Migrant Workers In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

In Of Mice and Men, George and Lenny are migrant workers in an area where they aren’t taken seriously. This is because other migrant workers that came around the farm wasted their monthly pay on drinking and gambling. George and Lenny have different plans though, they want a permanent home to live on, instead of traveling around to find work and leaving once Lenny screws up. They are treated like the drinking and gambling migrant workers throughout the book, because that’s exactly what those other workers had on their minds. During the Great Depression, this was what many had on their minds, but they could never get it because they couldn’t find work, or the work they found didn’t pay well enough. Perhaps, in the book, some migrant workers

became so used to the way they lived, that they forgot how to live any other way. George mostly would’ve ended up like that, if not for Lenny keeping him tied to his ambition to get a place of his own. With the help of an old swamper named Candy, he was really close to getting it. But Lenny screwed up again and George would have no choice but to go back to square one looking for another ranch to work on. Unfortunately, this was the fate of many migrant workers during the Great Depression. A migrant worker would wander around looking for work, find it, and either the pay would be cut or they screwed up so bad that they’d have to go through the motions all over again. Although things end a little differently in Of Mice and Men, this really makes you think about what a terrible time the Great Depression was for those living in it. For some, this is even the case for poverty today.