Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, a Frenchman living in America, wrote many letters to Europeans telling them of the great opportunities for immigrants to America and its generous, welcoming, paternal government. However, a study of the farm workers ' experiences in America does not always paint a rosy picture. In particular, John Steinbeck and Cesar Chavez portrayed the dire circumstances of farm workers during the Great Depression (1930 's) and the 1960 's. Today my interview with a farm worker shows that farm workers today still face injustices.
To begin, Crevecoeur states in his letters that there 's great opportunities for everyone in America. Those who were sober and hard working were quickly given jobs. All men who were hired were
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He states thousands of farm workers are forced to live in horrendous conditions in garbage and underneath trees. In order for workers to purchase food at inflated prices, they have to walk miles and their only source of free water is from irrigation pumps. Children in the family are put to work even though child labor is illegal in the United States. Children make up 30 percent of northern California garlic harvesters. The working conditions farmers were put through in the 1930 's and 60 's were not as pleasant as Crevecoeur described them to be. Crevecoeur ensured workers that if they were hard working and good citizens they would live an easy happy life. Instead, they were paid poorly and treated as if they weren 't important human …show more content…
Lepe and his family were hard working people who were given low pay, respected by their employers, but worked with dangerous equipment and never received any help from the government. The letters that Crevecoeur wrote between 1750- 1785 describe the great opportunities in America for hard workers and the generous helpful government. Unfortunately for the Okies in the 1930 's and Hispanic farm workers in the 1960 's life for them was very unpleasant. They were forced to work in terrible conditions with low pay and received no respect from their employers. The government never helped both groups in the times where they needed it the most and had to leave their homes hoping to find work. Life as a farm worker never ended up being as Crevecoeur described it to
Immigrants during this time period came to America seeking wealth for their family they had brought with them, or to send back to their families in their homeland. Whichever case it was immigrants spent the majority of their time working in the factories in hope for a better life than the one they gave up in coming to America. However, upon arriving immigrants soon realized that the home they left behind was not all that different than their new one. Immigrants came seeking the types of jobs that would give them Liberty and independence, leaving them only to find themselves just a working part in a large factory dependent on machines, rather than their own skills.
In two differing stories of departure, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Steinbeck’s standard for a writer is met by the raw human emotions exhibited in the main characters’ success and defeat.
"The Story of Cesar Chavez." UFW: The Official Web Page of the United Farm Workers of
In the late nineteenth century, many European immigrants traveled to the United States in search of a better life and good fortune. The unskilled industries of the Eastern United States eagerly employed these men who were willing to work long hours for low wages just to earn their food and board. Among the most heavily recruiting industries were the railroads and the steel mills of Western Pennsylvania. Particularly in the steel mills, the working conditions for these immigrants were very dangerous. Many men lost their lives to these giant steel-making machines. The immigrants suffered the most and also worked the most hours for the least amount of money. Living conditions were also poor, and often these immigrants would barely have enough money and time to do anything but work, eat, and sleep. There was also a continuous struggle between the workers and the owners of the mills, the capitalists. The capitalists were a very small, elite group of rich men who held most of the wealth in their industries. Strikes broke out often, some ending in violence and death. Many workers had no political freedom or even a voice in the company that employed them. However, through all of these hardships, the immigrants continued their struggle for a better life.
The enormous rush of European immigrants encountered a lack of jobs. Those who were lucky enough to find employment wound up in factories, steel mills, or in the meat packing industry. Jurgis Rudkus was one of these disappointed immigrants. A sweeper in slaughter house, he experienced the horrendous conditions which laborers encountered. Along with these nightmarish working conditions, they worked for nominal wages, inflexible and long hours, in an atmosphere where worker safety had no persuasion. Early on, there was no one for these immigrants to turn to, so many suffered immensely. Jurgis would later learn of worker unions and other groups to support the labor force, but the early years of his Americanized life were filled, with sliced fingers, unemployment and overall a depressing and painful "new start."
The social and economic developments of the last quarter of the nineteenth century drastically changed the United States. The business world changed once industrialization was introduced to the world. Opportunities grew as people heard about the boundless American opportunities. Immigrants from all races flooded the cities which doubled in population from 1860-1900 (Barnes and Bowles, 2014, p. 34). However, as industries grew, owners prospered off the hard work of others. People started to feel they were not being treated fairly. People had to work harder and longer for their money. Barnes and Bowles (2014) noted “In the era of industrialization, millions of workers fought to simply have the right to work in safe conditions, and earn a fair wage” (p. 45). Many Americans feared that giant corporations would one day seek to restrict the ability of common people to get ahead and curtail individual freedoms. These fears were particularly strong among farmers, laborers, an...
... stealing, and sleeping with random women, there was no way they could help make the United States a better place. The commercial class needed such people in order for their own business’s to prosper, yet they still disapproved how the lower class spent its free time. Instead of helping change the lower class’s lifestyle, the commercial class just complained about it.
“The Jungle,” written by Upton Sinclair in 1906, describes how the life and challenges of immigrants in the United States affected their emotional and physical state, as well as relationships with others. The working class was contrasted to wealthy and powerful individuals who controlled numerous industries and activities in the community. The world was always divided into these two categories of people, those controlling the world and holding the majority of the power, and those being subjected to them. Sinclair succeeded to show this social gap by using the example of the meatpacking industry. He explained the terrible and unsafe working conditions workers in the US were subjected to and the increasing rate of corruption, which created the feeling of hopelessness among the working class.
It is the worker’s condition that he truly focuses on. Many of the problems that people faced during this time include: tenement housing, poor working conditions, child labor, monopolies of business, social and political inequality, and most importantly people putting profits over lives. It is around the same time that a terrible fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The unsafe working conditions made the employees escape nearly impossible.
...ve-it” basis. Many of the workers were injured or killed in industrial accidents each year because of the unsafe conditions they worked in. men and women weren’t the only ones to work in the harsh conditions there was child labor they were used to move, clean, or fix large machines since they were so small and fit between the parts. The kids that worked were all under the age of fifteen, they missed air, sunshine, fresh air, play, and the chance to attend school and get an education.
...however, feels that to solve the plight of the Okies, land should be set aside for them to start their own small farms, since farming is all they know. He also suggests that local committees set wages and labor needs before the harvests to protect the rights of the workers and prevent them from being extorted (Pgs 58-59). While Steinbeck’s ideas made sense and had good intent, the grim reality still remained that the corporations controlled the agriculture industry and that they were going to save every nickel and dime they could, even if it meant a lower standard of living for the Okie. Today, we have unions that attempt to prevent things like this from happening again, but the plight of illegal immigrants demonstrates that the reality of this country’s need for cheap labor remains.
Having watched the movie "Grapes of Wrath", I have been given the opportunity to see the troubles that would have befell migrant workers during the Great Depression. Though the Joads were a fictitious family, I was able to identify with many signs of hope that they could hold onto. Some of these families who made the journey in real life carried on when all they had was hope. The three major signs of hope which I discovered were, overcoming adversity, finding jobs, and completing the journey.
Incomprehensibly, The Grapes of Wrath is both a praiseworthy radical investigation of the abuse of horticultural workers and the climaxes in the thirties of a verifiably racist focusing on whites as victimized people. The novel barely specifies the Mexican and Filipino migrant workers who commanded the California fields and plantations into the late thirties, rather intimating that Anglo-Saxo...
Harvest Of Shame, an interesting and touching black and white documentary from the early 1960’s, documents and exposes the deploring lives of thousands of American migrant cultural workers narrated and dissected by one of the best and first American broadcast journalists called Edward Roscoe Murrow. The principal objective of this movie is not only to show the poor and miserable lives that all of these people live, but to let all the other Americans who are above these workers on the social and wealth scale know that the people who pick up their fruits, vegetables, and grains have no voice, no power, and no help to battle the inequities and mistreatment they receive.
This was especially true for every worker that worked on any farm. With there being so many migrants looking for work it resulted in low pay for everyone(Migrant Workers of..). Any job they had did, they were getting paid at starvation wages(National Farm Worker Ministry). Their earnings often ranged from seventy-five cents to $1.25 a day(The Great Depression). For that reason, migrants were the lowest paid workers in the country(Mapes, Kathy). Even if a family had every member in it working, they still weren’t making