Sasha Abramsky says a large indentured class of workers is struggling to escape debt rather than build a better life.
Weeks into a year-long project working the dirty, exhausting, repetitive jobs disproportionately done by undocumented immigrants, Brooklyn-based writer and activist Gabriel Thompson comes to a realization. "It's simply not possible," he writes in his new book Working in the Shadows, "to do this work for decades and not suffer noticeable body modifications, such as a permanently hunched back, crooked fingers, and hands so swollen that they look as if someone has attached a valve to a finger and pumped vigorously."
In the shadows, Thompson picks up work alongside Mexican laborers in the winter lettuce fields of Yuma, Arizona, earning $8.37 per hour to pick, trim, and package thousands of lettuce heads per day. He and the other laborers, bent double for hours at a time, become almost one with the huge machinery that follows them to carry and sort the boxed lettuce heads. The laborers become cogs in the machine, their physical actions repeated dozens of times a minute, as predictable as those of a mechanical part.
Thompson works the overnight shift for two months in a poultry-processing plant in rural Alabama -- staffed not only by immigrants but also by many hundreds of white and African American workers for whom a minimum-wage job tearing apart dead chickens is about the only work in town. And, to round out his project, he returns to New York for an insanely low-paying jack-of-all-trades job in a Chelsea flower shop followed by employment as a minimum-wage bicycle delivery boy for a hip downtown Mexican restaurant.
The book documents a Metropolis world where modern proletarians are brutalized by their workplace conditions. "I'm beginning to appreciate the sheer willpower it takes to complete this type of job day after day," Thompson writes about the chicken plant. "In a single shift I could be asked to tear through more than 7,000 chicken breasts or lift, carry, and dump more than thirty tons of meat."
