Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.35 (746 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1568586388 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-11-13 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Gabriel Thompson writes for New York magazine, The Nation, the Brooklyn Rail, and In These Times. The author of There’s No José Here, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Combining personal narrative with investigative reporting, Thompson shines a bright light on the underside of the American economy, exposing harsh working conditions, union busting, and lax government enforcementwhile telling the stories of workers, undocumented immigrants, and desperate US citizens alike, forced to live with chronic pain in the pursuit of $8 an hour.. He dodged taxisnot always successfullyas a bicycle delivery boy” for an upscale Manhattan restaurant, and was fired from a flower shop by a boss who, he quickly realized, was nuts.As one coworker explained, These jobs make you old quick.” Back spasms occasionally keep Thompson in bed, where he suffers recurring nightmares involving iceberg lettuce and chicken carcasses. He stooped over lettuce fields in Arizona, and worked the graveyard shift at a chicken slaughterhouse in rural Alabama. What is it like to do the back-breaking work of immigrants? To find out, Gabriel Thompson spent a year working alongside Latino immigrants, who initially thought he was either crazy or an undercover immigration agent
. Gimmick or no, the author pushes his body and his patience to the limits, all the while deferring attention to the true heroes: his co-workers, whose dignity, perseverance, physical endurance, and manual skill are no less admirable for being born of sheer necessity. But the warmth with which he describes his co-workers and the heartbreaking descriptions of the demanding, degrading, and low-paying jobs quickly pull the reader in. Thompson's project feels initially like a gimmick; that this middle-class white American can go undercover in the lettuce fields of Arizona or the poultry plants of Alabama seems more stunt (or rehash of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed) than sound journalism. (Feb.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. What emerges are not tales of downtrodden migrants but of clever hands and clever minds forced into repetitive and dangerous labor without legal protec
"I am glad I chose an education" according to Guillermo Cruz. First off full disclosure: I am a Mexican born 1986 Amnesty U.S. citizen.Growing up in Los Angeles and the interest that was put on our education I could have easily fallen into one of these jobs. From the time I was 15 (I lied about my age) and went to work for a temp agency along side other Mexicans that were here illegal or legal and uneducated. They would send us to the worst jobs, for instance a dog food company that had all the same characteristics of the chicken plant the author describe. Good - could have been better This starts off as a very good book, and slowly loses its intensity. The first part of the book - the lettuce fields - was excellent. I would have liked to have learned more about the mechanisms of picking lettuce. But it was a good description despite that it focused a little too heavily on the physical pain one endures while picking. The book seemed to lose some focus during the story of the chicken plant. It was still good, but I got the impression that the author was less interested in the . How the Other Half Lives takingadayoff In Working in the Shadows, Gabriel Thompson goes undercover to find out what conditions are really like for those at the lowest levels of the American workforce. It's not easy, for several reasons. One is that, as a gringo, he doesn't look like most of the other workers cutting lettuce in the fields. It's hard to be undercover when you don't exactly blend in. Aside from that, the work is hard, physically harder than anything Thompson has done before, and he's no slouch.It's hard to improve on B