This story originally appeared in Truthout on Oct. 8, 2024. It is shared here with permission.

As Hurricane Milton barrels toward Florida, residents are bracing for their second catastrophic storm in less than two weeks. Since September 26, when Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4, communities across the Southeast have been grappling with the aftermath of that storm’s destruction. Among those hardest hit — and most overlooked — are farmworkers in southern Georgia.

The Georgia Department of Agriculture estimates that the storm has caused billions of dollars in damage to the state’s agriculture industry, affecting more than 100 farmers. Absent from many of these headlines, however, is Helene’s impact on the predominantly Latinx farmworker community, many of whom are undocumented or migrant workers with temporary visas. Ever since Hurricane Helene tore across Georgia, destroying pecan farms, poultry houses, cotton fields, and more, thousands of farmworkers have nowhere to turn as they grapple with decimated homes and lost livelihoods.

“I’ve been seeing pretty much every struggle that farmworkers experience in their daily lives, but magnified times 100,” said Alma Salazar Young, the UFW Foundation’s Georgia state director. “Everybody in South Georgia is struggling, especially in those really hard hit areas, but farmworkers are still an afterthought. Nobody has thought about going the extra mile to take care of them.”

Georgia is one of the top states employing migrant farmworkers through the federal H-2A program, which offers temporary visas for agricultural work. Before Hurricane Helene, living conditions for farmworkers in Georgia were already notoriously poor. The H-2A program requires employers to provide housing for their migrant workers that complies with the standards for temporary labor camps set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. These standards, a legal expert noted, are already the bare minimum and have not been updated in decades. Still, they are often not met by employers; federal investigations have cited Georgia farms for mold and water damage, dangerous exposed wiring, and more.

Undocumented workers, meanwhile, rent their homes, usually single-wide trailers. Desperate for affordable housing, these workers also tend to be pushed into substandard conditions, including mobile homes riddled with holes in the siding and drywall, roof and faucet leaks, lightbulbs dangling from wires, pest infestations and front doors lacking locks, secured only by a rope. And that was before the storm. When Hurricane Helene hit, these shoddy structures stood little chance against 90 mile per hour gusts.

“Conditions for the workers were already terrible to begin with, but now, many of them don’t realize that they’re homeless,” said Young, who has been traveling to the various farmworker communities in South Georgia that have been impacted by Hurricane Helene. She has seen trailers with their roofs blown off, littered with debris and the floors caving in, while families still attempt to seek shelter in whatever remains.

The roughly 35,000 H-2A workers in Georgia, as well as an untold number of undocumented immigrants, are not eligible for disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), nor do they qualify for food stamps or unemployment assistance.

The financial burden is exacerbated by the fact that many farmworkers already lived in extreme poverty before the hurricane. Minimum wage for H-2A workers in the state is $14.68, while undocumented workers often earn less — usually 10 to 12 dollars an hour, according to Young. If workers are paid by the piece — a basket of blueberries or a busload of watermelons, for instance — that hourly rate can be even more meager. Now, with fields and farms destroyed, it’s unclear when, if at all, workers will be able to return to earning a living.

Many agents that companies hire to recruit H-2A workers charge those workers illegal fees which the workers often pay by taking out crushing loans. If they’re unable to work, these workers will be unable to pay back that debt, on top of struggling to support themselves and their families. Visas for H-2A workers are also tied to one specific employer; if that employer no longer has work for them, they must return to their home countries, primarily Mexico, or risk being in violation of the law.

In the absence of government aid, local churches and groups like the Red Cross or Salvation Army are the only sources of relief for many of Georgia’s farmworkers. But these resources don’t come without barriers.

“Even before the storm hit, we were getting information on the storm, on shelters, and I would have to translate it before I could text it to our farmworker leaders, because it was not being provided in Spanish,” said Young. Sometimes information would be posted to Facebook groups that most farmworkers might not be familiar with, “so even if they do find out, they don’t find out about any type of assistance until it’s gone.”

Additionally, police officers and National Guard members have often been present at aid distribution sites, which dissuades undocumented workers from accessing those resources. In May, aiming to crack down on undocumented immigrants, Georgia passed House Bill 1105, which requires local law enforcement agencies to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if an arrested individual cannot provide documentation. Even though the Red Cross and other groups don’t ask for a name or ID, Young said that farmworkers are still afraid to show up: “They’re not going to risk getting deported over trying to get some food.”

In addition to food and water, farmworkers’ most requested items right now are diapers and baby formula. “They’re just trying to make it day by day,” Young said. “They haven’t had a chance to think about the future, while they’re trying to just figure out what they’re going to eat today.”

Immigrants form the bedrock of the country’s food supply, making up an estimated 73 percent of agriculture workers in the United States. Young joined the UFW Foundation after working as the director of Valdosta State University’s College Assistance Migrant Program, during which she witnessed firsthand what farmworkers sacrificed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to put food on tables around the country.

“I’m just so disheartened by how little everybody in general cares about farmworkers, because during the pandemic, they risked their lives to bring food to everybody. Not just in several states, but all over the country,” Young said. “Now that they’re in need, we forgot about them.”

Related

Professional coaching has been good to Alejandra Badilla, helping to accelerate an already rapid rise. The 36-year-old Chilean, who will complete her Executive MBA at Madrid’s IE Business School late this year, started monthly coaching sessions over Microsoft Teams six months into the course. Soon afterwards, she was promoted to a director-level role at the insurance business Chubb, managing a $100mn portfolio of clients.

“I believe that everybody needs a coach, always, because your life is changing constantly,” says Badilla, who switched careers a few years ago, having trained originally as a physiotherapist. She also has experience in the health and financial sectors and was a convert to coaching long before starting at IE. “For me, it is like a religion.”

EMBA providers increasingly emphasise the importance of executive coaching. According to 2023 research by the Executive MBA Council (EMBAC), a network of schools, more than 87 per cent of its member programmes offered a coaching service, up from 58 per cent in 2011.

Prospective students are also demanding coaching. The most recent Tomorrow’s MBA study, by higher education consultancy CarringtonCrisp and the European Foundation for Management Development, found executive coaching was the second most demanded career development service sought by prospective EMBA candidates, just behind mentoring.

Randall Peterson, professor and academic director of the Leadership Institute at London Business School, was involved in the decision to increase coaching for LBS EMBA students six years ago. The shift was driven by the reality that coaching was, even then, standard for senior executives.

“The logic . . . was that these students didn’t have much experience of it, so let’s get them used to the idea of coaching accelerating their careers,” Peterson says.

He adds that it was also important to differentiate in students’ minds the practices of coaching from other forms of careers support. “We wanted to show that it is not therapy and it is also not mentoring, in that they are not going to tell you to do X and Y,” Peterson says. “What coaching does is support your thinking about where you want to go and how you want to get there.”

Coaching EMBA students “presents unique challenges” because they are studying while holding down often senior full-time jobs and balancing competing demands on their time, says Sarah Langslow, executive coach and author of Do Sweat the Small Stuff. But, she adds, it can also be the best time to be coached.

“We can work on their leadership, communication, influence, executive presence and so on in the context of their working environment, not only their MBA class environment,” Langslow says. “Coaching on live challenges allows direct challenge and support, and the chance to follow up to explore the impact of their changes in behaviour and approach.”

Few business schools hire coaches as staff members, usually preferring to use freelance professionals. Los Angeles-based Sue Ann Gonis, a former business executive who has been a certified coach since 2008, supports students on the Executive MBA at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

Gonis says she can relate to EMBA candidates who are often in senior roles and looking to switch to other sectors or professions “because I have made a career shift”.

Executive MBA Ranking 2024

This is a story is from the EMBA report publishing on October 14

Her services are also in demand when Michigan Ross students come to LA, where she runs workshops with the cohort and follows up with Zoom calls.

Christoph Kiegler experienced private coaching before his Global Executive MBA at Barcelona-based Iese Business School, having hired a coach to support his rise to partner at KPMG, his employer of more than 20 years.

He and the approximately 40 participants on the GEMBA programme were offered four executive coaching sessions as part of the course’s leadership element.

Kiegler says he valued these interactions highly, particularly as Iese was able to pair him with a fellow German-speaking coach. But he adds that those who want to benefit fully from the process should continue after they graduate, something that Iese also offers.

Coaching supports your thinking about where you want to go and how you want to get there

“As a senior executive, the only way to grow is by such self-reflection, [but] having four sessions with the coach is not enough to get to something very specific,” he says.

Kiegler admits, however, that he has not used an executive coach since the GEMBA, blaming demands on his time. “It is like sports: I know I should do it because it’s good for me,” he says — adding that he also struggles to find time for those activities.

The process of coaching involves more work than just the time spent in one-to-one sessions. Alejandra Badilla’s coach at IE Business School recommended self-help books for her to read, worked together with her to discover aspects of her character that might help in achieving career goals, and assisted with strategies to capitalise on personal strengths.

“If you don’t have the ‘mirror’ to question you all the time, who sees your best skills, you won’t be aware of what you are best able to do,” Badilla says. “I have some friends, older than me, who always had a coach and they are successful people. On the other side, I have friends who are not open to that experience and they have been doing the same [job] for the last 10 years.”

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