Description
What is it like to do the back-breaking work of immigrants? To find out, Gabriel Thompson spent a year working alongside Latino immigrants, who initially thought he was either crazy or an undercover immigration agent. He stooped over lettuce fields in Arizona, and worked the graveyard shift at a chicken slaughterhouse in rural Alabama. He dodged taxis -- not always successfully -- as a bicycle delivery "boy" for an upscale Manhattan restaurant, and was fired from a flower shop by a boss who, he quickly realized, was nuts. As one coworker explained, "These jobs make you old quick." Back spasms occasionally keep Thompson in bed, where he suffers recurring nightmares involving iceberg lettuce and chicken carcasses. Combining personal narrative with investigative reporting, Thompson shines a bright light on the underside of the American economy, exposing harsh working conditions, union busting, and lax government enforcement -- while telling the stories of workers, undocumented immigrants, and desperate US citizens alike, forced to live with chronic pain in the pursuit of 8 an hour.… (more)
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User reviews
Pros: Well written, good premise.
Cons: His "sum-up" at the end and call for more light to be shed on normally ignored workers is a bit skimpy.
Grade: B
He gets four jobs, three of them for approximately two months. Lettuce cutter (I didn't know that you didn't pick it, but cut it, although now it does make sense that you have to cut it). Chicken plant worker, florist lackey for a couple of days and a restaurant bike delivery boy.
I picked up the book to read because of the chicken plant section. But, it wasn't the chicken planet in Alabama that was the most disturbing of the workplaces in the book. (Although none of them were great by any means of the imagination) The worst was the florist shop in New York. I've never been well acquainted with the cut flower business. The flowers I know most about are the ones in pots and in the ground. But, the fact that in such a city as New York there could be such horrendous working conditions is depressing. Everyone is a human, no matter if they're breaking the law (i.e. illegal immigrants) or not, and should be treated like humans and not animals.
It was an interesting book and a thought provoking one too.