Cornell support for NY farmworkers wins national recognition

Law students in the clinic recently partnered with the Cornell chapter of the National Lawyers Guild to recruit and train other students to help with client intakes, identify pro bono lawyers, and provide training and translation.

“The students really ran with this to expand the clinic’s impact, to represent as many people as we can,” Lyon says.

The clinic also represents farmworkers on employment-related legal matters before state administrative agencies and in state and federal courts, such as female farmworkers who experienced sexual harassment at work; a worker fired after being injured on the job; and migrant workers from Guatemala who were victims of extortion while being recruited to work in the U.S. on temporary visas. These cases have resulted in monetary judgments and settlements in favor of the clients, says Briana Beltran, who with Lyon supervises students in the clinic.

Students and faculty have also undertaken research and policy projects about the increasing use of temporary agricultural visas in the U.S., and students have traveled to meet with clients in Guatemala on three occasions as part of ongoing litigation.

Accounting and law students also have assisted farmworkers and others with tax preparation since 2017 as part of the Low-Income Taxpayer Program, an interdisciplinary practicum directed by Lyon and John McKinley, professor of practice in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.

The Farmworker Program brings Mexican and Guatemalan consulate officials from New York City to rural communities each year, hosting mobile consulate visits.

At a Mexican consulate visit, Oct. 16-18 at a community center in Geneva, more than 150 people, including families with small children, came for services including medical care, referrals and free screenings from Finger Lakes Community Health, an affordable care provider serving agricultural workers.

The mobile consulates draw workers in need of passports, visas and documents assigning guardianship or authorizing travel for their children in the event of parents being detained, deported or hospitalized.

The sites are hives of activity. In Geneva, tables lined a gymnasium where Dudley and students assisted clients; children had an activity table, and community partners offered expertise and resources. Consulate services and the health clinic were in an adjacent large room, with small offices to the side for legal consultations with pro bono immigration and family law attorneys. A Guatemalan mobile consulate visit last summer had 400 people in one day.

Partners at the mobile consulates typically include legal service providers, labor education organizations and health care providers. The Farmworker Justice Center of New York, in Rochester, partners with Cornell on a family preparedness clinic for immigrant families.

“For the Mexican consulate we all partner up together and do outreach,” worker’s rights advocate Erika Aguilera says. “We try to get to know the workers on a genuine level.”

Cornell students play a crucial role in the outreach work.

The Farmworker Program trains students in a summer internship to interact and work with clients, lead workshops on farms, and assist during consulate visits.

Students from the Migration in the Américas course – cross-listed in the ILR School, CALS and the College of Arts and Sciences – were in Geneva to test visual resources that explain changes in state laws affecting immigrants and migrant workers. One is New York’s new Green Light law, which will allow undocumented immigrants to apply for noncommercial driver’s licenses and learner permits.

Renee Henck, a graduate student in public administration, brought her project related to the law to the consulate site, “answering questions on issues they might encounter in applying for a driver’s license,” to fine-tune the text before translating it for further field testing.

Regional planning graduate student Hailey Morey is assessing “current conditions of housing [for farm laborers], possible solutions for improvement, and how the Farm Laborers Fair Practices Act will affect housing conditions,” she says.

The new labor law went into effect Oct. 25 and provides agricultural workers with organizing and collective bargaining rights, time off each week, housing protections, overtime pay, worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance eligibility.

“Agricultural workers in the United States were notably excluded from protections given to workers during the New Deal period of the 1930s,” says Kate Griffith, associate professor and chair of the labor relations, law and history department in the ILR School. “The new law finally fills the gap for New York’s farmworkers and promotes fairness and justice for this isolated workforce.”

Griffith has worked to connect farmworker and low-wage worker advocates with each other and with the Social Justice Division of the state attorney general’s office, and she joined colleagues in ILR and the Law School in providing testimony to the state Senate in support of the new law.

ILR has long been a collaborator on worker advocacy with the Farmworker Program and related initiatives.

“It’s been a coordinated effort through many entities on this campus to address this population,” says labor historian Veronica Martinez-Matsuda, assistant professor of labor relations, law and history, who is on the program’s faculty steering committee.

“Now there is a much more urgent language when we talk with them about their needs. In many ways, their bosses are experiencing that, too,” she says. “It has become even more important for those of us who can access resources to help mediate some of that, and for us to be involved.”

There is a need for more undergraduate student internships given the engaged-learning and service opportunities that exist, she says.

“It’s important to get students into the fields, into the labor camps, because the need is there, the interest is there,” Martinez-Matsuda says. “I get a lot of students asking for opportunities to get involved. I’ve never met a student who didn’t define it as a positive experience.”

This article also appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.