Flashback: Watch Edward R. Murrow’s ‘Harvest of Shame’

[Purveyor]

Via Moyers & Company. John Light
The people who harvest our fruits and vegetables are, today, among the country’s most marginalized. They earn well below the poverty line and spend a substantial portion of the year unemployed. They do not have the right to overtime pay or to collective bargaining with their employers. In some cases, workers have faced abuses that fall under modern-day slavery statutes. “The extreme is slavery,” observed Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), while visiting farm workers in Florida. “The norm is disaster.”

This is not a new phenomenon. Since the beginning of large-scale agriculture in America, the demand for farm labor has been met by a population that lives in the shadows. Often exploited by the employers they depended on for seasonal, poverty-level wages, farm workers have, time and again, been likened to post-Civil War slaves.

In 1960, legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and his producers Fred Friendly and David Lowe attempted to draw public attention to this state of affairs with the documentary Harvest of Shame. The film — an hour-long portrait of the “humans who harvest the food for the best-fed people in the world” — aired on CBS the day after Thanksgiving, 1960.

Watch it here:

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more...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/19/flashback-watch-edward-r-murrows-harvest-of-shame/

[dem in texas]

1. Yes, it is so true

I had a young Hispanic programmer who worked for me. He was born in Mexico in 1963, same year as my daughter. His parents were migrant workers. He told me how they would leave Mexico in their old station wagon and cross into the US and work the crops all summer until they got up Michigan. He said they went hungry and slept on the floor with cockroaches crawling over their bodies. He said sometimes his mother would give flour to suck because they did not have a fire for her to cook.

Lucky for him when he was six, his mother and father became US citizens as all the children. His father worked as laborer for the city of Dallas until he retired. I admired his family, they had the strong values seen in Hispanic culture, deeply religious and hard working.

[Cooley Hurd]

2. Murrow.

[ReRe]

3. Fast forward to today, 53 years later....

K&R

I watched the whole thing. They threw the mold away, I guess, on journalists like Edward R. Murrow. Thanks Purveyor for linking..

Ken Burns would be a good one to document what is going on today re our minimum wage workers all over this country.

[SunSeeker]

4. Chilling line from farm owner: "We used to own our slaves, now we rent them."

Thanks for the post.