Upon reaching adulthood, she would never live without some form of domestic "help", and battling the "timid spiteful servant mind" throughout her life both enraged her and sustained her. It was easier for her to regard her servants as not quite real than to accept the fact of her dependence on others.

It's a compelling portrait of how rich and poor women of this time were locked into a strange and pernicious symbiosis, and a vital warning against social inequality.

They’re angry at the Culinary Union for not coming to the rescue by organizing them.

They complained of poor work conditions and having to work through their breaks and lunch hours to complete their quotas of cleaned rooms.

Culinary Secretary-Treasurer D. Taylor said the union has maintained a long-standing policy of avoiding organizing drives at casinos whose fates are uncertain, and that is the case with Imperial Palace. “It would be somewhat disingenuous to pick up a place and then see it close,” Taylor said. “The workers are there and then there’s not much you can do. Several thousand workers we represent would have no place to go.”

Although the Dust Bowl included many Great Plains states, the migrants were generically known as "Okies," referring to the approximately 20 percent who were from Oklahoma. The migrants represented in Voices from the Dust Bowl came primarily from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Most were of Anglo-American descent with family and cultural roots in the poor rural South.

Voices from the Dust Bowl illustrates certain universals of human experience: the trauma of dislocation from one's roots and homeplace; the tenacity of a community's shared culture; and the solidarity within and friction among folk groups. Such intergroup tension is further illustrated in this presentation by contemporary urban journalists' portrayals of rural life, California farmers' attitudes toward both Mexican and "Okie" workers, and discriminatory attitudes toward migrant workers in general.

A US federal agency has filed lawsuits over the unequal treatment of more than 500 migrant workers from India brought into the country to work at shipyards in Mississipi and Texas, and over 200 Thai farm labourers brought in to work in Hawaii and Washington state.

"They were nickeled and dimed to the point where they really didn't have any pay," said Anna Park, regional attorney for the EEOC Los Angeles office.

The EEOC says that some of the workers were forced to live in crowded conditions, and their quarters were infested with rats and insects.

Human Rights Watch found that while many American companies use weak US laws to stop workers from organizing, the retail giant stands out for the sheer magnitude and aggressiveness of its anti-union apparatus.

Wal-Mart workers have virtually no chance to organize because they’re up against unfair US labor laws and a giant company that will do just about anything to keep unions out,” said Carol Pier, senior researcher on labor rights and trade for Human Rights Watch. “That one-two punch devastates workers’ right to form and join unions.”

Wal-Mart’s relentless anti-union drumbeat creates a climate of fear at its US stores. Many workers are convinced that they will suffer dire consequences if they form a union, in part because they do not hear pro-union views. Many are also afraid that if they defy their powerful employer by organizing, they could face retaliation, even firing.

As I'm checking out, the elderly man in front of me says to the young woman running the register: "It's so sad to see your favorite store like this." She just shrugs.

A media capital Jonquière is not. And yet Wal-Mart's abandonment of this north Quebec outpost in the spring of 2005 made news from Tokyo to São Paulo as an object lesson in the lengths to which America's largest company will go to throttle the threat of unionization. Wal-Mart closed its store here a few months after it was certified by the Quebec government as the only unionized Wal-Mart in North America.

Discretion was essential, for they knew that there were workers who either truly liked their jobs without benefit of a union or were so fearful of losing them that they would oppose unionization.

The real secret to Ehrenreich's book, though, is yuppie voyeurism. Nickel and Dimed is an interesting read. It approaches the working poor like a separate species -- and for most of Ehrenreich's readers, they are.

Ehrenreich's book does have historical precedent, but it's not Orwell. It's the illustrated guides to the London underworld so popular with the Victorians. Ehrenreich's official conclusion: It's difficult, if not impossible, to keep afloat on $7 an hour. Her implicit conclusion: The poor are different from you and me. They look different. They eat different foods. They live in places middle-class people rarely go. They smoke. They even think differently from the way we do. They distrust collective endeavors. They're not stupid, but they're not interested in politics or other abstractions. Above all, they instinctively dislike change, even when change might improve their lives.

And sooner or later, she will be invited to testify before Congress, probably about the effects of welfare reform and the subsequent growth of the service economy.

'That was the biggest - and nastiest - surprise,' she says. 'Discovering how big an atmosphere of suspicion there was, how much surveillance we were under. First, there were the drug and personality tests, then the endless rules. At Wal-Mart, we were not even allowed to say "damn".' She touches the discreet gold hoops in her ears. 'These would have been way too big for Wal-Mart. All that was a shock and it got to me

As she soon discovered, turnover in the low-wage world is so fast that companies simply use people up - literally working them until their backs give up the ghost or their knees buckle beneath them - and then spit them out. The poor are unlikely to have health insurance or pensions, so there is no prospect of retirement.

I thought he was going to say he was paying out so much in labour it was killing him. In fact, he admitted that everything I'd said was true. He was embarrassed and apologised. So I said: "Why don't you raise the wages?" But he shrugged that off.' Their lattes drunk, the only concession she won from him was that he would clean the employee rest room

''it is tyranny that has most often drawn writers into politics.''

tyranny indeed draws intellectuals into political conflict, so do economic, racial and social injustice.

It's also a clear call to action for labor rights, unions, and other causes that still affect people today.

You can compare the migration from Oklahoma to today's immigration. Much like in Steinbeck's novel, today some Americans hold contempt for immigrants coming to California and other agricultural areas to labor as migrant workers. However, the food industry depends on this cheap labor, and goes through great pains to make sure that it remains cheap. Today, half of all migrant farm workers make less than $20 per day.

Over the next 40 years, unions such as the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) were able to improve both the pay and working conditions of meat packing employees in the U.S. The UPWA was also known for its progressive ideals and its support of the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

Developments such as improved distribution channels allowed meat packing companies to move out of urban, union-dominated centers and relocate to rural areas closer to livestock feedlots.

By the late 1990s, the meat packing industry had consolidated such that the top four firms accounted for approximately 50 percent of all U.S. poultry and pork production and 80 percent of all beef production.

When Eric Schlosser came out with Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal in 2001, it was hailed as a modern-day Jungle, and with good reason.

Schlosser did far more, connecting the rise and consolidation of the fast-food industry in America to the declining power of labor unions, sliding blue-collar wages and growing income inequality.

"The basic thinking behind fast food has become the operating system of today's retail economy

"The government isn't going to take any steps unless people make it known that they want things to change," said Schlosser.

There are no villains whose removal would solve everything, Schlosser argued. "We wanted to show how very nice people become complicit in things that aren't nice at all. The goal is to unsettle, provoke, make people think and feel."

People usually do not resort to risky and desperate moves unless they have nothing left to lose. Steinbeck begins the Joads’ story with the loss of everything they had

Whether as tenants or small landholders, either for subsistence or for markets, the vast majority of the poor migrantes now coming to this country are fleeing the loss of their farms and their livelihoods, just as the Joads

As far as capitalism is concerned, whatever will maximize profit is the arrangement that must be pursued, regardless of the human consequences. The situation in Mexico today resembles that of Oklahoma 75 years ago. Small family farms are no longer profitable enough, and people are being thrown off their land every year by the thousands.

many among the upper classes began to flaunt their wealth more than ever. Working class Americans, many of whom were thrown out of work by the Depression (which they often correctly blamed upon the reckless financial dealings of the upper classes) were shocked and angered by this ostentatious display of wealth.

They often viewed such programs as hand outs, which, as can be seen in this cover, were not somethign which the upper classes felt was their responsibility to provide. They were further angered by the actions of President Roosevelt, who catered to the mass of Americans while largely ignoring the interests of the upper classes. These factors served to heigten class tensions during a period when many Americans (both rich and poor) were already tense over their financial futures.

New Deal regulations helped foster significant unionization and these unions would often run into conflict with company hired police forces.

"I am Upton Sinclair, and I have come to write the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the labor movement."

that the jungle was actually industrial capitalism. In the serialized version, he states: "the place which is here called The Jungle is not Packingtown, nor is it Chicago, nor is it Illinois, nor is it the United States—it is Civilization."

Tiddy was toying with a light breakfast an' idly turnin' over th' pages iv th' new book with both hands. Suddenly he rose fr'm th' table, an' cryin': 'I'm pizened,' began throwin' sausages out iv th' window. . . . Since thin th' Prisidint, like th' rest iv us, has become a viggytaryan

California newspapers alternated between ignoring the strike or printing the growers' side until several strikers were killed by growers at a Pixley, California rally. The reporters and photographers who rushed to cover the strike generally reported that it was growers, not strikers, who were breaking labor and other laws.

In Fall 1931, migrants were arriving in the state at the rate of 1,200 to 1,500 a day, an annual rate of almost 500,000 (p109).

State and local actions aimed to keep needy migrants out of the state. The vagrancy laws of 1933 and 1937, under which many migrants were arrested and sometimes "lent" to farmers to work off their fines, were finally repealed in 1941 as unconstitutional (Edwards vs California). Similarly, the Los Angeles police operated 16 checkpoints on the California-Arizona border to turn back migrants "with no visible means of support" in February-March 1936 until the checkpoints were ruled unconstitutional. (Loftis, p126).