Word: californiaisms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...California, tens of thousands of men pick grapes for a living. About half of them are migrants, every year making the route through Texas, Arizona, California, and Oregon, picking whatever is in season. The rest are full-fledged Californians. They work eight months a year and try, usually without success, to get welfare for the other four. About three-quarters of these farmers are Mexican-Americans; the remainder are Oakies, Philippinos, and Negroes...
...grape picker in California works between 10 and 12 hours a day in fields which average more than 105 degrees during the summer. There are no toilets in the fields. Drinking water is allotted according to the number of bushels picked. The number is arbitrary depending upon the foreman's mood. The migrants live in tents, the regulars in long tin huts. By the time most of the children are 12 years old, they've quit school and work with their parents in the fields. Nobody earns more than $1.40 per hour picking grapes...
Unionizing California's farm workers has been a major AFL-CIO project for three years. In September, 1965, they called a general strike in Delano, California, against 38 major growers. When the logistics of maintaining the strike proved too difficult, the AFL-CIO decided to confront the growers one at a time. Since that time, strikes and national boycotts have been carried out successfully against three now-infamous wine companies: Schenley, DiGiorgio, and Parelli-Minetti. Six others, including Gallo Wine, have singed union contracts after negotiation...
...family of that name, had learned something from the previous Delano strikes. There are special contractors who get 50 cents a head for importing workers from Texas and Mexico. The workers, called "scabs," had been earning 12 cents per hour in Mexico, so they discharged their new duties in California with little compunction...
...confer with him in San Francisco on Medicaid. Only Michigan's George Romney found it politic to attend, briefly, for the final session. Reagan told assembled health and welfare officials: "Unless Medi-Cal is revised and revamped, it not only can but most assuredly will bankrupt our state." California has a higher proportion of its population on welfare-though not necessarily of the medically needy-than New York State...