Working & Waiting

Going Where the Work Is

Like other states that drew displaced workers during the Great Depression, Florida sometimes used police and armed guards on the state's borders to limit what state and local officials feared could have become an overwhelming number of indigent poor.

Migrant workers and their families would wait for the chance to enter the border legally or find other ways to secretly enter the state and make their way south to where the jobs were.

For those migrant farm laborers who did find jobs picking vegetables and fruit in packing plants, pay could still be intermittent and workers needed every penny just to feed their families and pay rent.

Securing steady work as a migrant laborer often entailed a lot of waiting—for the chance to ride out to the fields where the day's picking would be or to finally receive their pay after a long day’s or week’s work.

Migrant workers did, however, find their way into Florida by the tens of thousands. They made their way to the drained marshlands south of Lake Okeechobee and along the edges of the Everglades in one of the few regions of the country still able to sustain profitable farming operations before World War II.

They worked picking vegetable crops such as beans, tomatoes and potatoes, in canning factories and packing plants, and at numerous other strenuous manual labor jobs, as well as picking citrus that had been unaffected by the Mediterranean fruit fly.

White and black, men and women, and people of all ages took advantage of the agricultural work available in Florida after finding themselves unable to make a living back home.