Harvest Gypsies is a collection of seven long articles that Steinbeck wrote for newspapers about issues of migrant workers in California.
In the first article he talks about the agriculture in California and types of foreign migrant workers that come for harvesting the crops. He says that there is a new issue now with a lot of areas in America being affected by drought and a lot of people losing their farms and homes leading them to migrate to California. This leads to influx of new agricultural workers and the writer says that he will talk about the treatment of these new American migrant workers.
In the second article Steinbeck talks about three types of families that migrated and are now living in squatting camps. The first family is trying to maintain their decency and cleanliness while the third type that was there the longest is living in filth and misery.
In the third article the writer talks about the connection of small farmers and these migrant workers and how they are helpless faced with large farm associations. These associations treat the migrant workers with no human decency at all and they lawfully get away with it because they are too powerful.
In the fourth article the writer talks about experimental camps being provided for these workers and these camps prove to be working very successfully without the outside supervision.
In the fifth article the writer talks about the issues of the migrant workers not being able to get unemployment relief. He also talks about the malnutrition that migrant families have to deal with which causes high infant mortality.
In the sixth article Steinbeck talks about the foreign migrant workers and how with a very simple style of life they are able to live off of very small wages which in turn makes the American white laborers endangered. This cause the foreign workers to be deported back to their countries as quickly as they came.
In the final article Steinbeck gives some suggestions on how to deal with this issue of new American migrant workers. Unlike foreign workers, they are there to stay and some suggestions include giving them proper housing and resources to build communities, give them proper information about their work and medical welfare etc. The inhumane treatment of them isn't going to end well end it is bound to result in disaster.
