Politics And Labor Supply
The demand for an adequate and consistent supply of labor has long been a rallying cry among agricultural employers. As a precondition for economic survival, that position is not, of course, unique to agriculture. The means by which demands for labor have been met, however, constitute a factor separating agriculture from other sectors of the economy. In particular, the overtly political character of labor market construction involving direct intervention by the state in issues
of labor supply has served to distinguish the industry (see Majka and Majka, 1982; Weiner, 1978; Galarza, 1964; Burawoy, 1976; and Sosnick, 1978, among others). Specifically, the importation of alien workers, the creation of contract labor programs, the dual standards of protective labor legislation (exclusion of farm labor from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act) have directly and indirectly set agricultural labor markets and employment conditions apart from other basic industries.
The argument that agricultural labor markets have been affected by political forces is not unique to this study. This analysis departs from previous work, however, in its emphasis on the interaction of industry structure, labor market operation, and work organization. There are three parts to the analysis. First, I will argue that while the relative homogeneity of agricultural enterprises prompted early efforts to construct a separate but internally undifferentiated agricultural labor market, the increasing diversity in organizational structure and demand of agricultural enterprises resulted in a differentiation in demand which could not be satisfied by traditional means.
Second, the extension of the trade union movement and pressures for broader social welfare legislation in the post-World War period affected the structure and operation of the agricultural labor market in several ways. Most important, efforts to break down the political barriers separating agricultural and nonagricultural employment coincided with the expansion of social welfare and political entitlements, making both employers' political power over labor and farm laborers' alien status appear antithetical to the gains sought by citizens. Thus, I will argue, efforts to alter the system of labor supply from outside agriculture help explain changes in the structure of agricultural labor markets.
Third, strategies pursued by nonagricultural business in the post-World War period had further impact on the structure of agricultural labor markets and, by extension, on the organization of agricultural production. Of greatest consequence, rising union wages and social welfare costs prompted some employers to seek reliable sources of less expensive
labor. For some firms, this took the form of expansion into the Southwest where such labor was easily within reach. More generally, however, many employers began to recruit unprotected, noncitizen labor for work in the United States. But, by contrast to agricultural employers who had exercised direct control over the system of labor supply, these firms (many of which were urban and spread across numerous industries) sought an unregulated supply of labor, that is, one which capitalized on the growing differences in legal protection and entitlement between citizens and noncitizens but which did not directly challenge (through overt action) the trade union or civil rights movements.
To understand how employer demands for labor have been transformed into political policy and what impact that intervention has had on the organization of production, it is first necessary to analyze briefly the structure and development of agriculture in the Southwest.
The development of agriculture in the American Southwest (especially in California and Arizona) can be broken into two broad and roughly overlapping historical periods. The first period (from 1800 to 1890) was characterized by extensive dry-farming (i.e., grains and feed). The second period (from 1870 onward) is characterized by the increasingly irrigated production of fruits and vegetables (McWilliams, 1971:59–60). With the annexation of the territory of California, Arizona, and New Mexico in the mid-1800s, the large Mexican land grants were converted from production for the consumption of wealthy aristocrats to production for national and international markets. As the benefits of climate, irrigation, and soil fertility came to be realized, large tracts of land were turned over to more lucrative fruit and vegetable production. Some of these tracts remained under the tillage of large entrepreneurs; others were broken into smaller acreages that were then leased or sold to small farmers.
Three factors in the development of agricultural production in the Southwest combined to create a highly uneven demand for labor. First, the environmental and physical characteristics of crop production (particularly fruit and vegetable production) created a pattern of labor use quite dif-
ferent from that found in other production systems. Most important is the temporal separation of the activities of planting and harvesting. The resulting process of production is characterized by periods of considerable activity (planting and harvesting) separated by periods of slack while plants mature or seasons change. This pattern of labor use is not peculiar to the Southwest, but it is especially important when the commodity under production is highly perishable and must be harvested within specific time limits.
Second, the intense market orientation of production made labor availability crucial to the success of the agricultural enterprise. The high value of farm production for rapidly expanding urban markets and for export (stimulated by the growth of rail transport in the late 1800s and by the expanded use of refrigerated rail cars at the turn of the century) undercut subsistence production and intensified cash-farming. Large farmers sought to capitalize on the production of lucrative fruits and vegetables. Smaller farmers, many of whom were tenants, were forced to produce cash crops in order to make payments on highly valuable land (McWilliams, 60–65).
Finally, the geographic separation of farming areas and the variety of property forms in the Southwest led to the creation of seasonally and geographically disjointed production. Though large landholdings were (and are) far more common in the Southwest than elsewhere in the United States, few individual firms bridged production areas and seasons. For example, large enterprises developed in the Central Valley of California, but until the 1940s only a handful produced crops in any other production areas in the state. Thus, geographic regions were characterized internally by diversity in sizes and types of production units, and production across regions was organizationally and seasonally discontinuous.
These three factors—the environmental effects of weather and crop perishability, intense market orientation, and geographically and organizationally discontinuous production—combined to create a highly seasonal and variable demand for labor (see fig. 1). This interaction of environment, market, and property form produced a demand for labor which could be available in steady supply despite the fact that employment
Figure 1.
Structural Conditions Affecting the Structure of Agricultural Labor Markets and Worker Organization
might be intermittent (or intense for only limited and segmented periods of time).
This conceptualization of the demand for labor flows from a relatively straightforward analysis of the interaction among industry, enterprise, and labor process as determinant factors. What remains problematic is labor supply: to wit, how was a labor force created? And how was it constructed so as to satisfy the demands of burgeoning agricultural enterprises?
The development of this agricultural economy fostered a variety of strategies for organizing and utilizing labor. However, two modal forms of labor organization emerged. The first, prevalent among tenant farms and small family operations, engaged the family itself as a means by which to organize and extract labor. That is, within the context of a heavy emphasis on seasonal cash-farming, family members could be trained in the totality of production skills and maintained to be available despite the periodic application of those skills. Equally important, if one leaves aside the issue of inheritance as a form of return on labor investment, the labor of children could be remunerated at less than its market value. That is, the nonmarket character of the social and economic exchange between parents and children facilitated the employment of children's skilled labor at a fraction of its market value. A marketization of that relationship would have altered considerably the social and economic relations of production. However, the normative bonds of family and the likelihood of return on labor investment (i.e., in terms of inheritance of property) provided the inducements necessary to sustain the nonmarket exchange.
The second strategy of labor organization focused on the recruitment of labor that could be available in steady supply but that would be only intermittently employed by any one organization. Rather than acquire or train labor skilled in the totality of production activities, as in the family labor system, firms sought instead to simply avail themselves of sufficient quantities of labor for specific activities and limited periods of time. The strategy sought, in effect, to externalize the uncertainties of weather, market price, and seasonality onto the labor force. Thus, no individual organization would be
saddled with the responsibility of supporting skilled labor for which there was no productive employment. The problem of steady employment would have to be solved by the workers themselves. Such a strategy was employed by larger firms and by those which had grown beyond the capacity of family labor. It is this latter strategy for meeting labor demand which is critical to the understanding of the organization of work and labor markets in southwestern agriculture.
A seasonal or periodic demand for labor is not peculiar to the history of agricultural production. Indeed, many industries have been characterized by regular periods of high and low labor demand. The construction industry, as Stinchcombe (1959) has pointed out, is marked by both fluctuations in market demand and seasonality in production. However, organizational response, and the response of the workers themselves, to fluctuations in the construction industry differ markedly from that found in agriculture. Stinchcombe, in comparing the administration of construction and manufacturing industries, argues that the reliance on teams of highly skilled workers to both interpret and execute complicated demands in construction represents a rational form of administering production (1959:168–187). While Stinchcombe underemphasized the importance of workers' organization in protection of their market position, the pattern of "craft" administration in construction enables firms to avail themselves of highly valuable labor when it is needed—at wage levels sufficiently high to sustain workers during periods of low employment—and to disemploy it when unneeded.
A different practice emerged in agriculture. In place of highly skilled labor, firms sought to acquire labor skilled in very limited aspects of the production process. Instead of paying a high price for labor skilled external to the organization or investing in the training of workers in the totality of production tasks, agricultural firms sought instead to minimize costs of training labor by reducing or limiting the skills required in production. This approach combined a relatively unsophisticated division of labor, that is, a division of labor based on the temporal isolation of activities and the performance of unskilled chores during periods of peak
labor demand (e.g., planting, weeding and harvesting), with a demand for undifferentiated gangs of workers to carry out those simple tasks. Workers would be hired for the duration of planting or harvesting (which could last a few days or several weeks) and then would be sent on their way.
The Politically Mediated Labor Market
The demand for labor in the mid-1800s was satisfied in a variety of ways. Family farms carried out most chores themselves, hiring labor on occasion from other farm families when harvests did not overlap. Other, larger enterprises sought out Native Americans from the abandoned missions and Chinese workers who had left railroad construction projects in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona (McWilliams, 1971:58–67).
As farmlands were improved and market possibilities expanded with better transport facilities and urbanization, the demand for labor increased. Indeed, as viewed in the late 1860s, the only real obstacle to further growth in the agricultural economy was labor (McWilliams, 1976:152). The extreme importance of adequate and timely supplies of labor was accentuated by the sensitivity of crops to temperature variations (which could hasten or delay a harvest by several weeks) and by the economic vulnerability of many firms to the loss of all or a portion of their seasonal output. The uncertainties of weather and market price argued against the creation of stable and permanent employment of the labor necessary to work only two to five months out of the year. Equally important, the investment in sufficient numbers of skilled or, at least, permanent employees would make employers vulnerable to wage negotiation or strikes at harvest time.
While regional demands for labor were satisfied by using local labor pools through the 1860s, a regularized labor system began to take shape in the latter part of the decade. At root was the disemployment of large numbers of Chinese immigrant workers following the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1860 (London and Anderson, 1970:7–8). Though state and federal legislators helped to stimulate the movement of the Chinese into agricultural labor markets
through direct importation, another issue was also important in the creation of that labor pool: opposition among domestic white workers and unions to the potential use of the Chinese as replacement labor in the expanding factories and mines (McWilliams, 1971:67–109). The militance of both organized labor and urban merchants (who feared competition from Chinese entrepreneurs) helped close off alternative employment to fieldwork. Furthermore, the lack of political rights and the generally low status of the Chinese made them virtually incapable of mounting a sustained battle against either labor or agricultural capital. As early as 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese immigrants would be restricted in their legal and political rights along with blacks and Indians (McWilliams, 1971:68). Thus, the Chinese formed the core of the first regularized supply of labor for agriculture.
The history of the Chinese labor force is important at several levels. First, the availability of Chinese labor facilitated the expansion of agricultural production. The large and relatively stable labor pool spurred investments in land improvement and increased plantings. As McWilliams notes, "The value of California farm land came to be capitalized, ultimately, upon the basis of actual and anticipated profits accruing from the extensive use of cheap labor." The amount of acreage under irrigation climbed steadily in the 1870s and 1880s as did the volume of fruits and vegetables marketed and sold to the canneries (Taylor and Vasey, 1936a , 1936b ). The expanding agricultural economy of the Southwest therefore came to bank heavily on the availability of Chinese labor.
Second, the vulnerable political and economic position of the Chinese workers served not only to limit their alternatives in employment but also to undermine their capacity to bargain over wages and working conditions. Backed by local police and merchants dependent on farm business, employers dictated the terms of employment to Chinese gangs and enforced the movement of workers from one production area to the next. Formal and informal committees of ranchers organized to formulate "acceptable" wage scales in order to prevent price competition in their own ranks (Fisher,
1953:chap. 5; McWilliams, 1971:74). These committees, in turn, became the foundation for later cooperative labor supply and union-busting efforts.
Third, low wages, unsanitary conditions, and migrancy combined with the already disadvantaged position of the Chinese to attach a low status to farm work in general. Farm work (particularly that of hired labor) had historically been viewed two ways in the United States: as a temporary station occupied by younger men trying to make a stake in order to purchase their own land, or a condition of servitude characterized by indentured labor and slavery. The Chinese farm worker was mired between the two statuses: never openly referred to as a slave but never as highly valued socially as a hired hand on his way to becoming a farmer. Differences in language and custom further isolated the Chinese. Because the immigrants accepted the brutal conditions of employment out of need and powerlessness, growers and rural populations came to view their (i.e., the Chinese) migrancy and low living standards as a group trait rather than a condition of employment. Adaptive behavior became a symbol of the inner character of the workers themselves. Equally important, that negative connotation (along with the undesirable conditions of employment) served to discourage the influx of domestic workers who might have been able to demand an upgrading of conditions (McWilliams, 1971:76; London and Anderson, 1970:chap. 1).
The Southwest's growing agricultural economy thus was fueled by the creation of an abundant and politically ostracized supply of low-status labor. However, the actual construction of a labor system, that is, an organized system of labor recruitment and allocation, did not develop until the supply of Chinese workers became problematic.
The opening rounds in the battle over Chinese labor were fired as the giant railroad projects declined in the 1870s and Chinese workers began to spill into urban centers, especially San Francisco, and into the mining districts. Organized Anglo workers in the cities and mining districts confronted the dilemma of wage competition and undertook a campaign of harassment against the Chinese. The entrapment of citizen
workers in a contest with Chinese immigrants fueled union opposition to legal protections for aliens and contributed to the xenophobia and anti-black bias that characterized segments of the labor movement in other regions of the country (see Bonacich, 1976, analysis of the role of white labor unions in the curtailment of employment of black workers during the same period). In an effort to shore up their endangered labor market position, Anglo unions terrorized Chinese workers, struck businesses and mines employing the Chinese, and boycotted goods produced by the immigrants.
Unions were not alone in their opposition. Small manufacturers who were incapable of withstanding strikes and boycotts and who could not use Chinese labor as efficiently as larger firms joined the fight against the importation of Chinese immigrants (McWilliams, 1971:72–74; Majka and Majka, 1982:21–36). Employers in the service sector who found themselves in competition with Chinese entrepreneurs pressed for restrictions on the immigrants' entry into business. Urban politicians, in the name of civic betterment and labor peace, sought to appease unions and employers by removing Chinese settlers and prohibiting farm workers from "wintering" in the cities. Finally, small farmers who relied on little or no hired labor suffered from the deflated market prices for their crops resulting from the low cost of Chinese labor. The campaign of political pressure and harassment culminated with congressional action in 1882 to suspend Chinese immigration. It was followed by the Immigration Act of 1885, which prohibited the use of foreign contract labor (London and Anderson, 1970:8).
Though the tumult over Chinese labor created significant economic and political headaches for agriculture, the large employers and processors of agricultural goods were not bereft of resources or political support. Furthermore, while the Chinese experience demonstrated the vulnerability of agricultural enterprises to fluctuations in labor supply, it did not prompt a decrease in the scale of production units or in the intensity of production. Rather, the exclusion of the Chinese accentuated the importance of the large producers to the regional and national economies. Uncertainties in the
market for fruits and vegetables resulted in higher prices for consumers in the expanding urban markets. The sugar beet industry in the Southwest, which had already come to prominence for the national economy, appeared directly threatened by the collapse of the Chinese labor supply. The railroads, which had expanded broadly into the rural areas of California, banked heavily on the commissions they charged for transportation and crop brokering and on the inflated value of land they had acquired as right-of-way.
Faced with the potential for considerable growth in an expanding economy yet limited by the curbs of Chinese immigration, large employers, processors, and their financial backers sought to replace the laissez-faire politics of labor supply with a more systematic approach to creating and maintaining adequate sources of labor. Labor recruitment organizations, which had previously been regional in character, began to make linkages across production areas and crops (Chambers, 1952). Statewide conventions of growers met to discuss state and federal legislative strategies (Fisher, 1953:103–105). State and local political action committees were formed and funded by membership dues and contributions from the financially powerful canneries, refineries, railroads, and banks (Chamber, 1952).
While the Chinese experience demonstrated the vulnerability of agricultural enterprises to fluctuations in labor supply, it did not promote a decrease in the scale of production units or in the intensity of production. As suggested above, the exclusion of the Chinese instead accentuated the importance of the large producers to the economy of the Southwest. As the furor over Chinese labor slowly subsided, consortia of large farmers, canners, and refiners (particularly in the rapidly expanding sugar beet industry) sought successfully to open up other labor pools (McWilliams, 1971:105–110). Capitalizing on the economic potential of the domestic sugar market (protected by high tariffs) and the already high level of concentration in the industry, refiners and growers persuaded Congress to sanction the importation of Japanese and Mexican workers (McWilliams, 1971:105–110). By 1910, over 70,000 Japanese and nearly 100,000 Mexican workers were
weeding and harvesting southwestern crops (McWilliams, 1971:106).
With frequently successful efforts on the part of Japanese workers to bargain over wages and to acquire their own land, employers focused their energies on establishing a more durable labor system built around Mexican nationals (McWilliams, 1971:110–116). Acquiring Mexican labor had never been a problem for growers: poorly fed peasants and refugees from the battles of the Mexican Revolution streamed across the border in large numbers (see Gamio, 1930). But to simultaneously insulate the labor supply (i.e., restrict its employment to agriculture) and prevent it from becoming a political and economic burden on local communities, external supervision of the labor force was needed. Thus, in 1926 a grower spokesman in Washington, D.C., urged Congress to "get us Mexicans and keep them out of our schools and out of our social problems" (cited in McWilliams, 125). Congress responded by lifting sanctions on the influx of Mexican workers and gave local communities the right to refuse relief to unemployed Mexican migrants (London and Anderson, 1970:28).
At the same time that lobbying efforts at the federal level were bearing fruit, employers expanded and intensified their organization at the state and local levels. In the period of the 1920s and 1930s, powerful employer associations emerged in the Southwest. Among the most influential were the Agricultural Producers Labor Committee, the Western Growers Protective Association (of which most lettuce firms were members), the San Joaquin Valley Labor Bureau, and the Associated Farmers (McWilliams, 1971:188–95; Fisher, 1953:103–118; and Glass, 1966). With overlapping memberships, these organizations enrolled the majority of large agricultural producers in the Southwest.
Though some of these organizations, like the Western Growers, ostensibly sought to regulate marketing procedures, their primary focus was on regulating labor. For example, the Associated Farmers grew out of a collaborative effort of the California Farm Bureau Federation and the state Chamber of Commerce to deal specifically with labor issues
(McWilliams, 1971:231). In that regard, they served two major purposes: controlling the supply of labor and prohibiting the entry of unions. Labor supply functions were handled through regional employment centers that generated employer estimates of demand, recruited labor from Mexico, and distributed the workers among firms. Employer organizations also provided staunch and unified opposition to the encroachment of trade unions in the fields. By decrying the "red menace" of communist and socialist unions (e.g., the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packinghouse and Allied Workers, and the Industrial Workers of the World) and declaring their defense of the free farming enterprise, the Associated Farmers, Western Growers, and others marshaled support for continued labor importation and opposition to unionization. Though farm worker organizations occasionally succeeded in winning wage increases, most of their gains were temporary (Jamieson, 1945; Galarza, 1964, 1971; Weiner, 1978; Jenkins and Perrow, 1977; Majka and Majka, 1982).