How Would You Like Brigido Oregon’s Job?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6225/how_would_you_like_his_job/

Wednesday July 14 12:28 pm By Stephen Franklin


A migrant farmworker picks spinach in September 2009 near Wellington, Colo. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.—Brigido Oregon is a small man, so it is hard to imagine all the work that has been squeezed out of him in 27 years as a farmworker.

The blue baseball cap he is wearing flops down below his ears. He smiles and half of his teeth are missing. And he smiles frequently. He looks at least 60, but says he is 45. His hands shake somewhat, and he explains that is the result of a brutal beating he got some months ago by hooligans who hit him with a wooden stick in Immokalee, Fla., the place where thousands of farmworkers make their winter livelihoods.

But you wonder if he also shakes from the endless hours of picking in the early morning when it’s still cold and then in broiling afternoons or from picking without a break or from picking in fields newly sprayed with pesticides or from just living around pesticides.

He says he worked 14 hours stretches day after day last year on some Michigan farms and got only $25 a day. He says he has worked in fields where the crew boss will sell him a bottle of water for a $1 and he will pay $25 a week for a ride by the crew boss out to the fields.

Some months he says he only earns $200 from his work in the fields.

He says there are bathrooms sometimes in the fields, but often he isn’t allowed to go to them. “They don’t want you to go to the bathroom. They want you just to work,” he says with a faint smile.

He says he has worked for crew bosses who pay different wages to workers and the pay depends on whether the workers get along with the crew boss or not. He often does not indicate that he speaks English, because crew bosses, he explains, don’t like English speakers since it means they can speak up for themselves.

FULL story at link.

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1. Check out the movie Fat City.

an early 70's movie with Jeff Bridges. There is a scene early in the flick that shows you what it was like when Americans did these jobs. It wasn't any better then either.

Plus it is a good movie.