Harvest of Shame:

Slavery in America

A system predicated on slavery must be dismantled.

—

This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said, ‘We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.’

–Edward R. Murrow, 1960, CBS News

CBS News chief national correspondent Byron Pitts reports on the condition of migrant farm workers 50 years after the premiere of Edward R. Murrow's celebrated documentary "Harvest of Shame."

 

In 1960 CBS aired a television documentary, “Harvest of Shame” that revealed the disturbing plight of America’s migrants who worked in the “sweatshops of the soil.”  Producer Lowe said that it aired after Thanksgiving to “stress the fact that much of the food cooked for Thanksgiving [was] picked by migratory workers” and to “shock the consciousness of the nation.”  Indeed, the footage was shocking, showing families of workers working and living in extreme, dehumanizing poverty; and the same scenes today should shame the consciousness of the nation even more.

 

<p style="font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 420px;">Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy</p>

In 1970, NBC returned to Florida to see what had changed in 10 years since “Harvest of Shame.”  “White Paper: The Migrants” showed that not much had changed.  The 1980 sequel concluded the same thing ten years later.  Likewise, in 1998 for NBC’s “Children of the Harvest,” which followed the lives of migrant children who worked the fields beside their families.  Even though a farm worker must legally be at least 12 years old to work, they regularly found 5 and 6 year old children in the fields.  The youngest child working was only two years old.  Last year, NBC aired a sequel, following the Cruz family, as the parents and even their 10 year old Ulises worked in the fields.  That same year the independent documentary “The Harvest” followed 3 of an estimated 500,000 children who work in America’s fields.  For Zulema Lopez, 12, one of her earliest childhood memories is of her mother teaching her how to pick and clean strawberries.  She makes 64 dollars a week.  “I think I’m helping her [my mother] with that.”

Migrant farm workers average from 10 to 12,000 dollars a year.  Adult migrant workers are often paid below the minimum wage, but children field workers who are under the age of 16 are not even entitled to minimum wage.  Many work for only 2 or 3 dollars an hour.    Farm work is 4 times more dangerous than any other industry with more than 100,000 children and adolescents being injured every year.  Children expose themselves to long term illnesses from the sun, pesticides, and hours spent bending over.  The agricultural industry accounts for 40% of all work place fatalities for youths. 162 children died in agricultural work during a 5 year period in the 1990s.

America’s agriculture relies on undocumented immigrants who make up over half of the work force, but it also relies on documented immigration in the form of the H2 guestworker program.  A 2007 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center entitled “Close to Slavery” reported:

Bound to a single employer and without access to legal resources, guestworkers are:

• routinely cheated out of wages;

• forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs;

• held virtually captive by employers or labor brokers who seize their documents;

• forced to live in squalid conditions; and,

• denied medical benefits for on-the-job injuries.

U.S Rep. Charles Rangel recently put it this way: ‘This guestworker program’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery.’

Congressman Rangel’s conclusion is not mere hyperbole — and not the first time such a comparison has been made. Former Department of Labor official Lee G. Williams described the old “bracero” program — the guestworker program that brought thousands of Mexican nationals to work in the United States during and after World War II — as a system of ‘legalized slavery.’ In practice, there is little difference between the bracero program and the current H-2 guestworker program.

The H-2 guestworker system also can be viewed as a modern-day system of indentured servitude. But unlike European indentured servants of old, today’s guestworkers have no prospect of becoming U.S. citizens. When their work visas expire, they must leave the United States. They are, in effect, the disposable workers of the U.S. economy.