Word: migrant
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...TIME'S article regarding the National Educational Television program on the plight of migrant farm workers [Feb. 16] contains a serious error. Huelga! is not a film about Mexicans working in California. It is a film that depicts a struggle to improve the wages and working conditions of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. They are among the more than 6,000,000 Mexican American citizens who pay taxes, fight and die in Viet Nam and send their children to U.S. schools...
Unlike the commercial networks, public television has plenty of time available for the exploration of "social" questions, and it is a charter well worth pursuing. This month the National Educational Television channels are carrying a pair of muckraking documentaries on the plight of the migrant farm worker. No Harvest for the Reaper is a chronicle of exploitation of Negro migrants on Long Island; Huelga!, a report on the 1965-67 Mexican grapepickers' strike in California. Both films contained remarkable and affecting footage, although they were more successful as polemics than TV journalism...
...Long Island story begins in Arkansas where a crew chief, himself a Negro, recruits his workers ("All you've got to do is get on my bus"). He barely mentions the $30 fare that begins the treadmill of debt. Sometimes, in picking strawberries at 10? per quart, the migrants earn only $2 for their day's work. But the crew chief deducts $1.25 a day for transportation to the fields. He also overcharges them for their filthy accommodations, for their food (a concession controlled by his wife), and the 51?-a-pint payday wine that he sells...
...cause lies in the economics of the industry, lack of unionization, inadequacy of the laws or failure to enforce them, or perhaps a combination of these factors. As a result, the exposes were neither as searing or as illuminating as Edward R. Murrow's 1960 CBS documentary on migrant workers, Harvest of Shame. But both of NET's programs proved, as one of the films concluded, that "the migrant condition is still the shame of the nation...
...JOURNAL (shown on Mondays). "No Harvest for the Reaper" graphically documents the exploitation of migrant workers on Long Island potato farms...