Labor: The Wrath of Grapes

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck awakened the American conscience to the hapless life of the migrant farm worker. That was exactly 30 years ago. The stoop laborer in the fields today is still a forgotten man among U.S. workers, often little better off than he was at the time of the loads' tribulations in Depression-era California. In 1969, the field worker is more likely to be a Chicano—a Mexican-American—than an Okie. And the grapes of Steinbeck's title are at the focal point of one of the decade's longest and most...