Poultry Workers in Upstate NY - Documentary
Hi there, we’re Xiomara, Liana, Gabriela, and Frida.
We are a group of strong, like-minded women who met in grad school - during a year of remote learning! - and we’ve decided to take on an exciting documentary project as part of our final two semesters of school. The four of us are masters students in the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies; different interests and life experiences brought us to labor school, but the thing that unites us is our focus on better understanding and acknowledging the experiences and power of marginalized workers. As such, as each of us begins the process of researching and writing our capstone projects - a year-long process that culminates in a lengthy written paper that we’ll present alone - we decided we also wanted to make something together: a short documentary film about the lives of poultry workers in upstate New York, a community whose needs were ignored over and over during the pandemic.
Our intent is that this documentary will travel far beyond the walls of the school. But we can’t do it without help from our community. We are looking to fundraise $15k, which will help us cover travel costs so we can arrange on- and off-camera interviews upstate, as well as hire folks to help us shoot video, record sound, and edit the final product.
We’re students who balance jobs and school (and for one of us, child care for a newborn!), and we’re committed to doing this on as tight of a budget as possible. After doing research into costs, $15k is on the lower end of what producing a documentary like this can cost.
Our goal is to center workers' voices throughout the film, help us make that a reality by making a donation and sharing this page with your networks! Any donation, $5, $25, $100 - helps!
More about our project:
In the pandemic, nothing became more obvious than the labor required to have food show up in supermarkets, corner stores, and farmers markets, or to be hand-delivered to our front steps by delivery workers. All along the food supply chain, farm and food workers’ labor is rendered invisible - and it’s convenient for the corporations that profit off the sale of food to keep it that way.
But at least for us, poultry workers are our friends, our family and our neighbors. Two of us spent time growing up in rural New York state, and saw up close how this workforce is composed of immigrants from all over the world. Over the last year, we’ve also seen how they have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic - denied masks and other PPE at work, subjected to long hours and no days off. When everything else went on pause, this was the work that could not stop.
Because we have seen up close the negative impacts of COVID-19 in rural communities, we want to use our knowledge of labor studies and our privilege as students to uplift the voices of workers in the Catskill Region.
Our documentary will tell the story of poultry workers in the Catskill Region, with the goal of centering workers' voices, their dignity and humanity. The documentary will be a window into the conditions of poultry factories in rural NY.
We will explore the following questions: Who are the people feeding NYC? What rights do they have and how are those rights being protected? What is our responsibility as consumers to ensure that ALL worker rights are protected? What role do unions play in all of this and what is their responsibility?
Too often, rural communities are left out of the conversation on workers rights and justice, and we believe that these sectors are the ones that suffer the most when there’s a crisis. We know this film is needed and timely. In order to make this film a reality we need to fundraise $15,000 to cover the necessary cost of making this film a reality.
Thank you for supporting our dreams, and our educational journey! Please share this link with friends and family. We are a group of strong, like-minded women who met in grad school - during a year of remote learning! - and we’ve decided to take on an exciting documentary project as part of our final two semesters of school. The four of us are masters students in the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies; different interests and life experiences brought us to labor school, but the thing that unites us is our focus on better understanding and acknowledging the experiences and power of marginalized workers. As such, as each of us begins the process of researching and writing our capstone projects - a year-long process that culminates in a lengthy written paper that we’ll present alone - we decided we also wanted to make something together: a short documentary film about the lives of poultry workers in upstate New York, a community whose needs were ignored over and over during the pandemic."
