2024 Farmworker Justice Conference

In this session, participants will learn about a Farmworker MLP started two years ago by Central West Justice Center’s Seasonal and Migrant Farmworker Unit in collaboration with “La Cliniquita” a farmworker clinic at the Baystate Brightwood Health Center in Springfield Massachusetts. This MLP is based on guidance from patients, community health workers, the workers center, and other community organizations. The partnership embeds a lawyer into the healthcare team to help patients with health harming legal needs, lead trainings for patients and providers, and advocate for policy change to eliminate systemic inequities at the state level. Participants will also learn about Legal Services of New Jersey's Workers Rights and Farmworker Project, another example of community collaboration to improve health and wellness outcomes for farmworkers. In this session we will share the models we have developed and explore the challenges, successes, and takeaways from our experiences. Participants will engage in conversations about how embedding legal services within community-based farmworker medical clinics can help eliminate barriers for farmworkers and will leave with models and key takeaways to help them think about how an MLP or similar partnership could be implemented in their own states and communities.

Providing high quality direct legal services in a fast-paced environment can be challenging. This presentation aims to identify challenges specific to legal service providers working with immigrant and/or low-wage workers. We will discuss the following challenges and share ethical approaches to: managing expectations, meaningful language access, and respectful client storytelling. The second half of this training will focus on providing ethical advocacy in a way that is sustainable for the advocates themselves. We will explore what it means to support staff with lived experience, define moral injury, discuss what meaningful collaboration with colleagues looks like, and create intentional, safe spaces for staff to regularly discuss emotionally challenging cases.

Citing labor shortages and costs associated with H-2A visas, pork producers, dairies, and other actors in the animal agriculture industry are increasingly turning to TN and J-1 visas to fill a wide range of vacancies in their production. While these programs are ostensibly limited to certain categories of professional work and cultural exchange, respectively, advocates across the country are hearing from TN and J-1 workers who are required to perform manual labor outside of the professional role promised and with no cultural exchange value. In contrast to the H-2A program, there is little government oversight of J-1 and TN programs--and the animal agriculture industry is actively lobbying for what little oversight exists to be further degraded.