‘Shame’ Still Harvested 30 Years Later : Television: Sequel to Edward R. Murrow’s documentary finds that migrant farm workers’ conditions remain deplorable.

A sequel to Edward R. Murrow’s famous “Harvest of Shame” documentary showing the deplorable conditions of migrant farm workers in 1960 found little has changed in 30 years.

Three decades ago, CBS cameras panned over a long line of tired, hungry farm workers waiting for bags of food. They had just lost their jobs to a killing freeze.

Public Broadcasting Service shot the same scene, this time outside the National Guard Armory in Homestead, Fla., after deadly Christmas freeze that dropped temperatures to 22 degrees in the Everglades.

The only notable difference is that one scene was filmed in black and white and the other taped in color.

Murrow’s report shocked the nation by showing that many Americans ate because of people who earned miserable wages and had no sick pay, vacations and unemployment benefits or disability pay. On top of that, the migrant workers for the most part lived in squalid housing.

Tuesday night, PBS will air “New Harvest, Old Shame,” the story of Pedro Silva’s family on the roads and in the fields of rural America as it moves from an Indiana bunkhouse to a trailer at the Everglades Labor Camp.

“Even nature is against them,” said the producer, Hector Galan. “This year they faced heavy rains in Indiana that cut crop yields in half, Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina which left them with no work, and the freeze in Florida.”

Galan located Pedro Silva and his wife Reina in late November and followed him with an assistant and a photographer as the extended family’s six-vehicle convoy headed south, stopping at highway rest areas to eat, wash and sleep.

Reina Silva’s sister, Maria Martinez, said she wanted to be filmed to give farmers a hard look at the way their workers live.

“If all the farm workers in this country stopped working, the farmers would have to let their fruits and vegetables rot in the fields,” she said. “They have to realize that when we make money, they make money. When we eat, they eat.”