stoop labor

stoop labor

Hard, physical labor requiring one to bend over, especially that which would be done on a farm. My grandfather has a permanent hunch in his spine from the stoop labor he had to do throughout his life. Every summer we send the children to my brother's farm. It's good for them to get out of the city for a while and do a little bit of stoop labor.
See also: labor, stoop
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

stoop labor

Back-bending manual work, especially farm work. For example, They had us picking peas all day, and that's too much stoop labor. [First half of 1900s]
See also: labor, stoop
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
See also:
  • stoop over
  • a hunch
  • hunch
  • bend over
  • stoop down
  • collapse, fall, etc. in/into a heap
  • fall into a heap
  • bend forward
  • bend (one's) mind
  • around the bend
References in periodicals archive
In exchange for $3,200 in tuition, Pierce got the privilege of living in a tent for six months, sharing a modest kitchen and dining room with 50 people, and performing stoop labor five days a week.
Growing farmers: young professionals go back to the land
Velasquez, the charismatic founder and president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), a Toledo, Ohio-based union, once again used the power of the boycott to improve conditions for thousands of workers who perform backbreaking stoop labor on farms so U.S.
Farm laborers win union victory: Religious support cited in success of five-year boycott against pickle company
Even at that, Mexican workers reputedly say the money they earn from stoop labor in Manitoba far exceeds anything they could ever make at home.
Manitoba Commercial Market Gardening, 1945-1997: Class, Race and Ethnic Relations. (Reviews)
The Martin Railcar Opener improves unloading efficiency and speed, without gang tactics, stoop labor or excessive noise.
Railcar opener improves unloading efficiency at Cemex
The second oldest son in a large family that had been doing stoop labor in the fields of Mexico for generations, Lopez was 17 when he accompanied his father to Salinas.
Dream houses
I turned to woodcut for its harsh contrasts of light and dark to create two sets of prints on immigrant labor, Sweatshop and Stoop Labor. The images of women's faces and hands in Sweatshop led next to Woman's Place, a series of prints evoking some of the external restraints placed on women: shuttering, veiling` binding, purdah.
Artist's statement
Pickers do "stoop labor" for 10 to 12 hours a day in California's strawberry fields.
Conflict in the strawberry fields
And by 2020, "most Americans will be able to travel to Europe only as casual labor, just as the poor of Latin America and the Caribbean now come to California and Florida as stoop labor for the harvest and in search of menial jobs."
As the one world turns
Immigrant parents don't work twenty hours a day so their grandchildren can do stoop labor in the fields of the Southwest, or blue-collar work in sweatshops or declining industries employing second-rate technologies.
Naftathoughts for the left; talk opportunity, not trade