What does art have to do with safety? Everything, in this case.
Photographer Alejandro Cartagena’s most recent collection “Carpoolers” highlights construction workers in Monterrey, Mexico commuting via truck bed. The high cost of transportation and the need to commute from rural areas to jobs in big cities causes these individuals to carpool in an unsafe way.
Images courtesy of Alejandro Cartagena.
What’s the solution?
Add your answers as comments…
Category: Pictures
8 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Reminds me of commuting to work in the back of a grain truck (50 at a time) and the back of a pickup (5-10 at a time) when I was a kid working in the corn and soybean fields in Illinois.
When I was 18, they made me a field boss. I occasionally drove the 10 speed grain truck with kids in it even though I had nothing beyond a basic drivers license. I thought that driving the big grain truck (bigger than all the trucks above) was great fun.
Because I was the biggest crew boss, my other job was carrying out kids that passed out in the field to to heat exhaustion. My only first aid training was to carry them to the end rows, splash water on them to “wake them up” and then drive them home and tell their parents that they had “had a hard day in the field” and they “shouldn’t come back in tomorrow.”
To me, it was all in a days work.
To keep ourselves from getting light headed and passing out or getting sick, we invented a drink that was sugary lemonade diluted 50% with water (not as sweet) and with added salt. If you got the salt and sugar content just right (by trial and error), you didn’t get sick because of too much sugar and didn’t pass out due to too little salt. I guess we had invented “Gator Aide” and didn’t even know it.
What were your first job stories?
Comment by Mark Paradies — February 26, 2013 @ 6:18 pm
Major flashback! My first job was de-tasseling corn at age 13. When I tell folks this they don’t believe that kids actually did this sort of field work. As a safety professional, I can barely believe the conditions we were subjected to myself and would never dream of letting my child do the same. Some how we made it through unscathed and with great stories to tell. Times have sure changed.
Comment by J. Reick — March 5, 2013 @ 10:35 am
You are asking for a solution. I wish I will come with one, but thinking about these people and based on my own experience working from very young age in my father plant pottery manufacturing, it is quite difficult, especially knowing that the other alternative that these worker have in their mind in either this, or stay unemployed back home. I know that in Canada there are seasonal workers during spring/summer, and it is probably because of the weather or law enforcement, but they live near by the work place, like worker residences, and they employers use vans for the commute. At least the van will minimize or mitigate the risk, and have another example back home (South America) where the companies enforce the contractor to use of suitable truck for personal transportation, like having proper seats and enclose container for the tools.
Hope this help,
Comment by Moraima Caceres — March 5, 2013 @ 10:36 am
Great story! I also worked in the fields for my first job. My grandfather grew potatoes and they were hand picked into crates in the fall. I worked as a “picker” for 4 or 5 years every fall after school and on Saturdays during “picking season”.
A tractor would turn over the dirt, digging up the potatoes and laying them on top of the dirt. Wooden crates were thrown to the pickers (mostly housewives and a few teenagers like me trying to earn some money for Christmas). The pickers all had rectangular metal tags with a unique number assigned to each individual picker and after a crate was full a tag was stuck in one of the potatoes.
The full crates were collected by men or boys who loaded them onto a flatbed pulled by a tractor, that took them to storage where they were sorted, bagged and stacked. The tags were collected, counted and controlled by my grandmother. I think each crate was worth 20 cents.
This job taught me the value of money, what backbreaking work was and also the fun and value of team work. My best girl friend and I would work together and pick from each side of one crate and she would tag one and I would tag the next. That was great fun cause we got to talk and visit as we worked and working together made a dull boring job interesting.
We never bought potatoes in a store when I was growing up if my grandparents had any in storage. They were a staple on our table and I still love them!
Comment by Cheryl Thames — March 5, 2013 @ 11:03 am
Ah, memories! At the ripe ole age of 14, I was allowed to work on a neighbor’s farm to earn my “own” money. I grew up in South Eastern Ohio, in the foot hills of the Appalachian mountains. We were borderline “poor”. My very first day on the job, the farm owner asked me to take the MF tractor and disk a field across the hollow, which was somewhat steep. As I drove out of the implement staging area, he yelled, “By the way, the brakes don’t work!” I used ingenuity and the disk to brake all day. “Get R Dun” was the word of the day.
By the way, when I presented my summer’s earnings to mom and stated what I was going to do with it, her reply was, “Good, you can buy your own school clothes.” Guess it wasn’t “mine” after all.
Comment by Charles Taylor — March 5, 2013 @ 12:34 pm
You just found out that your school cloths were yours too!
Comment by Mark Paradies — March 5, 2013 @ 4:30 pm
Spent many summers “haying”, walked alongside a conveyor and “tipped” bales onto it. This went on until I was old enough or big enough to stack in the box coming off the conveyor. Would get paid .20 a bale on the conveyor side and .25 a bale on the stacking side. This was and still is backbreaking work, even with modern conveniences of farm equipment I still appreciate what it takes to do it.
Comment by Brian — March 12, 2013 @ 1:30 pm
My first job, when I was about 9-10 years old, was as a caddy at a local golf course lugging bags that looked like the one Rodney Dangerfiield had in Caddy Shack. There were no wheeled carts. I would get 10 cents a hole, so after 18 holes and a tip, I’d usually make 2 bucks. By the end of the summer, I’d have close to $100 saved and one shoulder about 2 inches lower than the other.
When I was in high school, I worked on a landscaping crew cutting and laying sod in residential neighborhoods. I can remember sitting on top of the rolls of sod stacked in back of the old flatbed truck and hanging on for dear life as the owner, Louie, drove us down the highway at about 60 mph while taking pulls from the 1/2 pint of Canadian Club that he kept in his “bourbon holster” under the seat. Those were the days. Why no one was killed, I’ll never know.
Comment by Mike Mann — March 14, 2013 @ 6:24 am