Migrant Farm Labor

Archive Report

Roots of Migrant Farm Labour Problem

Distress among migrant farm laborers in the West has drawn renewed attention to a problem which caused national concern during the 1930s: how to assure enough seasonal labor to produce needed food supplies without subjecting the workers to the worst hardships of irregular employment and a migratory existence.

Maricopa County, Ariz., juvenile authorities reported in March that 100 children in a farm labor camp had been found suffering from “first degree starvation or malnutrition,”1 and the National Farm Labor Union (A. F. L.) told President Truman that at least 100,000 children of unemployed farm workers in the nation as a whole were in a similar plight. In the same month California authorities estimated that 5,000 to 10,000 families in the ...

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