Thread: CORNELL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS STUDY LIVES OF MIGRANT WORKER

LINK to Story


By Mark Johnson
ASSOCIATED PRESS

10:43 p.m. March 20, 2005

ALBANY, N.Y. – On Wednesday nights, Cornell University senior Alex Nothern drives about 20 miles to a dairy farm near Cortland.

While her classmates sit down to homework at Cornell's Ithaca campus, Nothern spends two hours teaching English to migrant farmworkers, the outreach part of what Cornell professors say is a unique offering in American academia – a course entirely devoted to migrant farm labor in the Americas.

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"It puts a face on the people we're studying," said Nothern, 21, a Spanish major from Massachusetts. "They're not just an abstract concept. The guys I'm teaching are all from Guatemala and don't speak a word of English. Their lives are so different from mine."

There is little solid data on migrant workers in the United States but a National Agricultural Statistics Service survey in 1997 and 1998 found about 1.7 million hired farm workers in the country. Some estimates put the current number at 2.5 million.

There are an estimated 47,000 migrant workers and their family members in New York, according to Herb Engman, a senior extension associate in Cornell's Department of Human Development.

The course, taught by professors from eight departments, gives a broad perspective on farmworkers, mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean, who toil at manual labor for low wages without the benefits of collective bargaining or overtime pay.

"It's a chronically neglected subject," said Vernon Briggs, a professor of industrial and labor relations who teaches a section of the class. "The fundamental problem is migrant workers are treated as second-class citizens. They're always treated as exceptions to labor laws."

Cornell, nestled on the southern tip of Cayuga Lake in central New York, is surrounded by rolling farmland. But the workers on those farms can often seem far away for students attending the Ivy League school, even as many also work in restaurants and shops around town. Ray Craib, a history professor who put the course together last year, said the course is starting to change that.

"It's really broken down barriers between the campus and the surroundings of upstate New York," he said.

Topics covered include migration and labor in global history, agricultural history in North America and the Caribbean, agricultural economics and statistics, the North American Free Trade Agreement and human rights. The semester begins with the history of slave labor on Caribbean sugar plantations, moves to immigration from Mexico and progresses to focus on workers in upstate New York.

Helen Yoon, 21, a senior from Long Island majoring in industrial and labor relations enrolled because she "had an interest in finding out where my food comes from."

"Because I didn't know much, every piece of information has been amazing, just on how much food we can produce," she said. "There are different guest lectures every week from the economics of agribusiness to theories on race, power and politics."

Besides regular classwork, students must perform at least 40 hours of service with migrant workers to complete the course. English as a second language has been a popular choice for the service portion of the class, but some students have also helped raise money for farmworker programs or designed a newsletter for the Independent Farmworkers Center, an advocacy group.

The 1997-98 national survey found 52 percent of farmworkers were married, and 61 percent had incomes below the poverty level. For the previous decade, the median income of individual farmworkers was less than $7,500 per year while that of farmworker families was less than $10,000.

Eighty-one percent of all farmworkers were foreign-born. Of those born outside the United States, 95 percent were from Mexico.

Students have also been able to make personal connections with the local workers.

"I was surprised at how much like us they were," Nothern said. "I don't know what I was picturing, but just sitting on a couch with them, they could have been friends of mine. It's easy to assume we couldn't make connection – a student at an Ivy League college versus guys who get up at 3 a.m. every day to milk cows. But those things didn't matter."



On the Net:

Cornell Migrant Program: www.farmworkers.cornell.edu/

National Agricultural Statistics Service: www.usda.gov/nass/





JUST ANOTHER OBL


Edit: Link by Mr_Magoo

I didn't see the word "illegal" in the article. Guess they were all here legally.