. As they marry or they have children, that may change. But what motivates them to come is either they are fleeing violence, or it's an economic reality that they cannot earn money where they are from.
And they come here to work, to earn money, to pay back the debts that are incurred with coming here, and to create a nest egg so they have something to go back to. They may purchase land. They may purchase animals. They may build a house. However, their primary priority while they are here is the workplace.
They want to be successful in the workplace, they want to understand opportunities for advancement in the workplace, and they want to be involved in a positive workplace. So we did a large research project that we worked with producers and farmworkers to look at, what is a positive workplace? And on our website, we have the results of that research plus tips and tools for creating positive workplaces. And the tips and tools for creating positive workplaces revolve around establishing good communication coupled with mutual respect.
So typically, in our interviews, in our needs assessment interviews, farmworkers will identify interest in how they can improve relations in the workplace with their employers, with their co-workers. And it's a challenge because, for many of them, their co-workers are also their housemates. But in understanding the workplace and understanding the need to communicate well with others in rural communities, they're interested in learning English.
And they're interested in opportunities to learn English that are fluid and flexible because they may not have a constant time off. And most don't have their own transportation, and public transportation in rural areas is unreliable. So one thing they talk about is they want to understand what services are there and how they can access that.
But since immigration is at the top of the list, it's important to understand that we live in an area of intensive immigration enforcement. And over the years, immigration debates have been stalled. We're now in a new era where we're talking about the Farm Modernization Act, which would provide an accelerated option for legalization of farm workers. But until that passes, farm workers talk a lot about the presence of law enforcement officials in rural areas that identify them as potential undocumented workers.
And so this risk of having law enforcement come to your house or stop you while you're going shopping is a very real risk. And that can lead to deportation and lead to separation of undocumented workers from their US-born children. The ACLU refers to this as the Constitution-free zone of the United States, those areas in which immigration enforcement can take place without any necessary catalyst.
And so the question of immigration is very central to the discussion about farmworkers. Some of them ask, are they supporting local economies? Are they doing work that others won't do? And our research points to the fact that they come to work, not to stay. Many ask, why don't they just apply for a visa? And there is no visa for workers on dairy farms. What we see is a situation where workers are doing physically demanding work in all kinds of weather.
In our research, they discuss social, economic, linguistic, and geographic isolation. It's a relatively young workforce. In our research, they discuss challenges to adapting to new communities. That includes things like language, cultural norms and expectations. Many of the farm workers note that we talk a lot about time. We're out of time. We're running out of time. We don't have enough time. And so that's part of what they always find interesting.
Of course, the challenges of living in rural, geographically isolated areas where there is no public transportation, the desire to have a positive workplace, to communicate well with your co-workers, to understand how to negotiate for changes in the workplace. And for those who now have families, they're interested in how to interact with schools, daycare. And as immigrants, many of them express loneliness, missing their family, missing home.
I think one of the aspects that is often not visible is while the general public has a sense that this is very physically demanding work, they may not have as close a sense of the dangers associated with the work, for example, dangers associated with using ladders or equipment, and both mechanical equipment on fruit and vegetable farms and equipment in milking parlors, equipment in processing and packing plants. It's dirty work, and there are dangers associated with working with large animals on dairy farms.
Another aspect, which is very prevalent in our conversations with farmworkers is that they work in both extremely hot and extremely cold temperatures. All of you who have experienced an upstate winter understand what it would be like to spend hours in February tying grape vines to a wire. And as we talked about a little bit before, the challenge is that many of them now have US-born children. In fact, in the US, there are over 4 million US-born children with one or more undocumented parent. And since the undocumented parent runs the risk of deportation, the possibility for family separation is very high.
So part of what we do is we support farmworkers in addressing these needs and fill in the gaps. We have students who go to farms during the farmworker's day off and tutor them in English as a second language. And I'll talk a little bit about some of the other things. COVID-19 really changed the game with farmworkers. Our priority was maintaining ongoing communication with farmworkers.
So we had to nearly, overnight, transition from face-to-face, on-farm workshops to developing a system where we could quickly communicate with a large number of farm workers. We developed a system of text messaging to 3,000 farm workers that we had their personal cell phone numbers. And we had their personal cell phone numbers because they have participated in an activity with us in the past few years.
We do many on-farm workshops about how to navigate within an intensive immigration-enforcement environment. We do many workshops where we assist families in assigning temporary guardians for their US-born children. And so we had those numbers, and we utilize that system to begin communicating with farmworkers about critical issues.
PAUL TREADWELL: And you're listening to Extension Out Loud, the podcast from Cornell Cooperative Extension, and our conversation with Mary Jo Dudley. As we talked to Mary Jo, the issue of the pandemic came up. And this section really looks at our farmworkers and the challenges they faced in dealing with this crisis, including isolation, access to health care, and issues of food security.
So you had a database of 3,000 numbers that you could rely on. Can you talk a little bit about what it took to build the trust to be able to develop a database like that? Because obviously, farmworkers aren't just going to give any random visitor their cell phone number.
MARY JO DUDLEY: That's right. So I personally have been working with farmworkers for over 16 years. And that means regularly going to farms, regularly interacting with people. We do workshops. We do training activities. We do troubleshooting. Our workplace relations project-- we interview farm owners and managers and ask them how their workplace has changed over time, and what are the challenges as well as the benefits.
And then, separately, we meet with farmworkers and talk about what it's like to work in that workplace. We analyze what they are both saying, and we host an all-farm meeting in which we address the challenges that they face. And we have developed, as I mentioned earlier, a series of tips and tools that are available for farm employers as well as farm workers.
One of the things that this research highlighted was that workers often did not have a face-to-face interview with their employer. They came to work on the farm, they shadowed another worker, but they never had that, welcome to the farm. This is what we're doing here.
And so we put together a bilingual tool which is a worker orientation checklist that farmers can use. When you have a new worker, did you talk about benefits? Did you talk about how to ask for time off? Did you talk about scheduling? Did you talk about training opportunities? So that's an approach in which we interacted with hundreds of farmworkers.
And in the immigration arena, many of the farmworkers who came here without proper documentation have US-born children. However, in order to create a legal document that assigns a temporary guardian for their US-born children, they have to have a current federal photo ID from their own government.
So 13 years ago, we started working with the Mexican and the Guatemalan consulates to bring them to upstate New York so farmworkers could get those necessary documents without running the risk of traveling from the North Country to New York City, where the possibility of being detained was very, very high. So in a recent mobile consulate event that we had with workers from Guatemala, we had 400 people come in a single day.
And so when they come, we collaborate with partners. And during that event, clinic was present to give free health consultations. We have pro-bono immigration attorneys on site in case people have immigration questions. We have workplace safety people on site to share resources. And so over the years, many farmworkers have attended either an on-farm workshop, a research project, a consulate activity.
And so that's how we have so many personal phone numbers, because we asked them if they would like to be informed of workshops, consulate visits, et cetera. So obviously, of those phone numbers, a certain percentage no longer were active. But once we went through, we found that we had this way to communicate with about 3,000 farmworkers.
When COVID presented itself, we had to interrupt our face-to-face interactions. And so we started initially sending, via WhatsApp or text message, links to videos in Spanish, in Mam, in other indigenous languages about the transmission of COVID-19 and how to protect oneself. We also organized Spanish language calls with a trusted medical professional, Dr. Canario, who's the medical director of Finger Lakes Community Health.
And these calls were simply Q&A. But this system allowed not only for us to communicate information to farmworkers, but they could communicate back to us. They could text us back and let us know if they needed masks, if they needed additional medical advice, if they needed legal referrals, and for many, if they needed food. So we transitioned our activities.
We worked with a group of local volunteers, the Bryant Park mask sellers, who sold masks. And we have distributed now about 8,000 masks to farmworkers. But at the beginning of the pandemic, none of us were familiar with masks, and farmworkers had a lot of questions about how to wash them, how to dry them, et cetera. So we included with the masks a bilingual graphic which showed how the mask should be worn, how it can be washed.
And on the reverse side, we included the phone numbers for all the federally designated migrant health clinics. So if it's a mask that we distributed in this area, it has the phone number for Finger Lakes Community Health, or if it's in Western New York, Oak Orchard Community Health. Or if it's in the Hudson Valley, it was then Sun River Community Health.
Because we had this two-way text messaging system, we started getting requests for food for people who, during quarantine, could not leave the farm. That's not a typical activity that we had ever undertaken in the past, but we needed to develop a an emergency response to that. And fortunately, we had a farmer who donated a large amount of beef.
We worked with CCE to store that beef, and we worked with the local food kitchen, with Loaves & Fishes, to cook those meals. And so we were picking up a hundred fully-cooked meals every week and delivering those. During the season, we also had farmers who provided produce. So we would deliver to those people who were in quarantine a box of shelf-safe food, produce, and cooked meals.
However, this really underscored food insecurity within the farmworker population, not only during quarantine, but because their children were not attending schools. While the schools might offer the continuation of meals that could be picked up at the school, most of the farmworkers didn't have transportation to go to the school to pick up the meals. So it underscored how much reliance vulnerable families had when school lunches and breakfasts were no longer available to their children.
During COVID, we undertook another activity. We have always supported farmworkers with legal clinics, but we could no longer do face-to-face clinics. So we would get a text message from a farmworker family that had a legal need. We would conduct a legal intake over the phone and then match that farmworker with a pro-bono immigration or family law attorney in their area. The immigration attorneys often receive funding to serve a specific geographic area.
And then we would have virtual legal clinics. The attorney would be at their kitchen table. The farmworker would be at their kitchen table. The translator would be at their kitchen table. And in order to facilitate that, we had to teach farmworkers how to download Zoom on their phones. So my students would do dry runs with farmworkers who were going to go to a legal clinic, and practice before the clinic.
And this allowed for farmworkers to receive that necessary support, those people who were in immigration and deportation proceedings to receive the necessary support. And Governor Cuomo put into place the possibility for virtual notarization, so legal documents could be notarized via Zoom or FaceTime. So we were allowed to continue with those families who were interested in assigning temporary guardians for their US-born children.
A parent who's undocumented who is facing deportation proceedings will often put into place a temporary guardian to avoid that those children become wards of the state. And they can name an individual that they know and trust. We did 10 virtual legal clinics, quite a bit of background work to make those happen. In addition to signing legal papers such as temporary guardianship, we also put together a packet of information for those people who were going to serve as a guardian, which includes all the information about the children-- their teacher, their pediatrician, their dentist, allergies, likes, dislikes.
And we also used COVID to tweak our service directory. We have a Spanish and English language searchable database of services that are organized by geocode. So you put in your address, and you can look at the services, things such as housing, legal services, education, English classes, job training, safety, health services.
And it's not just a simple list, but each service indicates, do they provide translation? If so, in what languages? Do they provide transportation? If so, how do you organize it? What is the general fee structure? And what are the documents that are required for one to access those services? Because you don't want to send an undocumented person to a government service where there are mandatory reporters. So we did a lot of revamping of our website. We have a Spanish language website, which is [INAUDIBLE], which is cell phone accessible.
And also, during COVID, we developed visual materials on new regulations. There were state regulations, COVID farm safety regulations. There was not an easy way for those regulations to be communicated to farmworkers. So we developed an audiovisual animated video to share that information with farmworkers. Many things changed. The Driver's License, the Green Light Law was passed, so immigrants, regardless, could have access to driver's licenses. However, the DMV closed, so we mailed out a lot of Spanish-language driver's manuals so people could study for the written test.
Also, right before COVID, the law that provides the Farm Labor Fair Laborer Practices Act, which revises the New York state labor law to include new protections for farmworkers, farmworkers and domestic workers were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, which is the federal, which provides the right to organize, guaranteed workers' comp, et cetera, guaranteed day of rest.
And that was changed in July of 2019, where the New York state labor law was revised through this legislation. So that raised a lot of new information. One of the things that we've been doing is, how do you take complex information and make it accessible to an immigrant low-literacy population? So I'm just going to show you this. As I said, the labor law affecting farmworkers changed, and it has many components. So how do you communicate it?
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- If you're a farmworker in New York state, there's a new law that you should know called the New York State Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act. This video explains what this new law means to you. This material was produced by the Cornell Farmworker Program at Cornell University. Pause this video at any moment to take note of the information.
This law went into effect on January 1, 2020. To whom does it apply? This applies to all farmworkers in New York state with or without legal status. Under the new law, you have eight rights that could be beneficial to you.
Right number one, the right to 24 hours of consecutive rest per week-- you could choose to work during your day of rest, but your employer can't force you to work. If you're unable to work for 24 consecutive hours due to weather or crop conditions, this counts as your day of rest. You should always keep track of the hours you worked and make sure that your pay stub reflects the exact number of hours worked.
PAUL TREADWELL: To watch the full video, please visit bit.ly/cfb_video or see the link in our show notes. Now, back to our conversation with Mary Jo.
MARY JO DUDLEY: I wanted to show that to you because we're using this animated form-- and this is the English version, and we obviously have the Spanish version-- to communicate complex topics. As you note, this new law came into effect January 1, 2020. And we faced a stay-at-home order two months later. And it was critical because there are certain aspects of this law, including paid sick leave, paid family leave, that became very critical during COVID.
How would farmworkers be paid for the time that they were in quarantine, or the time that they were ill, or the time that they were caring for a sick family member? So what this required is a different way of working, but the priority being to maintaining ongoing communication with farmworkers and this two-way communication, which included our text messaging system as well as regularly scheduled health related calls in Spanish with Dr. Canario.
And our most recent one was about vaccines-- why do you need it-- and a Q&A-- what are the challenges with vaccines? And general calls with farmworkers that were regularly scheduled, where they could just talk about issues that they were facing. So we went from in-person, face-to-face regular communications to developing a system to maintaining communication, using text messages, WhatsApp, Zoom calls, and regular telephone calls.
The concrete when your life is primarily focused on your work-- certain aspects of that take on greater importance, for example, your housing. If you're working 60 hours a week, and you go home to a house where you don't have hot water, or the house is falling apart, you never rest.
But if you go back to a house that you're comfortable in, you're able to rest. And one interesting aspect of farmwork is that many of the farm employers provide housing because there's no other housing available in rural areas. So the quality of the housing is extremely important to those that work on farms for their general satisfaction and their well-being.
KATIE BAILDON: Historically, farmworkers have not been protected under the National Labor Rights Act, right? But then there are some protections at the state level now because of the new legislation. Is that right?
MARY JO DUDLEY: When the National Labor Relations Act was passed, at that time, that was still a time of the Jim Crow laws in the South. And so that worker protection which gives the right to overtime pay, the right to a day of rest, the right to organize-- in order to get the support of the Southern Congress people, rather than explicitly state a racial exclusion, they excluded two kinds of workers who were typically Black, domestic workers and farmworkers.
Since that is federal regulation, the only way that can be changed is states can amend their labor law. And in 1990, I think, New York state amended its labor law with relation to domestic workers. Other states, as you know, have amended their labor law with respect to farmworkers, such as California. And that adjustment of labor regulations, when you have the right to organize-- that evolved into the birth of many labor unions.
United Farm Workers, based in California, was an entity that focuses-- has focused on organizing farmworkers. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee in Ohio focuses on organizing farmworkers. The typical union structure-- since many states' farmworkers did not have the right to organize, some states formed farmworker organizations that didn't use the typical union structure.
So for example, I don't know if you've ever heard of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. That was a coalition of farmworkers in Immokalee that, rather than focusing their energy on changing the relations between worker and employer, they joined forces and targeted those that were making the most money from their labor.
And so they put forth a campaign, which was called A Penny A Pound, for those that were buying tomatoes. And they focused on Taco Bell, Whole Foods, Burger King. And eventually, they were able to convince those people who bought the tomatoes to pay a penny more per pound. And that extra income was distributed among the workers.
We can turn back to-- the United Farm Workers, many years ago, had a grape boycott. And so that was a consumer boycott, where consumers were encouraged not to buy grapes grown in California. Or the Farm Labor Organizing Committee had the tomato soup boycott. They encouraged consumers not to buy Campbell Soup until they changed their relationships with farmworkers.
So there are different ways to think about organizing, and there are ways that farmworkers have organized informally for many years. Probably the most predominant is there's an organization of dairy workers. It's called [SPANISH], and they have organized. But before organizing around changing the labor law with its provisions for farmworkers, they focused on driver's licenses, the Green Light campaign.
So those workers said, we can't have a driver's license. We have US-born children. If something happens to our children in the middle of the night, we have no way to legally attend to their medical needs. Similarly, we have no way to legally arrive at our parent-teacher conferences. If you don't have a driver's license, and you live in rural areas of New York state or any other state where there's no reliable public transportation, most of the farmworkers rely on an informal system of transportation.
It's called [SPANISH]. They will hire a local unemployed or underemployed individual to give them a ride to town. And that ride to town may cost $50. So this is still an issue for us right now as we're encouraging farmworkers to access COVID-19 vaccines, is the transportation aspect. So there's a two-prong approach.
One is the federally designated migrant health clinics go directly to farms and vaccinate all workers. Or in some areas, CCE has hosted joint vaccination clinics with the County Health Department. But we need to ensure that there's appropriate and accessible transportation for farmworkers to arrive at those clinics. The most successful model that we've seen is where the employers transport their workers.
So there was an outbreak of COVID among a group of Guatemalan workers for whom Spanish is their second language. And their employer told them that people would be coming from the county health department to ask them questions in Spanish, probably in some version of Spanish, and that they should speak to them truthfully. Someone arrived at their house. They gave their real name, their address, and that person took photographs of them and of their house.
The next day, they appeared in the local newspaper, photographs of undocumented immigrants that tested positive to COVID-19, with their address in front of their house. The only option for those individuals is to flee, whether they're violently ill or not, because that kind of information is an invitation for ICE to go to that location.
That week, we had various reports of ICE picking up other farmworkers in the area, who had worked on the same farm for 20 years, who had US-born children, and took them to our federal detention center in Batavia that had a significant number of COVID-19 cases, and their bail was posted at $19,000. Make of it what you will. But did that person do that intentionally? I imagine not. But it illustrates the gap between an understanding of-- that would be a HIPAA violation if that was a health provider, right?
But it was a journalist. And they didn't know who it was. They didn't know the difference, right? In the current context of anti-immigrant sentiments, it fueled the fire. And we saw this in rural areas where social media, Facebook postings, et cetera, pointed to immigrants, and farmworkers specifically, as bringing COVID to their area. Farmworkers are essential workers. They worked despite statewide stay-at-home directives. They had higher exposure to infection. And initially, they did not have access to PPE.
KATIE BAILDON: On a final note, Mary Jo shared with us what brings her hope for this work.
PAUL TREADWELL: And it's really an interesting section because it's-- after listening to the lead-up to this part, it really seems like hope is a challenge to maintain. But Mary Jo had some words about that. So we hope you've enjoyed this conversation, and here's Mary Jo.
MARY JO DUDLEY: I think it's hopeful that the New York state labor law has been revised to provide protections for farmworkers. And as long as we can communicate that in an effective way, that opens up options for better well-being for farmworkers. I think that the partnership and the trust that we've developed with farmworkers allows us to work together to create approaches and materials that respond to both immediate and long-term needs among this population.
I believe that through the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people in New York state and other states perhaps changed their perspective towards food, it opened the question of, who is producing this food? Who is milking the cows? Who is harvesting our vegetables?
And so I have hope. And I have hope that we're now talking about immigration reform specifically for farmworkers. Because if we could find a way to diminish the fear associated with living undocumented in the US, we open up opportunities to be more creative.
PAUL TREADWELL: Thanks for listening to this episode. Extension Out Loud was produced and edited by Paul Treadwell with help from Katie Baildon.
KATIE BAILDON: For more about this episode, including show notes and more, visit extensionoutloud.com, and be sure to subscribe to Extension Out Loud on your favorite podcast directory.
