In the News!

Collective Editorial
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This Editorial contains news from The NYTimes, the NY Daily News, Newsday, the Albany Times Union, Newsday, the Syracuse Post Standard, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Troy Record, The Citizen (Auburn), and The Daily Gazette (Schenectady and Capital Region).

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NBC affiliate segment on the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act
Click here to download a copy of the news story. For the original link, please visit http://wnyt.com/article/stories/S961207.shtml?cat=300.

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Syracuse Post Standard
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Farmworker Albany Day Coverage
For complete May 12 Coverage, please visit our page here

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Harvest Kennedy's legacy: State Senate must pass farmworker rights bill
Daily News Editorial, May 16, 2009 "Harvest Kennedy's legacy: State Senate must pass farmworker rights bill." Click here to download a copy the article.

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Albany Times Union
May 13, 2009. Click here to download a copy the article.

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Farm Workers’ Rights, 70 Years Overdue
New York Times Editorial, April 6, 2009. Click here to download a copy the article.

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The right row to hoe: State Senate must give long-overdue protections to New York farm workers
New York Daily News Editorial, April 11, 2009. Click here to download a copy the article.

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Expand rights and workers will come (Letter to the Editor, 04/05)
Letter to the Editor, April 5, 2009.
      The article "Delay in reform irks area farmers" (March 25) only addressed one side of the farm labor situation. Questions demand answers, if we are to look at the whole story. Such as, how are we to reconcile growing upstate unemployment with the rise in H-2A workers? Is it really that U.S. workers won't do farm work? Or, is it that the terms of employment — no right to a day of rest, long hours with no overtime pay, no disability, no protection when bargaining collectively — are such that U.S. workers, even those unemployed, are looking elsewhere? The H-2A program creates a wildly unbalanced employer-employee power dynamic. Workers are virtually indentured servants with two options if they're suffering under their assigned employer: "grin-and-bear-it" or quit, which would mean going home, forfeiting a year's worth of income. U.S. workers have the right to go work across the street if they aren't being treated well. Extending rights and protections to farm workers equal to that of other workers would be a huge step toward attracting local applicants for local jobs.

—Barbara Deming, Sweden | (Click here for the source of the article)

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New York should give equal rights to the farmworkers RFK championed
      There is a far more fitting way for New York to honor Robert F. Kennedy than to name the Triborough Bridge in his memory, as happened last week.
      Kennedy fought passionately for the rights and welfare of the downtrodden, including migrant farmworkers who lived in miserable conditions on substandard wages. He championed the fieldhands and their families in an alliance with legendary labor leader César Chávez, pictured with Kennedy in a 1968 photo.       Read more>>

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New York's Harvest of Shame
      Gov. Paterson minces no words in declaring that New York farmworkers deserve the same labor rights as everyone else, including a 40-hour week, overtime pay, a day off per week and the right to organize and bargain collectively.
      The other day, Paterson recalled his support as a legislator for full labor rights for field hands, and said growers "are running a system ... analogous to what it was in 1880."       Read more>>

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'One New York' Would Give Farmworkers Rights
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