This past week, the comedian Stephen Colbert of the Comedy Central hit show "The Colbert Report" spoke before a House subcommittee on the plight of migrant farm workers in the U.S. His opening testimony is shown below (Video 1).
To speak more authoritatively on the subject, he took up the United Farm Workers "Take our job" challenge and spent a day on a farm picking beans and packing corn (link). As he noted in his testimony very few Americans seem eager to accept full-time employment as a farm worker. From these experiences, he learned that the labor performed by the workers "is really really hard" and further observed that "Even the invisible hand doesn't want to pick beans."
Interestingly, when asked by Congress person Judy Chu why he was devoting time to this cause, Colbert briefly stepped out of character to say,
“I like talking about people who don’t have any power, and it seems like one of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come and do our work but don’t have any rights themselves. Migrant workers suffer and have no rights.”
Video 1. Stephen Colbert speaking before Congress on the plight of migrant farm workers.
