Events

GABRIEL THOMPSON: WORKING IN THE SHADOWS      7PM Award-winning investigative journalist Gabriel Thompson (There’s No José Here) visits with his new book Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do. What’s it like to do the back-breaking work of immigrants? To find out, Thompson spent a year working alongside Latino immigrants, who initially thought he was either crazy or an undercover immigration agent. He stooped over lettuce fields in Arizona and worked the graveyard shift at a chicken slaughterhouse in rural Alabama. He dodged taxis -- not always successfully -- as a bicycle delivery boy for an upscale Manhattan restaurant, and was fired from a flower shop by a boss who he quickly realized was nuts. As one coworker explained, “These jobs make you old quick.” Combining personal narrative with investigative reporting, Thompson shines a light on the underside of the American economy, exposing harsh working conditions, union busting, and lax government enforcement, while telling the stories of workers, undocumented immigrants, and desperate U.S. citizens forced to live with chronic pain in the pursuit of minimum wage.