Agricultural Labor: Cultivating a Livelihood

Photographer, Dorothea Lange captures a scene of a father and son working together in the fields to support their livelihood. The father and son are describe in The Library of Congress as lettuce workers and migrants from the Southwest. Here they are working in outskirts of Salinas, California planting potatoes for a local farm owner. 

In another snapshot caught by Dorothea Lange, thousands of migrant workers were fortunate enough to find a job in Kern County, California. The image here exhibts men and women both harvesting a potato crop on a clear, seemingly hot, day.

Agricultural work seemed to be the most common type of work for migrants. Here, Dorothea Lange captures one of these migrant agricultural workers picking potatoes near Shafter, California.

Photographer, Lee Russell snapshots a migrant worker picking berries in the field in an unknown location (possibly in a field near Ponchatoula, Louisiana). Though Steinbeck's novel makes it seem like most refugees traveled to California, this was not actually the case. People effected by the Dust Bowl conditions would travel to anywhere that held the promise of employment and livelihood.

Arthur Rothstein photographs a migrant worker picking oranges in an orchard in Polk County, Florida. While many migrants traveled west to the "Promised Land" of California, multitudes of others perceived that hope resided in the East—anywhere that wasn’t effected too negatively by the droughts and economic plight.

Lee Russell takes a photo of a "colored intrastate migrant worker picking strawberries near Hammond, Louisiana." Working in the fields in the hot sun was back-breaking work.  

Work wasn't always easy to find. Multitudinous amounts of migrants would often find themselves unemployed for significant lengths of time. Yet, these migrants still had to eat. So, when unemployed, the migrants would often work in labor home gardens. In this image, photographed by Arthur Rothstein in 1940, a refugee works in the Tulare migrant camp garden in Visalia, California. 

Workers would often find themselves fed up with the unsustainable wages that they'd receive for hard work, and as a result, they would go on strike. The farm owners being unmoved by their plight and with a need to have their crops harvested in order to maintain their own livelihood, would resort to hiring other refugees, desparate for work, as strikebreakers. In a photograph captured by John Vachon in 1938, migrant workers are seen hired as strikebreakers after a strike at the King Farm near Morrisville, Pennsylvania. 

In chapter 22 of The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad was lucky enough to find a job with the help of Timothy and Wilkie Wallace, working on a ranch laying pipe for Mr. Thomas. Whereas Tom and his neighbors from the Weedpatch camp found a job laying pipe, the majority of migrant workers, like the men, women, and children working in the laboring away here, would find themselves in the fields on farmland harvesting crops for the local farmers.

Agricultural work was probably the most common type of work that migrants found themselves engaged in. As noted in Crossen’s article about the migrant situation, “a few drifted toward cities, hoping to find factory jobs, [but] thousands of others fled to California, to seek work as ‘fruit tramps,’ or crop pickers, in the state’s burgeoning agricultural industry,” (Crossen). Whether it was picking potatoes, strawberries, oranges, or peas, the "Okies" would accept any kind of work that they could get. Wages were often less than sufficient to support the families who deserted their homes in the central United States to start anew, but with their own personal stock of wealth so minimal, they would often work for any wage offered. As we see in The Grapes of Wrath, upon hiring Tom Joad to work for him in addition to Timothy and Wilkie Wallace, Mr. Thomas lowered the hourly wage from thirty cents to twenty-five cents, and of course, Tom, Timothy, and Wilkie had no choice but to accept his offer. Upon being asked by Mr. Thomas, "'Now, what are you going to do? Twenty-five cents?'," Tom Joad responds by saying, "'Sure, I'll work. I got to work,'" (Steinbeck).

With the demand for work so high, and the jobs so sparse, employers were able offer nearly any wage they chose. Yet, as we see in Steinbeck’s novel, it often wasn’t even up to the farm/ranch owner. As Mr. Thomas notes in the novel, he belonged to The Farmer’s Association, which was owned by The Bank of the West—the banks the entities who were calling a lot of the shots. Mr. Thomas was depicted as a justifiably good man in the novel, but as he states to Tom, Timothy, and Wilkie, “’That bank owns most of this valley (…) last night the member from the bank told me (…) ‘The wage is twenty-five now. If you pay thirty, it’ll only cause unrest,’’” (Steinbeck). This situation, of course, wasn’t only for narrative purposes; the banks had control over much of the economic situation in the United States, and the workers, and farm owners had little choice but to abide by the system. Surely, the men could have attempted a strike in hopes of raising the hourly wage, but with families to feed and their own funds so significantly low, they’d typically have little choice but to work for whatever they could get. As noted in Crossen’s article, “whole families worked in the fields, earning barely enough to feed themselves,” (Crossen). As soon as all of the work in one county was all completed, the migrant families would have no choice, but to pack up whatever it was that they still had and move onto the next place that may hold the hope or promise of employment.