Good Company is a book from what turned out to be the last days of the white migrant worker riding freight trains from job to job, season to season. Doug Harper is a Ph.D. student at Brandeis, and he hops freights with a bunch of traveling workers on the way to pick fruit in Washington state. It's a good book. It changed my perspective on freight-hopping, which I never realized was a way to actually get to a particular place, or unofficially sanctioned by companies that need to get low-wage workers to where they need work done. Lots of stories about how the cops look the other way when they're riding the trains into town during apple-picking season, but they look for any excuse to run them off when the work is done. Kind of like how meatpacking employers don't review identification paperwork too closely nowadays.
Harper is really self-conscious about being accepted by the rest of the tramps, but realizing that he's got class advantages that they don't have while also needing to hide the fact that he's there as a reporter/academic. He's also trying to take photos, and most of the other guys don't want their photo taken, so there are quite a few photos as part of the book, but they don't lend a whole lot of insight.
I got this book off the free shelf at the library, and I think it's the original printing from the '70s. It looks like there was an additional edition in 2006 or so with a different cover design. I read most of this book on the plane ride(s) back from Indonesia for a work trip. Let me know if you want to borrow it. There aren't too many books giving a first-hand account of this lifestyle, and it does so without romanticizing it too much.
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