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In this back-breaking way, a 31-member crew harvested 30,000 heads of Yuma, Arizona, iceberg lettuce one day in early 2008. It’s one of the stints Gabriel Thompson undertakes for “Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do.” He also clocks in at a poultry plant, a wholesale florist operation and as a restaurant delivery man.

In “Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers,” Dick J. Reavis looks at the labor hall, where workers go each morning in the hope of “catching out” a job ticket for a few hours of low-level, low-paying toil.

The two journalists bring back from the margins reports of exploitation, injury, injustice and numbed resignation. It can be eye-opening to see what the body and mind will endure, yet it isn’t pleasant reading, not least because neither writer holds out much hope of better prospects.

Thompson, who speaks Spanish and spent three years reporting on Latino immigrants before researching his book, targets industries that depend on their labor. The lettuce fields are staffed by Dole Food Co., which pays him $8.37 an hour and, he says, runs “a pretty fair program.”

Dying at 49

Almost all the workers he meets are legal, living locally or commuting across the Mexican border each day. He finds no “glaring abuses” of workers. Yet few can escape the fields, or reach retirement age in them. Life expectancy is 49.

Workers at the poultry plant, in Russellville, Alabama, are black, white and Latino and make between $8 and $10 an hour depending on attendance and punctuality. The work is stupefyingly dull, smelly, painful and dangerous. Jobs range from “neck breaker and oil sack cutter to giblet harvester and lung vacuumer.” One man puts lids on boxes for an entire shift.