What was life like for migrant farm workers in the 1930s?
Migrant workers lacked educational opportunities for their children, lived in poverty and terrible housing conditions, and faced discrimination and violence when they sought fair treatment. Attempts to organize workers into unions were violently suppressed.
Where did migrant workers go for work in the 1930s?
Many migrants set up camp along the irrigation ditches of the farms they were working, which led to overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions. They lived in tents and out of the backs of cars and trucks. The working hours were long, and many children worked in the fields with their parents.
What type of work did immigrants do in California in the 1930s?
Migrant Farm Labor and the Unions They handled cotton, fruit, sugar beets, and vegetables with great skill for low pay. In the early 1930s, these workers organized and formed unions. Their unions called for labor strikes throughout California. One of the largest was the 1933 cotton strike.
Why did so many migrant workers go to California in the 1930s?
Many once-proud farmers packed up their families and moved to California hoping to find work as day laborers on huge farms.
Where in California did migrant workers find jobs 1930s?
Like the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, some 40 percent of migrant farmers wound up in the San Joaquin Valley, picking grapes and cotton. They took up the work of Mexican migrant workers, 120,000 of whom were repatriated during the 1930s.
Where in California did migrants find jobs?
Many families left farm fields to move to Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area, where they found work in shipyards and aircraft factories that were gearing up to supply the war effort.
What happened in California in the 1930s?
California was hit hard by the economic collapse of the 1930s. Businesses failed, workers lost their jobs, and families fell into poverty. While the political response to the depression often was confused and ineffective, social messiahs offered alluring panaceas promising relief and recovery.
What did migrant workers do in the 1930s?
The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl (a period of drought that destroyed millions of acres of farmland) forced white farmers to sell their farms and become migrant workers who traveled from farm to farm to pick fruit and other crops at starvation wages.
Where in California did migrant workers find jobs in 1930?
Where in California did migrant workers find jobs in the 1930s?
How much were migrant workers paid in the 1930s?
Migrant workers in California who had been making 35 cents per hour in 1928 made only 14 cents per hour in 1933. Sugar beet workers in Colorado saw their wages decrease from $27 an acre in 1930 to $12.37 an acre three years later.
How did migrant workers travel in the 1930s?
Dust Bowl migrants squeezed into trucks and jalopies—beat-up old cars—laden with their meager possessions and headed west, many taking the old U.S. Highway 66. “Dad bought a truck to bring what we could,” recalled one former migrant, Byrd Monford Morgan, in a 1981 oral history interview.