50 Years After Murrow’s “The Harvest of Shame,” What’s Changed?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6283/all_the_harvests_of_shame/

Monday August 2 5:22 pm

By Stephen Franklin

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6283/all_the_harvests_of_shame/

This is the last in a series of articles about migrant farmworkers in the U.S. For the earlier posts by Stephen Franklin, go here, here, and here.

They live broken lives. They are not slaves but they could be. They picked California’s fields 80 years ago and they harvested Florida’s fields 50 years ago.

It would be heart-warming to say that 50 years after Edward R. Murrow’s iconic documentary about migrant workers, “The Harvest of Shame,” that migrant workers no longer suffer in silence. Wouldn’t it be uplifting to say that the government is a trusted ally of one of the most vulnerable groups of workers today in the U.S?

It surely would produce smiles for many to be able to say that nobody makes a dime on the backs of people who cringe from those who rule their daily lives because they are immigrants without papers or because they do not know their rights or simply because they can’t find another way to work and survive.

But that’s not the case. Not in the world that Vincent H. Beckman and Alexandra Sossa know.

Their world is made up of migrant and seasonal workers in Northern Illinois. Some of these workers come here quite legally on H-2a visas, which allows them to do short term agricultural work for gardens and nurseries because the businesses say they cannot find others to do the same back-breaking work. Some are farmworkers. Nearly all are Latino.

FULL story at link.

[Omaha Steve]

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