Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20100516

when i decided was to try to spend a year going from various places in industries that are very reliant on immigrants, both legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants to try to get a better sense of what the work is like. and the other really like great thing that i was excited about was not only being able to delve into this work in a way that i wouldn't have access to it otherwise. if i went to a chicken plant like the chicken plant i worked at in rural alabama and said, you know, i'm sure we're on the same page and you would like people to know what goes behind this plant that slaters 1.5 million birds a week please let me document what happens here then i wouldn't have had any problem being honest. but i knew that they would have a problem with that. so i realized i'd have to go under cover. ... >> just sort of the worker and help to get a much more candid sense of what was happening. so i went undercover route. the final thing that got me excited about this project was, i feel, i try not to watch to much and it succeeded not watching too much cable news. but when i see it, what really strikes me is that so much of the discussion about immigrants and so much of the people that are angry, they are so far away from what they are talking about. the story of immigration is a story of coming and working hard, not just to better yourself. it's really why i'm here and probably why you're here, people are thinking of their kids lives will be better. i recently, it's been sort of horrifying/intriguing to do it. i did a couple talk show things, you know, like on cable news where you just realize how, when you're in a manhattan studio at 30 rock and it's air-conditioned and you had these guys making strong statements about i am this or that the immigration. you want to go you have no real idea which are talking out, do you? i thought it would be great to get as close as possible to describe what the work is like, not editorialize so much and not be a pundit. so the first place i went when i tried to figure out what jobs i wanted to do and where i wanted to do them is, i figured farmworker would be a nice place to start. i'm from california and i were driving along the coast of california looking at anything people taking strawberries are doing let us in salina. when i drove past it look like a total for the world to me and i knew, i know the work is hard your kind of the work is hard, but i didn't feel like very many americans have a really good sense of what it would be like to actually do farm work. and i learned that when i was looking to do work on it was in late fall 2007 that human arizona -- anyone been to yuma arizona? is like very hot in yuma arizona. it's the one place during the winter where it's warm enough to actually grow and harvest lettuce. so for much of the year led his grows in california, but in the winter and all sort of shifts to yuma. so about 90% of iceberg lettuce in u.s. and canada consumed in the winter months is all coming from yuma. they had a labor shortage. so that became my first sort of job and i moved to yuma. the piece about the book that made me very anxious always was i was moving somewhere where i didn't have any connections at no guarantee of getting a job, and each place could have been a total bust. but they hired me. and so the first thing i want to read was about a section in doing let us work. i have to say that lettuce by far, i worked harvesting lettuce for dole for two months. i tried to do each job for two months just because i figured, you know, i'm not walking in the shoes of immigrants. i'm visiting for very short time and i'm very different. i have much more options to make, more money. and like i went to college, i speak english. software to be very clear up front that this is not, you know, me walking in the shoes. it is me hanging around a bit and trying to get a little bit of a sense the work is like and also getting a sense of who the people are. so two months was my goal. i will definitely go to my grave as one of my proudest accomplishment surviving the two months in the lettuce fields because it was so physically demanding. but there's also a real sense of calm robbery. you're working outdoors that i really enjoy. this section is towards the end of my time, of my two months in yuma. it's have tried taking a four-day break, which shows how privileged the kind of things i could do that other peoples couldn't. it was either that are going to have to quit. today should be easy. i am rested. my fingers are opening properly and i can walk without the soles of my feet hurting. i met told office waiting for the bus to come in the sun to rise. with two strong cups of coffee are you my system, i feel strong, healthy, recuperated, but no matter. it turns out to be the hardest day of my brief career in lettuce. were working in a field near the town 90 minutes east of yuma. after my today absent a number of people are surprised to see me again. i thought the lettuce kill two, on hill said, patting on the back. it almost killed me on friday. it turned out i chose my vacation wisely as the crew worked well into evening on the two days i miss. the first noble difference is for the first time i'm seeing the field. when i asked pedro, the foreman, about the complete absence of insects he responded by praising the quote unquote very good fumigation. i suppose this is true. it's like good and telling all white except that which is willing to grow lettuce. it was unnerving to me in the field with zero bug life. farmworkers the very fumigation can be very dangerous. admitting that the true figure is likely much higher. as many workers never visit physicians. along with being buggy the field is wet. so instead of firm durkheim sliding around in mud. i can handle this but there is a new challenge. the lettuce is soaked. each time i raise a head of lettuce and trim off the leaves i get a face full of water. within the first hour, my hands, and i believe were completely covered, feel weaker than ever. i'm soon placing letters on the ground and strong to wonder what's wrong with me. i have been doing this almost two months. i just had four days off and i still can't keep up? exhausted but aware the morning break is still 30 minutes away, i make a drastic decision. after checking to make sure pedro is a looking, i forget about trimming or bagging the lettuce. instead i got the stem, slice the they had three or four times, drop the remnants between two rows and nonchalantly crush them with my feet as i move forward. it's a quicker -- it's quicker and takes much less energy. julio, working to my right, sees my new trick and dubbed me the lettuce assassin. [laughter] >> during the break i am a wreck. i make no attempt to socialize. instead find a patch of dirt to lie in. by the end of the day to day filled with pedro could join me and taking my knife and helping me, i'm not even attempting to do two rows. luckily pouliot is still to my right and he doesn't seem to be having any problems handling three rows. there is something seriously wrong with this band. don't worry, i'm helping you. three rows, no problem of. he says they left the house at 3 a.m. we got up at two to get rid. it was completely dark outside. i feel like i'm going to vomit from exhaustion. it's a very passive, nearly out of body expense. i don't feel sick but every ounce of energy is being sucked from my body and a logical last up this process is to release whatever it is in my stomach. iq over a few times but nothing comes out. pager calls were signaling for we're done for the day. if i could muster the energy i would feel really. we hop into the bus. for a few months the crew is lively but as we near the highway the bus go silent. i am sharing a seat with a sleeping gloria and i turned around to see that everyone except the driver is unconscious. as if someone flipped the switch on a cruise power. even julio is out. when we get to the office, i get home after 7 p.m. having been a way 14 hours. making dinner i realized today i just survived was exactly what my coworkers have been going through all season. only now are workdays are even longer. today they left their homes at 3 a.m. and will return sometime after 8 p.m. the next day, we worked just as lord. i feel good the entire day. even my hands have a much better grip on the ninth and lettuce. it's counterintuitive but after talking with several coworkers who have had several experiences, to come up with a theory. early in the season, say, after the first week, a farmworkers but is thoroughly broken down, legs and arms are sore from hands and feet swell up. eventually a taller for the pain is developed. the sharp eggs goal but don't disappear. the weekend is just enough time for the body to recover from the trauma but not so much that it actually starts to mean. my four-day break was actually to law. my body begin to recuperate and wanted more time to continue. instead it was thrown right back into the mix and rebuild. the next day i am back to normal. my belief in his three will grow stronger once i quit the job and understand how much time i body needs to fully recover. it takes two weeks until i feel comfortable shaking someone's hand and an entire month before the numbers in my foot disappears. we had for visitors today from the government and a check that we're following the proper food safety procedures. it's a good thing we get a heads-up about their visit to hours before they arrive. or dole would have been slapped with a number of violations. during each break we stuffer gloves in the bags hanging from our belts but we can't do that anymore, pedro says, we must now let our gloves on a machine. he is deathly nervous about the inspection. he make sure everyone is worried their fairness. several art. he tells us to make sure we eat our lunch away from the lettuce. after reminding us about the gloves for a third time, pedro goes behind the machine to talk to the voters. as i'm cutting i look over to a coworker, pieces of the lettuce are falling from his mouth. during breaks were not supposed to eat lettuce that hasn't been cut. we're definitely not supposed to eat over the lettuce and triple remnants on produced that will soon be purchased by customers. don't eat. quietly enough so that pedro won't hear. the government is coming, remember? we pass our inspection with flying colors. by the end of my two months in yuma i was feeling a little bit and assaulted about it, which is strange because the work is so exhausting, but you did in his rhythm, at least for me, the difference between me and everyone am a true, everyone on my crew were mexicans and they had families. so they would come home from work and deal with feeding the kids and reading stories to them, helping them with homework. i had no life in yuma because i didn't know anyone in yuma besides my coworkers. so i was able to just pass on by 8 p.m. and sort of live a kind of spartan existence of wakeup, lettuce, come home, falsely. and it was always kind of amazing to me that the folks i was working with were maintaining these full lives. but the other piece i think of why i enjoyed the lettuce was that when you're on a crew of 30 people, the crude stays the same. and there's a real sense of, you get to know personalities. and because everyone is making the same amount, which was $8.37 an hour, there is much less -- there's a lot of sort of soldier in helping out because no one is trying to advance in a way. and also having worked in offices before right think we all -- or at least i understand how competent office dynamics can be, you know, and like one e-mail taken the wrong way and someone is a bit up in the air and a week later like there's a fistfight or something. afpak. >> we just did have the same kind of energy to worry about this stuff because we are also tied. so i was nostalgic until the last two days in which i've harvested more than 35 tons a day. it was a very -- on any given day each cut a good harvest, then down and cut, bag, more than 3000 hits in a shift. so that kind of beast and the soldier right out of me. by the end i was ready to go. when i finished the lettuce, i decided that i wanted to work in poultry. at a poultry plant. and again, excited sounds like the wrong word but it kind of was. in the way i was thinking about it, like i was excited even though i've been a vegetarian since grade school. and i know, reflexive it on my weirdness that i would find that fun, but the other reason i really thought that poultry work would be great is that towns in the south, all these anonymous towns in the u.s. out are being rapidly transformed by latino increments -- immigrants. so i thought it would be great way to not only write about poultry work, but also be able to write a little bit about how the town that i chose, which is a town called russellville, has a hasn't been adapting to the newest arrivals. and russellville is -- i was out of place in arizona because i was only white person i saw in the fields, but i was equally out of place in russellville because i don't have -- i don't have a southern accent. i'm not particularly conservative and russellville come it's a dry county so you can't even get alcohol there. and i was spending the summer there. which is troubling for me. [laughter] >> once i realized. and i think in some ways i was utah looked at as a free. i didn't have a car, so i arrived in russellville, which is very rural, kind of out in the middle of nowhere. and with a bike and some people would see me biking around. in russellville, bikes are for kids. it seemed odd. but it seemed like a wonderful chance to dive into, not just the work, but the ways in which -- russellville seem like a microcosm of what's happening across the south. and so this is my -- i left let us, i chose forward at the beginning because i thought it was the most physically tiring, it was. but i discovered that the poultry plant work in some ways, it wasn't quite as physically demanding, but in terms of the depressing nature of the work. lettice work is very skilled. by two months of doing it i was barely keeping up with the. one of the reasons it was so descoped is they know they're going to have such high turnover. if anyone of you came off the street and went to a poultry plant, they will give you a task. probably within five minutes both would report that they need people to be interchangeable. one we got 150 new people into plant, which is about one 10th of the weeks workforce. this section about my time -- what is it a bit about the workforce there. the quad of all is that i was working with had fled civil war in guatemala in the '80s by large, had moved to florida and had picked tomatoes, which is incredibly punishing would. then came to do poultry plant work, which was indoors and year-round. so for them it was kind of like a step up to compared with the family members killed in guatemala, they had done crazy work in florida. and so they were sort of stepping stones. they did what their kids to work in the plant but they felt like this was the way they could get the kids eventually to college. and then you have the local resident who grew up in russellville, who hadn't left very often. and in many ways much more be down. and i think it might have been about the head, the immigrants had, had different perspectives base of where they were coming from. they had a sense they're pushing ahead all the time. and a lot of the locals that i got to know about like they have been stagnating for a long time, going back and forth between wal-mart and the poultry plant, and there's not much outside there. so this section here is about my first real experience in the money not the chicken plant work. which is almost the first line here the jury. my first taste of true line of work monogamy the following evening when i told to stay in bsi. since dsi deals directly with fresh chicken me, unlike iq have or the combo department, they have just sacraments that no one ever explained. i never knew what they were. [laughter] >> for the first time i put on the standard black uniform of a cheap blue plastic smock note think of any piece of paper, cotton gloves under plastic lids and a white internet. at this point dsi remains a mystery. i don't know what the acronym stands for what it does. i do see two lines parallel to each other with worker standing on either side. since keeping workers totally in the dark seems to be part of the business model of pilgrim's pride i'm not surprised when barbara tells me to follow her without excavation. with a the 20 or so others guess i workers and walk at the platform where another short belt runs at waist level. i am now standing above the workers. you play play play before, barber asks? there are words before i can here. i pull out my earplugs and the russian. what's that, i shall? i say do you ever tear chicken breasts? she is now shouting, do. not really. okay, good. stay here and when the press come by, care them in half. care them in half? with my hands? i turn around in time to see her walking away and i put my plugs back and. they should be interesting. i stand at the perch for several minutes waiting nervously for chicken breasts. from this angle i have a few other large section of the plant floor looking out on both dsi in the bone but it's too complex to make sense of. i realized that while workers are slaving away on the ground, and intrigue system is possibly turning about. i am reminded of those plastic marble sets of childhood in which you place a marvel and then followed its progress along the path until it eventualleventually landed at the bottom. where ever i look i see chicken meat flying off belts, spinning around yours, dropping from one moving plane to another. what's going on, gabriel? kyl ambles of the stands wearing his hooded alabama sweatshirt. i lived in a trailer right next to the plate and he lived in a trailer a few trailers down. i had been there for two months. he had been there since his grandfather because it was his grandfather's original landed it looks like we're fixing to be part of. do you know what we're doing here? chicken breast. you can them in half, they come to me and i put them in boxes. just as he takes a position to my right the first you chicken breast began dropping from about 10 feet india. they land on another belt and travel directly pass my station. the press are pink, slippery, heart-shaped and much larger than i expected. there's a footnote. in touch with chickens and labor are selectively bred to develop outsized breasts. this tinkering is profitable for companies like pilgrim's pride, less so for the chicken stick along with suffering from broken legs that are unable to support their top heavy physiques, many chickens have lungs and hearts they can't keep pace with the growth of the press and the birds succumbed to our failure. it sounds like a freakish event. chickens fell by heart attacks? every year millions of birds perish precisely this way. heart attacks have become so prevalent that the industry has even created a euphemistic name for the phenomenon, flip over center. the senate is unknown among non-factory farmed chickens. back to the main text. the breasts are pink, slippery, heart-shaped and much larger than i expected it. some rip easily beating no more strength than what is required to carry through a thin stack of papers that others are stubborn. for these i dig my fingers and toes deep into the flesh and yanked hard. some infector connected so strongly by this that i care right to the press muzzled. tonight the whole breast don't give off much of a snow but each time i tear through the dense muscle, and not seeing with of meat israelis. for a few minutes my vegetarian self is aware that this task is pretty gross. the number of the breast art in go i deleted blood. a few go squirting out of my hands onto the cement floor. gobs of that cling to the breasts. the fat is why dish and could easily be confused with scrambled eggs. when i care the brass, pieces of that come flying at me and within minutes they cover my blue small. other pieces are set saving in my face landed on my cheeks and four had. as disgusting as this task is it doesn't take much time for a routine to set in. within an hour i applaud of the breast of nearly 1000 birds that were recently slaughtered but i no longer even thinking about chicken. i imported my wrist are beginning to hurt and my thumbs are locking up. this sucks, i shout over to kyle. he grins. welcome to pilgrim's pride. brass have been dropping from about one at a time. now in tight groups are tumbling down. full breasts are getting past me so i use my right arm as a wall to drag past -- dragged back into a breath before the get to kyle. of course, the time i spent riding the back it's time i am not taken. it's not long before i have a massive collection of breasts in front of me that i am essentially hugging. [laughter] a few tumble off the line and landed at my feet. it was as lean not funding at the time. [laughter] i kicked into the ground. as i'm wondering what to do, a woman walks by with a blue hair not as an assistant supervisor. hey, we could use a more help i shout to a. she turns to me, what? we could use some help. i can't keep up. she gives a faint nod and keeps on walking. just lets him go, kyle says. pocket if we can get them all. i hope that's okay for c-span. that sounds like a good idea. i remove the barricade my arm has created. file that hundreds of whole breast light passing which will be delivered to customers full instead of divided. we fill up a number of boxes before the pace slows and unable to regain my rhythm. i glanced around furtively waiting for an outrage supervisor but no one is watching. hanging from the break room wall is a framed document reminding us -- let me just back a. the break room wall, they have three walls, one has all these very inane corporate slogans like you can do it, and stuff. another one is a bunch of junk food and the third one is just painkillers that every different kind of painkiller you could have, because any going patient they tell you that you're going to need to be taking painkillers every four hours because your hands just not used to making 50,000 cuts in a single shift. so this deals with the inane corporate slogans. hanging from the break room walls is a framed doctor reminding us of the three cornerstones of continual improvement. quality, process and improvement and teamwork. out here in the real world of the processing floor, kyle and i just demonstrate teamwork in order to reach a process improvement that is completely undermined quality. when you're working in a plant that can slaughter and process more than 250,000 chickens a day, quality just doesn't stand a chance. we work until 1:45 am. i worked the graveyard shift. barber communicates that it is break time by holding both hands in front of her chest and mining that kyle and i discard our smocks which are torn and covered in chicken blood, and toss them in the trash. as a result of my mind roaming over the last hour, i have come to the conclusion that breast resemble nothing except where in the newborn babies. later in the shift i moved to a different part of the line doing the same work next a black woman who has been at the plant for four months. as we care breast i share this observation. her response, you have something wrong in your head? after a few minutes of silent during breast, she comes round. it does kind of. [laughter] the but of a white baby. [laughter] a i have to say one of the really striking things about the chicken plant work was just how people -- people struck me -- when people met me, they were curious because i was clearly a yankee, as they call me, and were blown away -- i think they thought i was 17 or so, 18. and i might look younger now because i take from this but i normally don't shave and so i look a little scruffy or. i don't think i ever looked like i was a recent high school graduate, but i think what was going on was people that do this work for a while age very quickly. one of my coworkers start working, said working the night work makes you old quick. that's really true. you think about all the benefits that people like me have, not having to do this work day in and day out. and it struck me in my time in the chicken plant was that the greatest factor was the jobs i'm not doing are not making the older. and you'll see that. you will see someone in their '40s who are missing most of their teeth, and i would assume there in their late '60s and they don't have much time left. than you realize, oh, this guy is like 39 or 40. i think it is his grinding poverty. . . >> i had this idea when i was doing this project, as i was at work -- i would come home from work and get a lot of work done. that very quickly was -- i was disa-abused of that notion. you didn't have the stamina. i was reading a biography by john steinbeck. he thought he would dig ditches and do like manual labor. and then he was done doing that write and he had to give that up because the digging ditches -- the hard manual labor left him no energy at the end of the day to pursue things that he was also interested in. the other really fascinating thing for me about the work and about time in russellville, alabama, there had been some news stories -- that seemed to suggest that there are very terrible relations with the new guatemal guatemalan mexican indians. and it there was a kkk marches where the supporters outnumbered the protesters. and so when i showed up there, i was expecting to find a lot of animosity between -- or at least some animosity between the groups. i just didn't find it. i mean, i would hear people in grocery stores make comments about anger about maybe bilingual cereal boxes or things like that. i'm sure you hear in that arizona. i hear that in california. i hear that in new york. i didn't find anything particularly anti-immigrant in a way that was unique. and i think one of the reasons that i didn't find that was on the shop floor, on the processing plant floor, i never heard anyone mention this idea that people were -- their jobs are being taking away by immigrants. when i showed up out of nowhere and at the week i was at the plant. i had a job. the real problem was surviving the work. and that was a problem -- that was a problem for immigrants. and it was a problem for american citizens. and it's been a problem for a long time in an industry like poultry. but that there was a real sense of sort of -- when you're walking side-by-side people, not only do you have a common enemy which is a supervisor that's constantly telling to you work faster and doesn't show empathy to the situation. but just the -- the fact that you're with someone eight or nine hours a day and it may only be as superficial as sharing curse words or food on break floors but you can see some boundaries being broken down. what i came with, the locals who grew up in alabama, many of them looked at the immigrants as sort of how i would think about in grade school or a high school when you have a foreign exchange student from a foreign country. and there's the curiosity but not too much hostility. very curiosity. man, how do they work very hard. and they're very small and they carry all believe weight and stuff. and so that was really promising, i think, to me. the other piece was just how much each job from lettuce to the chicken plant in new york city when i came back, i worked for two days in an area called the flower district which i thought would be a great job. like a mom and pop shop and it turned out to be like a sweatshop hiding in plain sight where they're constantly barraging you and they fired me after two days and doing food delivery work by bike. in manhattan a lot of -- because it's so -- it's such a dense city that there's a huge industry of people that ride bikes to bring food to usually wealthy people and it's a very dangerous job because you're winding in and out of crazy traffic and generally a lot of immigrants will be paid about $2 in an area and you're in the snow. it's a really rough job. but even in that job you had this sort of natural -- people would welcome you into the job and would always cover people and would really help each other out. and so that -- having a background in labor organizing, that natural solidarity that i saw in the ways in which people would naturally break down barriers that i thought was not so easily to break down was really promising. that's my spiel for now. and i'd definitely welcome any questions as long as you follow the protocol -- whatever the protocol is. >> did you have any problem to get people use their name in your book? >> well, not really 'cause i never asked them. i mean, like the -- i never told -- i never told the company what i was doing. because i knew that as soon as i told them, they would say no. or they'd have some really real arrangement, like, yeah we'd love to this as a journalist and we'll have you off in this corner and we'll have a worker come by every 10 minutes and say this is a great company and you can write that down. so i really wanted to have a more -- i didn't want to know what it would be like to be a journalist being sort of managed through these jobs. and i also just didn't think they would go for it. i mean, i got -- i sort of got -- was proven right by that at the chicken plant through my own sloppiness. i was working in the slaughterhouse but i wanted to see how the chickens were being grown all around because they spend six, seven, eight weeks or so and then they get to the plant and then they're killed. so i had experience in that thing but i wanted experience in these farms where they're being grown. and i revealed too much information at about week 5 1/2 to a farmer about what i was doing. and that farmer called the plant and that plant realized, i was -- i had spent over a month working there and they went on my website and bought my other books and called me in and said, like, you're fired. and if you had come to us earlier we could probably tried to work something else. which is false because you're firing me now. i think -- they're all very curious about -- and i think in each of the jobs, each of the companies -- especially the bigger ones who i list, i think they've all read through the book. and there were anything they thought they could sue me for, that's probably -- it's like right about now they would be preparing it. i'm pretty sure -- i feel like i was pretty carefully about the reporting. it's a little bit difficult to report on a story when you can't actually ever be reporting in real time. and so i have little ways to -- whenever i couldn't take off i would go to the bathroom and write in a notebook. one great thing danielle my wife was in honduras when i was in alabama. and i was just learning text messaging, which is like very late to be learning text messaging but my cell phone is a big thing that wants an antenna that pops up. [laughter] >> and so what i would do during breaks i would text message notes to myself and my coworkers assumed i was text messaging my wife in honduras. but i would put little, what just happen, little snippets and that sort of, i think, helped out. someone asked me, do i feel like unethical about it? like not at all. i think think it's the only way you get access to these stories. and to get to these people. the only -- the ethical thing for me was always, you know, i've written about immigrants before in a much more left -- much less first person about following people. and i've never gotten any sort of -- like the media response from this book has totally surpassed anything i've ever done before. and i don't think it's an accident it's because it's a story about a white guy doing it. and so i think the only kind of ethical thing for me or the very tricky part is to underscore that what i did was really -- you know, to spend two months in the lettuce fields is not an earth shattering experience. people did this 10, 15 years, 20 years no one knows about them. and as much as it is the first person book to also really try to bring the experiences of the workers. and to the forefront. and so to underline -- it seems like a really great project to me. but in the grand scheme of things, it really pales in comparison to the work that's been going on for so long. that was my biggest sort of discomfort of the book. >> what has come from this story coming out, getting out? >> well, you know, i don't have faith -- or at least a lot of faith in my ability to write a policy piece that will convince people that are on the fence about how people view about immigration. to have statistics and be like it's this and that and the other thing. and it's also something i feel i'm very good at. what i would hope is just that -- that it fills in the sort of a back-story on what we're involved in and makes very clear the connections between the hard work that's being done all over the place and the way in which we are deeply connected to it. so you know when you go and buy a head of lettuce in a store and you grab it, usually the last person who have touched the head of lettuce is a farm worker who harvested it. in some ways i'd like to reveal and open up ways in which maybe some people would have to reevaluate the role that immigrants play in the country. and i don't know. i feel like a little while ago i was much more optimistic about that. and then -- and i think there are people that can be reached that way. but there's people who -- if like what i think is important, like passing immigration reform and doing things, there are some people you're just going to have to run over, you know? like they have a very different view of -- and it's not like it's a few phenomenon. i mean, i think americans have always been -- if you look at surveys of americans views on immigrants, pretty much decade after decade, the only thing that comes -- the only consistency is that americans have very generally high -- put a high value and think highly on immigrants that came before. and they feel like the immigrants that are coming currently, every time the survey is being taken, are very different and much more problematic. and it's like in the '50s and the '60s. so we're always very uncomfortable, i think, with the immigrants that are currently arriving. so like in a perfect world i would hope like some people would read this book and not have too much about immigrants but, man, immigrants come here and they have a very easy life and they're on welfare. we can't let them become legal residents and they have to earn it. one thing i came away with this is realizing how much immigrants have earned already, you know? i mean, the kind of work that people have been doing and the kind of hardships they've been putting up with, i feel like that's -- to talk about the need to earn their citizenship, i feel like a lot of people have, you know. and then i like to sell a lot of books. [laughter] >> have you stayed in contact with any of the people that you met during your time? >> yeah. i mean, it's been a lot easier to stay in contact i met in alabama because -- 'cause of cell phones are u.s. cell phones. the workers that i worked with in yuma most of them came across the border and a lot of them had guest worker visas so i've had a hard time getting in contact with them because the cell phones are in mexico. in two days i'll be doing a book event in yuma, which is where i worked. and so i talked to the h.r. person at yuma about trying to get as many of my coworkers as possible at the book event to -- you know, it's in english which sucks. hopefully it will be in spanish at some point but at least there's a lot of photos of them and i think they would get a kick out of stealing. -- seeing it. as much as i could -- and there's the spanish-speaking workers in alabama that i worked with. and not just the workers but i always in most towns i found people who became great support systems. in alabama, the librarian, she considered herself -- she had the most liberal library in the state of alabama within one of the most conservative areas. and i really loved -- i would go in and hang out in the library with her. they had air conditioning. she let me check out as many books as i wanted. but she would talk to me about how one of the big issues about keeping a library that wasn't overtly like -- that wasn't just one issue was everyone come in and bring inspirational fiction, which is christian fiction, i guess, and tons of books of christianity. it was kind of overwhelming her collection what she said we'd love all those books but to have balance we need to also bring a book about judaism or islam. and that really dried up any -- so there's always these characters that i really enjoyed kind of connecting with that i stayed in touch with. and have -- even the p.r. guy at pilgrims pride who fired me -- i actually really liked him. he was acting on orders from above. we had this really fun firing experience where we sat for about a half hour. and he told me -- like he told me he ordered my other books and they read my articles. and what i realized is the h.r. folks at a poultry plant have a lot of similarities between the people that work in the poultry plants on the floor. their job is totally monot mis. -- monotonous. they are constantly trying fill slots. when i was there, they were running four to five orientations, full orientations a week to keep the work force up 'cause everyone was dropping out so fast. there are people that i kept in touch with. i really look forward -- i mean, it would be great if i see a bunch of people in yuma, you know. >> were there a lot of injuries at the jobs? like in the jobs? >> yeah. i think the -- the injuries in the bicycle delivery work were -- like at any time you go out you could be hit by a car or something. and generally the way the work situation was, the workers were almost all undocumented. and if they got hurt, they would kind of limp to the hospital, get no assistance from their bosses. and then they would go find another job. it was more just -- at any given moment you could be hurt. in the chicken plant work, the danger was repetitive stress work. so if you imagine that there's like 38 chickens flying by you on this thing and each chick you have to make a certain cut with a sharp knife, and sometimes you do that about 18,000 times in a shift. sort of it's just not something your body is made to do. and you will very quickly have very serious injuries in your wrists and your fingers. carpal tunnel -- one of the women i interviewed -- she had had her thumb joint -- and also a lot of older people. and it's freezing. it's like 40 degrees in these plants. if you have arthritis it's like -- you know, your hands -- one of the thing i realized from this book is how important your hands are. lettuce, chicken. when your hands are sore, it's very hard to feel comfortable doing anything from sleeping, from saying hello. and so one of the people i interviewed -- she had left the chicken plant because her thumb joint had been completely worn down. and the doctor says there's not much of a joint there. and he had taken a gristle or he'd taken a long vein and he wrapped around the thumb joint to create this sort of pseudothumb joint. and when i talked to her -- she wasn't working there. she was like in her 60s. and she said she was never going to go back to the doctor. he said it would be terrible. when i was doing my follow-up calls before my book went to press. and i kept calling her and she wouldn't return my phone calls so i called another friend of mine kyle who knew her. she's not calling you back because she's back at the plant which i think -- and she didn't want to get in trouble. it kind of shows how -- how few options there were for that work. or for any kind of work. she needed work. she needed to pay bills. and chicken plant work is kind of what she knew and it paid the best of anything around there. >> is there a kind of comra camaraderie of one group from one racial composition, et cetera. did you notice a big difference. >> i don't know if it was so much the race or -- but it was -- i feel like the real big piece about why lettuce had so much better camaraderie was just the fact that we had a crew that worked together constantly. and for two months, 30 folks -- you get to know each other. and you're outside which played a really big psychological difference. and you could talk while you're working. and we'd have like a radio blasting spanish radio. and people would joke around a lot. and all those sorts of little things that make a job a little bit less depressing were impossible to do in the chicken plant. because it was cold. i mean, lettuce is repetitive but it's also -- it's skilled work and so you are focusing a lot on the work. and the chicken plant you just couldn't communicate very much with people based on the fact that you have ear plugs and you can't hear and it's cold. and you're doing -- you're standing in one place doing this for like -- separating chicken breasts. and so i could do that for two and a half hours and never look to the left or the right. it becomes a different sort of job. which i think if you had -- if you had -- if you had a diverse work force that were doing lettuce, i think they would get along probably pretty well. i think it was mostly just the way chicken -- it's hard to imagine like, you know, the brain -- the human brain is so complicated. it needs challenges and it's an incredible organ and you sit people and have them spend all their waking hours doing one repetitive motion over and over again and it does weird things to you. >> did you ever receive like any promotions on these jobs that you did? >> i was -- they attempted to promote me, and i had to always turn down the promotion because it wasn't like what i wanted to do. when i walked into the dole, the first thing they told me like you don't want to do this, the farm work. but, you know, we'd a really -- we need a bilingual forklift driver and you make a lot more money. no, i want to be in the fields and the second time i'd walk in the plant you can make more money working inside. you know, i got two promotions for showing up that i had to turn down. in the chicken, no. chicken -- there's -- the only promotion is you can go into the live killing and hanging field which is where -- you get two bucks more an hour and you're actually helping to kill the chickens. she told me they didn't have any openings at that point. and i was like, that's okay, you know. in the -- in the restaurant business, my manager was a white guy who -- the guy who had much more experience in the work was a guy name gumarro and he was mexican. and he could do everything much quicker than me. but greg, my boss -- from the very moment i interviewed with him, he said you know i think you've got leadership potential here. it's like, i was wearing, you know -- i was wearing like jeans, the same jeans i'd worn doing lettuce and chicken. i mean, i'm like a pretty simple dresser. they're the same jeans and i had a blue tattered t-shirt. i'm glad you think i got leadership potential and it came up over and over where gumarro would be much better what he was doing than i was doing. and i think you need to be doing what gumarro because you're a lot better. no, i'm not a lot better of it. it was his whole conception in this field there aren't very many white people and i must have some sort of special skills. he never quite realized that gumarro was the leader of the crew. that i wasn't. so if anything -- you could see the bias the ways that i -- the clear advantages i had. in chicken plant i wanted to get to the jobs debone which is one of the strenuous jobs and i attempted three or four times to talk in the h.r. person to get me in debone and they never did and that was the job that was most dangerous. and i think they just felt like you're not supposed to be there. >> you mentioned something about the popularity of this particular book. i'm wondering if you know why that is besides it being a great book, of course. do you think that there's any particular reason at this historical moment or anything in particular about it that makes it particularly popular now? >> well, david foster wallace, he read these couple huge books. one book in particular in one of his frustrations -- i'm not frustrated by this. but he was saying all this media attention -- and he realized it was like a week after the book came out and he knew no one who was interested read the book. and so i think what a lot of the ability for me to get more press and get -- is that it's a very marketable idea in that i can say it in like two sentences. like white guy and does jobs usually only immigrants do it and writes about it. people can be more intrigued. a book i wrote earlier is about a mexican-american family that came from southern mexico and about their travails. the guy's daughter is lead-poisoned. there's all sorts of inner family dynamics. but it's a complicated story to pitch to like a tv person because -- hopefully it's a complicated story that goes over a lot of stuff. but the ability to pitch something quickly and have someone be like, oh, that's quirky. that's have them on and talk for five minutes. i think it more has to do with that. maybe in a month and a half from now when people are more reading it, i like it and then they start faxing along, then that's a more genuine -- like development of like why the book would do well. but i think at this point it's just strictly -- it's easy to pitch in like the tv world where you have to make a point in 45 seconds. it fits into that. i don't know if that's cynical. it's sort of the reality of doing tv work or, you know, marketing. >> were there any companies that you wanted to work for and how many companies did you actually do the work for. >> i worked for four companions. dole and pill gram's pride which was the biggest chicken company in the world. i worked for an upscale mexican restaurant in manhattan and then i worked for a mom and pop flower shop in what's called the flower district in manhattan. it's like a couple -- in an old area. it used to be a lot bigger and it's shrinking. it's wholesale flowers. very old school. almost all the workers are either ecuadorian, guatemalan, mexican. very unregulated. the idea of would i want to work for them again? no. i mean, i had actually a lot of respect for dole. not that they were paying us well. but they -- i felt like they explained policies and safety things in a way that seemed meaningful. and the foreman was really sort of respectful of workers. i think that's a little bit different, though -- i think the reason for that is that yuma has such a history of cross-border work so people have been coming -- it's right on the border. it's nothing new. and so a lot of the mexicans and mexican-americans have family members in the u.s. and they're accustomed to kind of crossing the border. when they come to the u.s. they don't feel like they have to check their rights at the door. which is very different for, let's say, you're a guatemalan and a labor contractor comes to you and you're poor and we have great jobs picking blueberries in maine, so you -- you give them your visa or whatever and they fly you out to maine and they've got their own little housing. and they take away your proof that you're there legally so now they control where you live and i don't know where you are. and that's where i think -- there a-

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