Paying a large price for very little

“There’s so much interest in food around this country, whether or not it’s organic, or if it’s local,” Gabriel Thompson said. “It would be a good move for all those people working around food justice not to just think about where their food is coming from, but who it’s coming from.”

In Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs Americans Won’t Do, Thompson, an investigative journalist, shares his experience working beside Latino immigrants in poor conditions for below minimum wage.

“If only people were willing to go to the next step and pay a little more for making sure the workers that are feeding us are paid for their work” Thompson said.

In the fall of 2007, Thompson read a New York Times article about the raid of a hog processing plant in North Carolina. After the raid, close to 1,000 undocumented immigrants left the company, leaving a serious labor shortage. So the company began hiring American workers.

The new workers that were hired quickly began complaining about the work being too hard and somewhat nauseating. The company began having higher and higher turnover rates, as the American workers were unable to bear the conditions for too long.

“I just had a sense a lot of people have no idea what it’s like to do these jobs at the bottom of the economy that are done by undocumented immigrants,” Thompson said. “I wanted to put a human face on some of the immigrants that do that kind of work.” 

Thompson began his own yearlong experiment, posing as a regular worker, in various occupations usually filled by immigrant workers. First, he worked for two months in the fields of Yuma, Ariz., cutting lettuce for Dole.

“I wanted to do some agriculture work,” Thompson said. “I had grown up in California, and drove past fields and saw people stooped over. You know that must be hard work.”

He quickly learned that harvesting and cutting lettuce was not only very challenging, but required a great amount of skill. He found that it usually took four or five years before someone could really understand how to harvest lettuce.

From there, Thompson got hired in Russellville, Ala., at a poultry plant, working in grueling and nauseating conditions for little pay. He worked alongside a lot of Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants that had settled near the plant.

Thompson then went back to New York City and worked in a flower shop in the flower district of New York, alongside almost exclusively undocumented Latino immigrants. After that, the author delivered food in the upscale Manhattan restaurant industry.

“Manhattan has a whole industry of having a whole army of workers that, even when it’s snowing, run door to door making somewhere around $2 an hour,” Thompson said.

Reflecting from his experience, Thompson has a lot to say about the ideas some Americans hold about immigrants in this country.

“Even the anti-immigrant, when he [or she] goes in the grocery store to grab that lettuce, the last person to touch it was an immigrant worker. We all benefit from their presence,” Thompson said.

Thompson, who was hired almost immediately at each job he applied for, says the idea that immigrants are stealing jobs is also completely false.

“These jobs are jobs where it’s very hard to survive,” Thompson said. “The real challenge is making sure these industries are cleaned up; farming, poultry, or back of the restaurant jobs. It effects both regular U.S. workers and immigrant workers if we assume people have basic labor protections.”