migrant worker

Examples of migrant worker in the following topics:

• Tenants, Sharecroppers, and Migrants

  • The transforming of the West in the late nineteenth century relied on various types of laborers–-tenants, sharecroppers, and migrants.
  • Migrant workers in the United States have come from many different sources, and have been subject to different work experiences .
  • The experiences of migrant laborers in agriculture during this period varied.
  • However, the use of Mexican migrant laborers declined during the Great Depression, when internal migrant workers from Dust Bowl states moved west to California, taking jobs normally filled by Mexican migrants.
  • Examine the experience of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers in the late nineteenth century

• Dust Bowl Migrants

  • Owning no land, many displaced people became migrant workers, traveling from farm to farm to pick fruit and other crops at starvation wages .
  • Ben Reddick, a free-lance journalist and later publisher of the Paso Robles Daily Press, is credited with first using the term Oakie, in the mid-1930s, to identify migrant farm workers.
  • Many West Coast residents and some politically motivated writers used "Okie" to disparage these poor, white (including those of mixed American Indian ancestry, the largest tribal group being Cherokees), migrant workers and their families.
  • Author John Steinbeck later wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Of Mice and Men, about these migrant workers and their struggles.
  • The music and writings of Woody Guthrie were also inspired by the migrant workers and the Dust Bowl.

• The Diversity of the West

  • As a result, many Hispanics became permanent migrant workers, seeking seasonal employment in farming, mining, ranching, and the railroads.
  • Migrant workers in the United States have come from many different sources, and have been subject to different work experiences.
  • The experiences of migrant laborers in agriculture during this period varied.
  • On the other hand, workers from Catholic countries, such as Ireland and Germany, were subject to a number of prejudices.
  • However, the use of Mexican migrant laborers declined during the Great Depression, when internal migrant workers from Dust Bowl states moved west to California, taking jobs normally filled by Mexican migrants.

• The Human Toll

  • There were two kinds of migrant workers: seasonal urban dwellers and permanent migrants who followed crops from one place to another in order to make a living.
  • Because of their exclusion from federal and state legislation that protected workers against exploitation and unfair labor practices, migrant workers earned lower wages than other farm laborers.
  • The music and writings of Woody Guthrie were also inspired by migrant workers and the Dust Bowl.
  • , shows a family of migrant workers from Missouri stuck on the side of the road near Tracy, California.
  • The 1936 image became synonymous with the plight of migrant farm workers during the Depression.

• Culture in the Thirties

  • It established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression.
  • Dorothea Lange, "Migrant Mother," Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, 1936
  • Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother - an iconic image of the Great Depression - depicts Florence Owens Thompson, age 32, a mother of seven children and a migrant worker, in Nipomo, California.

• Latino Rights

  • The highest-profile struggle of the Mexican American civil rights movement was the fight that Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta waged in the fields of California to organize migrant farm workers.
  • In 1962, Chavez and Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA).
  • Workers organized by the NFWA also went on strike, and the two organizations merged to form the United Farm Workers.
  • The strike ended in 1970 when California farmers recognized the right of farm workers to unionize.
  • However, the farm workers did not gain all they sought, and the larger struggle did not end.

• Agriculture, Tenancy, and the Environment

  • Other solutions included the crop-lien system (where the farmer was extended credit for seed and other supplies by the merchant), a rent labor system (where the former slaves rents his land but keeps his entire crop), and the wage system (worker earns a fixed wage, but keeps none of his crop).
  • Sharecropping was by far the most economically efficient, as it provided incentives for workers to produce a bigger harvest.
  • The farmer could, if he desired, charge the tenant extremely high interest on the advanced pay since there were no lending laws applicable to migrant or tenant workers at the time.

• The Great Migration and the "Promised Land"

  • There was no government assistance, but northern industries often recruited African American workers.
  • While the Great Migration helped educated African Americans obtain jobs, the migrants encountered significant forms of discrimination.
  • After the Great Depression, more advances occurred as workers in the steel and meatpacking industries were organized into labor unions in the 1930s and 1940s.
  • Populations increased so rapidly among both African American migrants and new European immigrants that there were housing shortages in many major cities.
  • Migrants often encountered residential discrimination, in which white homeowners and realtors prevented migrants from purchasing homes or renting apartments in white neighborhoods.

• Changing Demographics

  • The abundance of individuals, companies, and groups interested in the availability of inexpensive labor ensured that the immigration laws in place throughout the early 2oth century did not adversely affect the movement of Mexican migrants, in spite of calls on the part of some of southern congressmen to put an end to the open border policies.
  • Some historians differentiate between the first Great Migration (1910–1930), numbering about 1.6 million migrants who left mostly rural areas to migrate to northern and midwestern industrial cities, and a Second Great Migration (1940 to 1970), in which 5 million or more people moved, including many to California and various western cities.
  • There was no government assistance, but often northern industries such as the railroads, meatpacking, and stockyards took it upon themselves to recruit workers.

• The Migratory Stream

  • Migrants to the Western US sought new economic opportunities such as larger, cheaper, and more fertile parcels of land.
  • " The new railroads provided the opportunity for migrants to go out and take a look, with special family tickets, the cost of which could be applied to land purchases offered by the railroads.
  • The actual migrants looked beyond fears of the unknown.
  • By 1836, when the first migrant wagon train was organized in Independence, Missouri, a wagon trail had been cleared to Fort Hall, Idaho.
  • In the "Wagon Train of 1843," some 700 to 1,000 migrants headed for Oregon.