TV REVIEW : ‘Shame’ Solid, Aggressive Journalism

Some of the old Edward R. Murrow mystique has rubbed off on the CBS News division. From a group not exactly holding the old CBS tradition in a very secure trust, its latest report, “Legacy of Shame,” is some of the best, most aggressive network journalism of the year.

Following in the wake of “Harvest of Shame,” Murrow’s 1960 investigation of the plight of U.S. farm workers--and lagging five years behind “Frontline’s” own Murrow follow-up--Dan Rather and Randall Pinkston travel from South Carolina to California’s Central Valley to examine how much has changed for the people who labor in the fields of agribusiness.

Their findings range from the macro to the micro. Contrasted with 1960’s virtual slave economy, farmers now must adhere to federally enforced labor regulations. But the laws can be so impossibly precise that such basics as housing (as seen during chili harvest time in El Paso) are no longer provided--and farm workers sleep in the streets as a result.

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The hour’s highlight is easily Pinkston’s snooping on one Miguel Flores, a free-lance crew leader in South Carolina and, if the charges are accurate, a very bad dude. According to documents and claims by workers under his charge, Flores is involved in a personally lucrative system of indentured servitude in which Guatemalan and other workers (some as young as 14) are forced to pay off incurred debts before they may leave the farm.

Flores and his attorney deny the charges to Pinkston, but the CBS cameras depict a ghastly climate of fear out of the 19th Century.

The law finally catches up to Flores, but it has yet to catch up to all of the abusers of field pesticides, which the United Farm Workers union has been campaigning against for more than a decade. Again, cameras show California workers laboring adjacent to ongoing airborne spraying--all of it perfectly illegal.

Rather shows an operation, run by A. Duda and Sons, that apparently does things the right, humane way, complete with worker benefits, proper housing, above-average wages and no free-lance crew chiefs like Flores. Farmers and labor-rights activists alike agree that if the American consumer were willing to pay a few pennies more for produce, a special case like Duda’s company would be the norm.

One problem with this logic is that consumers will always shop for the best price. Rather and Pinkston don’t ask representatives of agribusiness when the industry will be willing, on a collective basis, to raise product prices to pay for American-style worker conditions. That decision begins and ends in the boardroom, not the kitchen.

* “Legacy of Shame” airs at 9 tonight on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).