Summary Of The Film 'Harvest Of Shame'

The film “Harvest of Shame” illustrates the conditions of life for American migrant workers. The journalist Edward Murrow captures the conceptions that migrant workers have in relation to their working lifestyles. Indeed, these workers are subjected to long hours of work while receiving a contingent amount of money that isn’t sufficient to feed their families. That is, migrant workers obtain wages between a few cents to 5 dollars. This amount of money changes everyday, which makes life hard for these migrant families because they can never rest assured that their fathers will accumulate enough money to buy food, let alone a sustainable house to live in. Thus, the points in this movie that changed my understanding of how migrant workers lived were the ideas of kids missing school because of the parents having to tend to their crops and the fact that these workers were not able to improve

Indeed, Murrow captures the responses of children articulating what they want to be when they grow up and then there’s a clip of the teacher giving her opinions about the possibility of these kids actually achieving their ambitions; she did not believe they were going to make it far due to the harsh conditions of their lives. Additionally, the missing of school for these children put them at a disadvantage for becoming illiterate and unable to land a job in the future. Hence, the fact that these kids had to miss school to take care of their younger siblings illustrates the pathways in which they’ll go. On another note, Murrow records the responses of the migrant workers explaining their ambitions and then he follows up with a question about if they’ll actually be able to; the workers did not have much faith in the idea of improving themselves considering the economic status of their lives. In fact, workers had to travel in busses