Julia Donahue
Julia Ann Donahue is a junior at the ILR School. She graduated from Convent of the Sacred Heart in NYC. She spent the summer on a worker-owned coffee cooperative in the small community of Bochil in Chiapas, Mexico.
“I was doing administrative and preparation work on a worker-owned coffee cooperative. Every August they are inspected for organic and labor standards—so we were conducting the internal inspections in preparation for the outside inspectors. On a day-to-day basis, that could mean going to the capital of the state to apply for government aid with banks, or typing up proposals, or even going into the coffee field and physically inspecting the plants; a pretty wide range of activities.
“I have always been interested in Latin American studies and I plan on going into union organizing. I’m interested in alternative forms of worker organization. I’m really a union person. In situations that are not your traditional work place, you kind of have to be a little more creative and I found that the cooperative style of ownership fit in with what I am interested in.
“I definitely had to be very resourceful—culturally, it’s very different. Ninety percent of the time, I was with men whose second language was Spanish. They spoke an indigenous language and they were accustomed to waking up at 4 o’clock in the morning and harvesting. So, in terms of just communicating, that was a challenge. We also put on several workshops to develop leadership skills among some of the more invested members of the cooperative. For example, one exercise was for everyone to take a balloon and keep it up in the air as a group—just seeing a group of 15 bearded farmers, covered in mud playing ‘keep the balloon up’—it was pretty interesting.
“I didn’t know what to expect. I packed my bags. I had an idea of what the weather would be like and I had an idea of how much it would cost me to live there, but in terms of interacting with people and my daily routine, I had no idea. What ended up taking place was a big surprise.
“I was exposed to a different type of work. Through ILR, I interned at a couple of unions and at the Department of Labor and I was accustomed to that kind of typical American work, in the office or working in the research department of a union.
“Fundamentally, no matter where you go, people are interested in their work. They are interested in getting a certain level of respect on the job and for these farmers who probably take in about $3000 a year, on a good harvest, that’s a really basic thing for them. It is so entrenched in their life. You see workers who could be producing and selling on their own, coming together in a cooperative and investing in themselves. There are extra steps that you have to take when you’re doing cooperative and organic and meeting labor standards.
“It changed what I want to do in the future but in sort of an odd way. For the past couple of years, I have wanted to go into union organizing. Previously, I was interested in hotel workers, which are mostly immigrant service workers. But, when I got to Mexico, I became interested in health care issues—for them it’s a huge day-to-day struggle in terms of basic access to health care. And since I got back to ILR, I’ve been looking at graduate programs for nursing and I think I might want to be a nurse organizer—get an RN degree and then work in a hospital with unions as a nurse.
“We traveled on a seven hour ride in the back of a truck on a dirt road in the mountains to visit a sister cooperative in Oaxaca, a neighboring state, and we toured their health clinic, which was very basic. I saw that if you have the ability to help other people, in terms of medical issues, that is something that is incredibly useful and the skills you learn there, in terms of interacting with people, can really be applied to anything.
“It was quite an experience. My career services background would tell me that it’s very important to network and I’ve definitely learned that from other internships—the people that you meet become invaluable contacts for your future—not just in terms of getting jobs but in offering advice. But, in this situation, that really doesn’t apply. What you have to learn is just keep an open mind and be prepared to get exposed to things you would never imagine.”
