It should not be a surprise to us that the actual grease that makes the wheels turn is hard, physical work, it has been for centuries. From the middle ages and before farmers worked hard to feed their own, if they were lucky enough to own their own land, but mostly worked for the landowner who could choose without any labor laws to be more or less humane or later on in the industrial revolutions where millions started to work in factories, rather than in fields. Yet it still does, somehow we have mollycoddled up so much, that we really think that our chicken comes from the fridge the electricity directly from the outlet.

Enter a dedicated journalist who decided to start a little experiment: He will spend a year doing jobs most Americans won’t do, among the ample choices he picked: harvesting lettuce in the fields of Yuma Arizona, working in a poultry plant in Russellville, Alabama and delivering flowers and food in his hometown New York City.

The author finds out first hand what is it like to do the back-breaking work of immigrants and describes his experiences working alongside mainly Latino immigrants who thought that he was either crazy or an undercover immigration agent, in a light and entertaining way.
As one co-worker explained, “These jobs make you old quick.” – and probably even older if you grew up in the pampered US American society and not in harsher conditions in other countries, more used to physical labor. Back spasms occasionally kept Thompson in bed, where he not surprisingly suffered recurring nightmares involving iceberg lettuce and chicken carcasses.

As entertaining as his book is written, the author always remains the alien in a foreign world who always has the option to quit and above all knows that this is a temporary experiment not something he will do for the rest of his life. What stays with us, as the cushioned consumer, is that we have a choice, every single time we buy something, to consider all the elements of the chain that was necessary to bring this product to us.

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 New York City. Go to the Author’s Blog

Working in the Shadows, Nation Books (January 26th, 2010), 320 pages, English

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