1. Carey Mc Williams described conditions at Durst’s Labor Camp:
The lucky ones slept on straw or gunnysacks thrown on the floors of flimsy tents, rented from
Durst at 75 cents a week. Others slept in the fields. There were nine outdoor toilets serving 28
hundred people. The stench around the camp was nauseating, with women and children
vomiting. Between two to three hundred children worked in the fields, and hundreds more
children were seen around the camp in an unspeakably filthy condition, many, especially the
young ones, were dehydrated and sick.
Temperatures reached 105 degrees by noon and there was no water in the camp. The workers
started picking at 4 o’clock in the morning and earned less than a dollar a day.
In the spring of 1933 , more than three thousand pickers went on strike from Half Moon Bay to
Hayward. It was a successful strike which made wages double.
18 thousand cotton pickers at a string of plantations throughout the San Joaquin Valley.
For example, The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission made guidelines in 1980
stating that English-only workplace rules are a form of discrimination and also when Governor
Edmund G. Brown signed the first farm labor law in California which allowed for farmworkers
to be allowed to vote.