previous section
1 Citizenship and Labor Supply
next chapter

1
Citizenship and Labor Supply

Introduction

In a lush field of green extending off to the horizon, a harvest crew plods steadily along narrow irrigation furrows. Toward the front of the group, a line of men walks bent at the waist, their arms extended to the ground. Each man repeats the same motion: he grasps a single lettuce head, digs his fingers into the floppy leaves that surround the solid core like enormous green flower petals, and tilts the plant slightly to expose its thick taproot. A quick plunge of his broad knife cleanly severs the root a fraction of an inch above the pebbly clay soil. Lifting the plant with a hand that seems hardly big enough to hold the head securely, he deftly trims the upturned trunk and, with a sharp twist of the wrist, sends the detached wrapper leaves flying in all directions. In a fluid motion, he lays the trimmed lettuce gently on the carpet of discarded leaves and then reaches for the next head. The cycle takes four seconds; it will be repeated more than 5,000 times that day. Trailing behind the leaders, other members of the harvest crew pack and seal the lettuce in cardboard cartons. Their movements are rapid but controlled. In the crew's wake, leaves lie flattened as if mowed by some enormous machine.

Reaching the end of their rows, two men straighten and stare momentarily across the asphalt county road in the direc-


2

tion of another immense green field. Removing his baseball cap slowly and drawing a soiled red bandana across his sweaty brow, Cruz speaks slowly to his companion: "It looks like we'll be over there next week, Miguelito. That is, if it doesn't rain." Miguel, at thirty the younger of the two, rubs the small of his back and nods. "Yeah," he responds, "we'll cut that field and the next one and then next year we'll be back to cut them both again. Only next year it'll be harder. My back will hurt more and my knife won't be as sharp. And," he adds, "the year after that I'll be thirty-two and an old man like you." Laughing in response to the remark, Cruz shifts his gaze to his companion and raises his eyebrows: "Do you think Mexicans wear out faster than other people? Or do we just start out tired?" Cruz acknowledges Miguel's silence with a nod of his own and, donning his cap, turns around to face a new row of lettuce.

Two months earlier in a field not far from the one picked by Cruz, Miguel, and their co-workers, a different harvest crew was at work. They, too, were harvesting lettuce. Unlike Cruz and Miguel's crew, these workers trailed behind a lumbering mechanical contraption called a "wrapping machine." The machine, little more than a sophisticated mobile conveyor belt, makes it possible for some workers to sit and wrap heads of lettuce in plastic wrap before they are packed and shipped. It changes the division of labor employed by Cruz and Miguel to one paced and controlled by gears and motors.

Differences between the crews, however, are more than mechanical: the wrap crew is more than half female and the men are either young (in their teens) and trying to break into the lettuce harvest or much older (mid-forties to sixties) and looking to earn enough to keep themselves and their families going. The men tend not to stay in the crew very long; many of the women, however, have worked in this crew or company for five or more years.

As the wrap machine bounces lazily through the field, its huge tractor tries churning up precisely contoured irrigation furrows, a platoon of workers walks behind cutting the lettuce heads and handing them to the wrappers seated on the machine. The cutters are men and the wrappers women.


3

Several of the women teasingly grill a recent addition to the crew. "Are you sure you're not Mexican?" they asked. "Maybe we'll call you Guero just so you have a Spanish name. 'Bob' isn't a good name for a lechugero (lettuce worker)," offered another woman, La Señora, as everyone called her. The younger men, boys really, and the aging men laughed but did not add anything; several looked away as Guero looked around for some clue about how to respond to the gentle ribbing.

Apparently unable to resist the temptation to continue questioning the embarrassed Guero, La Señora finally discovers he is Anglo and a student who wants to learn about lettuce harvesting. "A student?" she laughs, adding, "The only Anglos I've ever seen out here have been bosses or Communists!" That comment draws a chorus of snickers. Several days later Guero approached La Señiora during a break and asked why she thought Anglos didn't work in the fields. "Why?" she snorted and then answered herself, "Because there are always enough Mexicans to go around. They just whistle across the border and here come ten thousand more hungry people." But, Guero wondered aloud, there are many unemployed people in the United States, too. To that La Señora responded: "But, unemployed Anglos won't work for what they pay us women and they won't work for what illegals get paid. All the ranchers know that."

These comments point to a paradox in work organization found in an important set of agribusiness enterprises in the southwestern United States. Where the trend in recent years has been toward the substitution of harvesting machinery for seasonal labor, producers of head lettuce have persisted in organizing production in a highly labor-intensive fashion. Despite the perishability of the crop, its extreme vulnerability to minute variations in climate, and a seemingly unpredictable market, the lettuce industry hires thousands of farm worker men and women each year to bend, stoop, and cut their way through the fields in a fashion more reminiscent of nineteenth-century farming than twentieth-century agribusiness.


4

Were the lettuce industry populated by small-scale, marginal enterprises, these observations would not be so striking. However, lettuce production in California and Arizona is no marginal business: in 1980 firms in the two states grossed nearly $500 million in total revenues. In an inflationary period in which such gross figures are hard to comprehend, another factor must be taken into account: between 40 and 60 percent of the national market in lettuce has been cornered by four firms (Friedland, Barton, and Thomas, 1981:49; and other calculations provided in chap. 3). Leading firms in the industry obviously are not marginal family enterprises. Instead, they represent examples of some of the most advanced of modern business organizations. As later evidence will suggest, the top lettuce producers are highly profitable, financially prosperous, bureaucratically administered capitalist enterprises. They bear as little resemblance to the prototypical family farm as the corner grocery does to the A&P or Safeway supermarket chains. In fact, the two "giants" of the lettuce (and, for that matter, vegetable) business are organizational extensions of multinational corporations into the fields.

Lettuce, under the guidance of large corporate capital, has ceased to be a seasonal venture. Lettuce is a manufactured commodity grown year-round and channeled to national and international markets. Cultivation and harvesting are scheduled on a long-term basis. Computers monitor output and assist in inventory control. Batteries of telephones and advanced communications equipment connect corporate officers with production supervisors, planning offices, and distant markets. Company planes whisk busy executives from company landing strips in sweltering rural valleys to air-conditioned headquarter complexes. Gone is the farm family, the lettuce patch, and the few "hired hands."

Yet, for all the organizational sophistication surrounding the lettuce business, the harvest labor process remains remarkably "backward." While production orders may emanate from distant corporate offices and sales contracts may be negotiated in plush restaurants, crews of lechugeros push themselves through blistering heat and physical torture to prepare the "green gold" for market. The physical demands


5

of the work alone are reason enough to evoke images of nineteenth-century sweatshops. In the "ground-pack" harvest (the predominant form of harvest work organization) nearly all the work is done by hand. Lechugeros frequently walk stooped through the fields for ten hours a day, six days a week, completing the equivalent of 2,500 toe-touches a day in order to earn a living and get the crop in. Not surprisingly, the ground-pack labor process takes its toll: "careers" in the industry are short and painful, with even the most ardent and committed lechugeros lasting less than fourteen years (on average) in the job.

The economic rewards hardly compensate for the physical destructiveness of the work. On average, even the most productive workers earn less than 30 percent of the average annual wage for manufacturing operatives. Though some lechugeros can earn upward of $500 a week during peak periods, most earn much less. But even those inflated figures fail to take into account important costs: the physical drain of cutting lettuce that prevents full-year employment; the high costs of transportation, food, and shelter accompanying migration between production areas; the expenses of travel from home to work (often a thousand miles between a worker's pemanent residence and some of the work sites); and the nonmonetary but significant costs of separation from home and family while on la corrida (the trail of work in the lettuce harvest).

Despite the fact that lechugeros (especially those who work in the ground-pack harvest) tend to earn more than other farm workers and often proclaim themselves the "champagne of farm labor," higher wages establish a claim for social status only within the farm worker community. The low status of the lechugero and other farm workers is itself the product of a complex interaction among class, ethnic, and organizational factors. In spite of the economic success of the organizations that employ them, lettuce workers face a hostile and discriminatory environment when they seek housing, police and government services, and, most directly, better wages and working conditions.

For many, the glaring contrast in economic position and


6

social status between agribusiness corporations and farm laborers is not a startling finding. After all, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath , Carey McWilliams's Factories in the Fields , and Edward R. Murrow's documentary "Harvest of Shame" painted similar pictures in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. More recently, the strikes and boycott campaigns marshalled by the United Farm Workers (UFW) union and its leader, Cesar Chavez, brought the plight of southwestern farm workers to national attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even in the lettuce industry—a major focal point of union organizing for over a decade—campesinos (farm workers) continue to struggle for basic economic and political rights and protections.

The paradoxical success of agribusiness in the lettuce industry is further underscored when one looks closer at the labor process. For, although the work is arduous, careers short, and rewards relatively meager, ground-pack harvest crews (which hereafter I will refer to as "ground crews") are remarkably productive and skilled . A ground crew of thirty-six workers can, under normal conditions, cut, pack, and load 3,500 cartons of lettuce per day, that is, enough to fill 31/2 railroad cars (the equivalent of 84,000 heads of lettuce). The efficiency of the crew resides in the precise and controlled division of labor among crew members: workers perform coordinated tasks in such a way as to minimize extraneous movement and thereby establish a high level of synchronization. Since crew members are most often paid on a crew-based piece-rate (so many cents per carton completed), the "collective" skill of the crew unit determines group and individual earnings.

Ground crews in the lettuce harvest therefore present a sharp contrast to the general conception of farm work as unskilled, casual employment. Since the speed and efficiency of the harvest is a function of the skills both of individuals and the collective, the crew-based labor process more closely resembles the traditional organization of work in many mining, construction, lumbering, and longshoring settings. In other words, the organization of lettuce harvesting places considerable emphasis on the stability and experience of crew members in their jobs and in their relations with one another. And, as I will suggest later, the emphasis on stability and


7

experience comes from both the company and the crew: workers derive economic and social gains from cohesiveness; companies get higher output from experienced crews. Ground crews are, quite literally, extremely productive "social" harvesting machines whose performance is critical to the timely production and marketing of a highly valuable crop.

In combination, these characteristics of the ground crews suggest that individual and, more directly, crew skills are highly valuable to lettuce firms. The centrality of these crews to the harvest of a profitable but perishable crop suggests that lechugeros should occupy a strong labor market position. And, to some extent, they do; according to UFW sources, nearly 70 percent of the lettuce industry is unionized. However, thousands of lettuce workers and nonunionized farm laborers in the Southwest lack the organizational means by which to negotiate effectively over wages, work rules, and the conditions of employment.

The situation encountered by the ground crews of the lettuce industry raises a number of important questions: How can agribusiness firms in the lettuce industry avail themselves of such valuable labor at so low a price? How can workers organized into skilled crews be denied the ability to claim the status and reward commonly associated with skill? What factors account for managerial control and worker consent?

The preceding questions capture but half the problem. The ground-crew harvest accounts for nearly 80 percent of the lettuce cut and packed in the Southwest; the remaining 20 percent is harvested under different conditions, in the process described earlier as wrapping. This method of harvesting exhibits characteristics of the ground crew: a group of workers (usually 33 to a crew) cuts, packs, and loads lettuce using only the most rudimentary tools. In contrast to the ground-pack, however, the "wrap-pack" inserts a new activity—enveloping heads of lettuce in individual plastic packages-and a new source of coordination—a large, mobile conveyor apparatus. The wrap-pack harvest removes from the crew the critical element of mutual coordination: the pace and coordination of work is controlled not by crew members but by the mobile conveyor (see chap. 3 for a diagram). In other words, though the machine does not do anything to the


8

lettuce other than move it from one work station to another (and is therefore not a harvesting machine), the machine coordinates cutting, wrapping, packing, and loading and regulates the work pace.

With the breaking down of the skill of the ground crew (especially the collective dimension of skill), harvest workers participate in a different kind of labor process. In contrast to a crew-based piece-rate, wrap crew workers are paid an hourly wage rate much lower than the potential hourly equivalent in the ground crew. Individual proficiency in a job or crew skill do not constitute a basis for appreciably higher earnings. Workers need have nothing more than a passing acquaintance with one another and a few hours practice at their individual tasks for the crew to achieve near-average productivity. Yet, the continued appearance of an adequate supply of workers to fill crew positions is no less important in the wrap crew than it is in the ground crew. And, even though the work has been "deskilled" (to use Braverman's term) through the introduction of capital investments in machines and auxiliary equipment, employers in the lettuce industry seek to achieve continuity in the makeup of the wrap crews. That is, for the agribusiness employer as for the owner-manager of a McDonald's fast-food franchise, there is an organizational advantage in having the same workers performing, day in and day out, the mindless and repetitive tasks of cutting lettuce and frying Big Macs (Boas and Chain, 1976:41–43).

The situation encountered in the wrap-pack harvest thus raises another set of important questions: How can these machine-paced crews operate productively if, as is generally presumed, labor is casual and uncommitted? Alternatively, how can the firms that employ those machines to harvest this valuable crop be assured that labor (even the same workers) will show up consistently?

Stratification In The Workplace And In Society

Although the preceding questions are drawn from the case of the lettuce industry, they are connected to a number of


9

important issues in the study of work and stratification. Most important among those issues, especially in light of recent developments in Marxian and neo-Marxian labor market and labor process theories, is the relationship between stratification in the workplace and stratification in society. The corpus of research on dual and segmented labor markets (Edwards, Reich, and Gordon, 1975; Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, 1982) has stimulated much greater concern with the consequences of change in economic organizations for how work is organized, how jobs are structured, and, ultimately, how the working class is divided economically and politically. Likewise, recent studies of the labor process under capitalism (Braverman, 1975; Edwards, 1979; and Burawoy, 1979) have focused considerable attention on how the dynamics of technological development and class relations in the work-place affect the contours of stratification in society. Yet both approaches have shown a measure of insensitivity to the interactive character of problems of work organization and control in the labor process and problems of social and political inequality outside the enterprise. The lesser emphasis or, in some cases, lack of emphasis on the manner in which social and political institutions can shape the labor process derives largely from a general adherence to a unidirectional theory of determination that sees economic structural arrangements as molding or shaping the "rest of society." This approach, I will argue, distracts us from the way in which labor process and labor markets, on the one side, and social and political institutions, on the other, structure one another . That is, rather than rest with the argument that class relations embedded in the labor process determine the structure of social and political institutions—and with them the conditions necessary for the reproduction of those class relations—I will contend that the structure of the labor process can be influenced by social relations and social processes external to it.

More concretely, I will argue that theories of labor market segmentation and labor process organization often fail to account for historically persistent inequalities by race, gender, and citizenship precisely because they rely upon a strict economic determination of social and political inequality. By


10

looking primarily to the workplace to explain stratification in society and thereby promoting a "class-first" (Hartmann and Markusen, 1980) analysis, these theories find it difficult to deal with inequality built around categories of race, gender, and citizenship as anything other than functions or functional aspects of class relations. By limiting political economy in this fashion, institutional arrangements such as are found in the welfare state, the family, and national state systems are transformed into dependent entities consigned theoretically to "superstructure," the "sphere of reproduction," or the "social structure of accumulation" and are made visible only when needed to drive home a point about structural issues.

In an effort to rectify these shortcomings, I will emphasize the interactive character of labor processes, labor markets, and social structure and point to a reformulation of the argument which allows for a more systematic integration of nonclass categories of inequality.

Before proceeding, however, it is necessary to show more directly the linkage between the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter and the issues raised regarding labor market and labor process theories.

Initial Considerations

In undertaking this study, I had the benefit of prior exposure to research on work organization in agriculture—specifically, the processing tomato industry (Friedland and Barton, 1975: chap. IV) and other segments of agricultural production in California (Thomas, 1977). The tomato industry study and a later work focusing more directly on the lettuce industry (Friedland, Barton, and Thomas, 1981) sought to uncover the conditions leading up to and resulting from harvest mechanization. In both studies, labor market and labor supply issues seemed directly connected to the organization of work. In the tomato industry, a remarkably rapid shift to mechanical harvesting appeared to be precipitated by a reduction in the supply of braceros (contract laborers from Mexico), even though the technology for mechanical harvesting had been unpopular and seen as too cumbersome by many agricultural


11

employers (Friedland and Barton, 1975:20–34). In the lettuce industry, the technology for mechanical harvesting had been (and continues to be) in place, ready to be employed as an alternative to a highly labor-intensive harvesting system. Yet for all the turmoil surrounding unionization efforts and lettuce boycotts (Levy, 1975; Jenkins and Perrow, 1977; Friedland and Thomas, 1974; and Thomas and Friedland, 1982, for analyses of the battles for unionization of lettuce workers in California)[1] , the mechanical alternative has yet to be deployed. In assessing the conditions that might lead to harvest mechanization, Friedland, Barton, and Thomas (1981: chap. 3) pointed to the importance of labor supply considerations for analyzing methods of work organization. However, an important question remained: what was it about the labor system that made managerial control over the harvest labor process unproblematic, even in the wake of high levels of unionization?

For many readers, it might seem that two obvious factors provide the explanation: (1) that the geographic proximity of the American Southwest and Mexico offers a pool of cheap labor making possible the paradoxical coincidence of profitable firms and low-wage labor; and/or (2) that something about the business of agriculture sets it apart from the conditions, and therefore the explanations, of industrial organization. To some extent these factors will be shown to be important; after all, the unique setting of southwestern agriculture, especially with respect to labor supply issues, is not the same as one encounters in the New England region. However, these factors provide only a very partial answer to the questions I have asked.

In the first case, the geographic proximity of Mexico would seem a logical explanation for why Mexican workers have played an important role in the historical development of the southwestern agricultural economy. Taylor and Vasey (1936a and 1936b ), London and Anderson (1970), and Galarza (1964, 1971) have documented the general significance of alien workers to the region's agricultural history. But arguments about geographic proximity do not inherently explain why Mexicans, for example, should have been more "attractive"


12

workers than other disadvantaged or negatively privileged workers (e.g., blacks or women). Nor does this argument explain why, in different historical periods, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and U.S. workers competed with Mexicans as the principal source of farm labor. Moreover, it does not explain why women have numerically dominated some segments of agricultural production while men dominated in others.

Macrostructural analyses provided by Portes (1978), Jenkins (1978), Cornelius (1976), and others have moved to overcome the shortcomings of this explanation by emphasizing the economic disparities between the United States and Central and South America which give rise to an important "push" complement to the "pull" factors of employment in U.S. agriculture. These arguments are helpful in understanding how uneven development contributes to the formation of labor pools. However, they only explain how uneven development makes possible the employment of foreign workers, not why those workers show up in the jobs they do, what the effect of their presence is, or whether the actual demand for labor is as undifferentiated as the supply would seem to be. And, equally important for our concern with issues of stratification in the workplace and in society, neither this argument nor the one based on geographic proximity attempts to more systematically analyze the relationship between citizenship status and labor supply—even though both refer implicitly to issues of citizenship. This is especially the case when undocumented immigrants ("illegal aliens") are seen to play an important role in the contemporary setting.

The second explanation, based on considerations about agriculture as an exceptional system of production, argues that characteristics of agricultural production distinguish it so greatly from other economic sectors and production processes that efforts to analyze it using industrial categories prove fruitless. Factors such as the perishability of the product, the time gap between the principal production activities (e.g., planting, cultivating, and harvesting), the relative immobility of' agricultural firms, and the greater uncertainties brought on by plant biology and weather have historically been used


13

by agricultural interests as an argument against their inclusion under generic policies, such as coverage under the stipulations of the National Labor Relations Act (Friedland and Thomas, 1974:52–54). Though on the surface this characterization would seem to have little to do with explaining the relationship between labor processes and labor markets, it does by virtue of giving the appearance that analyses of agricultural enterprises, labor processes, and labor markets ought to be made apart from industry. Even Carey McWilliams's (1977) stirring imagery of "factories in the fields" could not budge many policy makers (or rural sociologists, for that matter) from believing that agriculture was indeed different. Until recent developments in the political economy and the sociology of agriculture (Buttel and Newby, 1980; Friedland, 1979; Friedmann, 1981; and Buttel, Ehrensaft, and Friedland, forthcoming), such a characterization went largely unchallenged.

In the wake of these studies, however, two implications must be considered. First, a number of agricultural enterprises and commodity groups have been shown to be characterized by organizational structures and labor processes that very closely approximate relations of production and employment found in industrial settings (Friedland, Barton, and Thomas, 1981; Hightower, 1972; Mines and Anzaldua, 1982; and Scheuring and Thompson, 1978). Second, comparative works by Friedland, Barton, and Thomas (1981) and Mann and Dickinson (1980) have pointed to considerable variation by enterprise and commodity group. Moreover, Friedmann (1981) has called for distinctions between industrial agriculture and simple commodity production—reflecting more and less direct involvement in capitalist relations of production and exchange. These studies not only question the exceptional character of agriculture as a production system and the undifferentiated character of agricultural enterprises; they further argue for sensitivity to the differentiation among segments of agriculture in terms of demands for labor. With regard to the latter point in particular, they argue that differential needs for labor have developed within agriculture which cannot be satisfied through a homogeneous supply of


14

unskilled workers. If, indeed, there is a differentiated demand for labor according to levels of skill, degrees of stability, or other characteristics, how are those jobs filled? Moreover, their research has the practical implication of questioning whether theories of sectoral splits in the economy and corresponding labor market segmentation are capable of providing an explanation for the coincidence of large-scale firms and low-paid labor—for example, as found in the case of' the lettuce industry. That is, sectoral theories have tended to categorize agriculture as part of the "competitive" sector of the economy (see, e.g., Beck, Horan, and Tolbert, 1978; Oster, 1979; O'Connor, 1973; and Edwards, 1979) when, in fact, segments of it, like the lettuce industry, may be dominated by firms whose characteristics appear much more consistent with "monopoly" or "core" organizations than with "competitive" or "peripheral" firms.

Segmented Labor Market Approaches

Since the concern here is to analyze the connections between organizational structure, labor process, and labor market, it is instructive to turn to theories of segmentation in labor markets and labor processes for aid in the development of an explanatory framework. Works on segmentation by Gordon, Edwards, and Reich (1982) and on labor processes by Braver-man (1975), Edwards (1979), and Burawoy (1979), though differing in terms of focus and conclusions, share a number of' analytic concerns useful to this study: (1) the effect of changes in the economic structure for the organization of work and labor markets; (2) the factors underlying differentiation in labor processes and labor markets; and (3) to a varying degree, the political aspects of industrial organization, especially the sources of differential amounts of power between workers and managers and its effect on control over work. In this section I will turn to a consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of segmented labor market theory; in the section that follows I will undertake a parallel consideration of labor process theory.


15

In recent years, labor market theory has been expanded in an attempt to develop explanations for a number of problems long ignored by neoclassical economics: for example, the persistence of poverty, differential levels and types of employment for different population groups (especially blacks, women, and Latinos), creation of different career trajectories for members of the traditional working class, and variation in employment opportunities and jobs by organizational type (Gordon, 1972). The effort to link labor market processes to social stratification began with the pioneering efforts of Averitt (1968), Bluestone (1970), Doeringer and Piore (1975), and Gordon (1972). Their investigations into the linkage between opportunity structures (as represented in job openings in different types of organizations) and poverty were built on sectoral analyses of the economy. Averitt and Bluestone proposed dual and tripartite models of economic organization, claiming that the division of the economy into different kinds of enterprises—differentiated along the lines of size, market share, and capitalization—had resulted in radically different opportunity structures for workers. They counterposed, for example, the relative affluence of workers in heavily unionized, large-scale firms with the low wages and unprotected positions of workers employed by less substantial, nonunion enterprises.

Doeringer and Piore (1975), looking much more closely at the employment and training practices developed by those large-scale firms, argued that the traditional notions of labor market operation had been undercut by the appearance of a division between internal and external labor markets. Internal labor markets, they contended, had evolved within many large enterprises, especially those located in basic industries like steel and auto, into administrative structures designed to shelter firms from the vagaries of external labor market operation (especially fluctuations in supply and demand and the difficulties of acquiring skilled labor in the external labor market) and to provide workers with a measure of protection from competition with outside labor market participants. They further noted that internal labor markets resulted from the construction of durable relationships between management


16

and organized labor, that is, collective bargaining and seniority systems had pushed for the creation of bureaucratic rules and procedures for the allocation of union members into slots within the organization. The upshot of internal labor market construction was the creation of barriers to entry into some of the most prosperous and highly rewarded occupations within the overall economy. Entry-level positions were concentrated at the lower ranks of the blue-collar hierarchy and reward systems (especially in terms of nonwage benefits such as insurance and pensions) were oriented toward maximizing stability in the individual firm's labor force.

Though theories of' internal labor market existence and operation had predated the work of Doeringer and Piore (Kerr, 1954) and Marxist economists such as Baran and Sweezy (1968) and Dobb (1963) had drawn attention to the bifurcation of the economy into monopoly and competitive sectors, the combination of these approaches, particularly in the work of Gordon (1972), Edwards, Reich, and Gordon (1975), Edwards (1975, 1979), and Gordon, Edwards, and Reich (1982), resulted in a new body of research and a new theoretical approach to the relationship between economic organizations and labor markets. "Dual labor market" and later "segmented labor market" theories sought to draw attention to the relationship between economic segmentation among firms, segmentation in labor markets, and divisions within the working class. This approach, posing an alternative to the traditional Marxist model of a homogeneous or homogenizing working class, gained popularity in part because it offered a common framework for discussing economic processes and social stratification. Sociologists, in particular, began using the language, if not always the meaning, of dual and segmented labor market theory to reorient traditional approaches to numerous topics, for example, income determination analyses (Beck, Horan, and Tolbert, 1978; Bibb and Form, 1977; Wright and Perrone, 1977; Baron and Bielby, 1980). Such a reorientation meant that many more sociologists looked to these neo-Marxian theoretical formulations and away from the neoclassical assumptions of competition within labor markets and market determination of


17

wages and opportunities (see Kalleberg and Sorenson, 1979, for a review of the breadth and impact of dual/segmented labor market theory on sociology, and Gordon, 1972, and Cain, 1976, for reviews of the debate engendered within economics).

In response to critics who argued that dual labor market theory did not deserve status as a theory (see Cain's defense of neoclassical approaches, 1976:1235–1257), Edwards (1979) and Gordon, Edwards, and Reich (1982), in particular, extended the original arguments into a historical analysis of the interaction of organizational structure (among economic enterprises), organization of the labor process and attendant systems of control, and segmentation in labor markets. The thrust of their argument can be summarized in the following propositions:

 

(1)

that the segmentation of the economy into core (large-scale, highly capitalized, and oligopolistic) enterprises and peripheral (small-scale, less capitalized, and competitive) enterprises represented the working out of capitalist economic development proceeding through the combined concentration and centralization of capital as a means by which to avoid a declining rate of profit;

(2)

that the concentration and centralization of capital in core enterprises had been brought about in part by their increasing market shares and in part by the development of more and more productive forms of work organization;

(3)

that processes of concentration and centralization and the introduction of more productive forms of work organization had resulted in higher levels of concentration of workers in large, mechanized firms and a greater capacity on the part of workers not only to view themselves as collectivities but also to express common interests in the form of unions and union contracts;

(4)

that the size and scale of core enterprises, combined with the increasing militance of workers, necessitated the development of new forms of control within those


18
 
 

organizations, that traditional mechanisms of control ("simple forms of control" manifested in paternalism, strong foremen, and coercion) had been undermined by the increasing size and complexity of the organizations, and had to be replaced by "technical" forms of control, manifested in greater subdivision of tasks and machine-pacing coupled with wage increases tied to increased productivity;

(5)

that increasing internalization of business-related functions and the growing complexity of work processes and products resulted in the development of new hybrid occupations within these organizations (e.g., engineers, staff functions such as sales, marketing, research and design, labor relations and personnel) which, along with growth within the services sector (especially in financial institutions, retail and wholesale trade, education and government), resulted in the establishment of a new set of positions to be filled by labor market participants—particularly in secretarial, clerical, and other so-called white-collar jobs;

(6)

that the increasingly organizationally specific character of' many of these occupations within the core enterprises, the higher level of educational training (or credentialing) required to fill white-collar positions, and the creation of' new, service-oriented enterprises (e.g., specializing in the production of "soft" products such as computer software, basic technological research, etc.) required not only new techniques for management but also new forms of control over employees—resulting in the rise of "bureaucratic" control systems, organized principally around the administrative structures for labor allocation Doeringer and Piore describe as internal labor markets;

(7)

these factors in combination have resulted in an economic landscape characterized by one hill and a number of hillocks—with core enterprises constituting the hill in terms of their economic leverage, their share of the labor force, and their impact on the economy, and semiperipheral and peripheral firms constituting the


19
 
 

hillocks, with their lesser levels of organizational complexity, fewer numbers of employees, lesser technological sophistication, and less rewarding (in terms of pay, job security, and promotional possibilities) job opportunities.

Their cumulative impact, according to Edwards (1979), has been a segmentation in labor market structure brought about by a segmentation in demand. Thus, in a broad historical sweep, this approach appears to have brought together models of economic, organizational, and social change.

In their later work, Gordon, Edwards, and Reich elaborate this view by bringing in arguments concerning development stages of capitalism and long swings in the capitalist economy. Their most important addition from the point of view of our analysis, however, is a broad conception of the arrangement of social, political, and market institutions necessary to sustain the process of capital accumulation: what they refer to as the "social structure of accumulation" (1982:9–10, 22–26). The integration of a social structure of accumulation is a critical amendment to the model inasmuch as it allows that social and political institutions and structures may potentially influence the process of capital accumulation itself. In earlier formulations (especially Edwards, Reich, Gordon, 1975, and to a lesser but still significant extent, Edwards, 1979) it appeared that the structure of the economy massively determined the shape of the "rest of society." The analysis of social structure and its constituent elements (e.g., family, religious institutions, and community forms) and political structure (i.e., the state and governing apparatus) was reduced to an assessment of their functionality with respect to capital accumulation.

In practice, however, specifying that a social structure of accumulation exists somewhat apart from the accumulation process does not proceed far enough. That is, unless the analysis of capitalist economic development is accompanied by a systematic study of social structure under capitalism, then such important and historically visible forms of inequality as racial, sexual, and political stratification tend to revert to their functional form. This is particularly critical in the


20

stage of segmentation where race, gender, and citizenship play a particularly important role in the division of the working class.

The stage of segmentation, charted by Gordon, Edwards, and Reich as roughly beginning in the 1920s (1982:chap. 5), is depicted as the period in which differentiation in economic enterprises, labor processes, and labor markets emerges with greatest strength. It is a stage marked by the development of three analytically separable labor market structures (primary, subordinate primary, and secondary) and, significantly, by a disproportional representation of disadvantaged members of society—blacks, women, Latinos, and immigrants—in the lowest paying, lowest status, and least stable (secondary) jobs. While the empirical evidence provided by Gordon et al. and others is substantial, what continues to be unclear is why those workers should show up in those jobs. Or, more generally, we are led to ask: where in the social structure of accumulation—what set of processes and institutions, what set of historical developments, and in what relation to the accumulation process—do we locate the process and the purpose behind the creation of those disadvantaged statuses? Without a more systematic and simultaneous analysis of the interaction between social and economic structures, the appearance of these disadvantaged categories of labor seems conjunctural (i.e., entirely circumstantial) or functional (i.e., entirely determined in form and content by the accumulation process).

Work and Control in Capitalist Industry

Recent analyses of the organization of work in advanced capitalist industry have succeeded in breathing life back into the sociology of work and stratification, particularly in the United States. Three major efforts, in particular, have opened new avenues of inquiry. First, Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital (1975) presented a sweeping analysis of the social and organizational forces mediating technological change ("the degradation of work" of the book's subtitle) in the twentieth century. With an emphasis on how the control


21

over work is made possible through the separation of conception and execution, Braverman made a significant attempt to extend Marx's theory of the labor process (Marx, 1975:357–514) through the era of monopoly capitalism. Second, Richard Edwards undertakes in Contested Terrain (1979) a historical and sociological analysis of the changing organization of work in twentieth-century United States with an eye to revealing shifts in the foundation of managerial authority. Piecing together industrial data against a backdrop of developments in the general political economy of U.S. industry, Edwards concludes that the segmentation of economic organizations (core and peripheral) has transformed managerial mechanisms of control from personal to bureaucratic authority. Third, Michael Burawoy's Manufacturing Consent (1979) challenges many of the assumptions of prior work in industrial sociology, as well as some of Braverman's, through an analysis of how labor's willingness to participate in its own exploitation is "manufactured" through the organization of production. By asking "why do people work as hard as they do?" Burawoy avoids the traditional assumptions of harmony or conflict between managers and workers prevalent in earlier researches and constructs a theory that argues for the analysis of how force and consent are combined in the labor process.

Each of these writers has attempted to make explicit connections between changes in the structure of the capitalist economy and strategies of control in the workplace. All three argue that the development of large-scale, highly capitalized, monopoly-sector firms has made it possible for some capitalists to pay higher wages, offer more extensive benefits, and thus secure higher levels of stability and commitment from their workforce.

There is, however, a catch to contemporary labor process research and theory. While analysts such as Braverman, Edwards, and Burawoy have been quick to point out that the labor process in late twentieth-century capitalism differs significantly from Marx's nineteenth-century observations, their theories have by and large sought to squeeze twentieth-century observations into a nineteenth-century model. To be more precise, Braverman, Edwards, and Burawoy focus on


22

the transformation of the labor process coincident with the transformation of the capitalist economy and enterprise. Each offers a distinct approach to the context and consequences of the rise of large-scale, monopolistic organizations. Yet all three largely adhere to a model of society which places primary emphasis on class as the fundamental category of social life and social action and which locates the origin of inequality in the labor process. To substantiate this argument, let me consider each one in turn.

Though Braverman's argument seems to capture the historical sweep of capitalist development, a major theoretical problem remains: he fails to provide an adequate explanation for the continuing division of the population along the lines of race, gender, and, increasingly, citizenship status. Race and gender inequality is subsumed under the more general, but less useful, rubric of the industrial reserve army of labor (pp. 377–401). For Braverman, the industrial reserve army of labor is a segment of the working class created and sustained as a buffer for the oscillating and uneven development of capitalism. This "relative surplus population" (p. 386) is composed, in part, of those people unemployed as a result of business cycles, technological change, and regional or sectoral uneven development. However, a significant segment of that labor pool is accounted for by those for whom steady employment is rare or unattainable or those who are crowded into relatively limited niches in the economy (e.g., service, agricultural, or domestic employment). It is in this portion of the industrial reserve army that one finds a disproportionate share of blacks, Hispanics, women, and immigrant workers.

It is, however, precisely this coincidence between nonmarket status and real or potential market position which constitutes the major problem for the reserve army formulation. Why should blacks, women, or other groups be concentrated in the industrial reserve army? Moreover, how do we account for this historical persistence of that concentration? Braverman provides few clues to these questions. In large part, his conceptualization of capitalism as a system of inequality presumes that the categories of actors in that system are determined entirely by their positions in the labor process. Thus,


23

all other categories and organizations are determined entirely by, or are a function of, that fundamental relationship. Yet what is often critical in the case of the industrial reserve army composed of blacks and women is that they are full-or part-time participants in something other than a capitalist labor process: for example, housework or welfare transfer programs. In other words, participation in those other organizations provides the means for material existence when an individual is not engaged in value-producing activities; and, at the same time, participation in those organizations confers a status separate from class position.

Unfortunately, Braverman's use of the industrial reserve army concept does not provide sufficient clarity as to how or why certain groups should show up in its ranks consistently or what distinct status is attached as a result. Thus the reserve army comes to represent a residual category. I would argue, by contrast, that it is necessary to develop a better understanding of the distinctive processes responsible for constructing the category and for maintaining its important social and political consequences.

Edwards (1979), in contrast to Braverman, recognizes that race and gender are important considerations in the analysis of work organization and stratification. For example, he writes: "For members of both groups (blacks and women), their daily existence as workers is always conditioned by their special status" (p. 197). Yet Edwards is only slightly more helpful when it comes to identifying the basis of that special status or demonstrating how it is reproduced over time. With the exception of passing reference to the "special dialectics of race and gender" (pp. 194, 196) and to a cultural legacy of slavery and women's subordination to patriarchal authority (p. 197), the analysis focuses instead on the labor market positions of blacks, women, and, to some extent, alien workers.

While it might be unfair to criticize Edwards for not having broadened his analysis to account for parallel systems of inequality, the "special status" of blacks, women, and other identifiable groups plays an important role in his research on the labor process. In particular, his concept of "simple


24

control" (pp. 34–36) in peripheral enterprises is built around the additional (nonmarket) leverage exercised by employers over workers. Simple control infers paternalistic authority, lack of formal job rights, and arbitrary employment practices. This form of control, according to Edwards, is rooted in both the personal qualities of the employer and in the vulnerable position of employees. What accounts for their vulnerability?

The only answer provided by Edwards is a partial one: vulnerability derives from the concentration of workers into specific (segmented) labor markets. That is, when there exists an overabundance of' people to fill a limited number of positions and when those positions require little personal or organizational investment in training, then the specter of replacement by a labor market competitor creates vulnerability among employees and, therefore, leverage for employers. However, that explanation is incomplete in two senses: (1) it fails to account for the mechanisms that produce the vulnerability of secondary workers external to the labor process; and (2) it displaces to the level of the labor market the explanation for why some markets are crowded (and competitive) and others are not.

Again, let me suggest that for Edwards, as for Braverman, the inability or unwillingness to allow for the existence of a system of inequality not directly determined by the structure of the labor process leads to a rather incomplete explanation. Although Edwards concludes that racism and sexism have "become real material forces in society" (p. 195), we are neither directed to a material base nor to a set of organizational practices that might serve as their foundation.

Finally, there is the recent work by Michael Burawoy (1979). While Burawoy offers an important theoretical contribution to labor process research, he also creates an obstacle to explaining the relationship between race, gender, and citizenship and the organization of work. In the introduction to his case study of a modern machine shop, Burawoy warns (p. 25):

The political, legal and ideological institutions of capitalism guarantee the external conditions of production. Under capitalism, these institutions mystify the productive status of work-


25

ers, capitalists, managers, etc. Thus, the political, legal and ideological apparatuses of the capitalist state transform relations among agents of production into relations among citizens, sexes, races and so on.

In other words, the explanation for the continued participation of workers in the capitalist inequality relationship lies squarely in the labor process. For Burawoy, the organization of the labor process simultaneously obscures the capitalists' appropriation of surplus and secures workers' participation in the wage labor contract (pp. 23–30). Therefore, workers' interests cannot simply be taken as given, nor can opposition (or cooperation) between workers and managers be assumed as invariant characteristics of industrial organization. Rather, interests, opposition, and consent are manufactured through the activities of the labor process.

Although Burawoy's argument presents a formidable challenge to underlying (but generally unsubstantiated) assumptions about conflict or harmony, his theory of the structural determination of interests and attitudes tends to overlook the ways in which the status of workers external to work organizations can be manipulated internally. This is evident in two ways. First, the theory is heavily weighted in the direction of work structures and practices found in monopoly or core industries. This insulation of the machine shop he studied from the vagaries of market fluctuations made possible the development of bureaucratically administered job structures and increased the importance of seniority and job rights over and against other worker characteristics, such as race and gender. However, outside of such enterprises, Burawoy's theory lends little insight. How, for example, do we account for the manipulation of women or minorities in settings that do not provide job rights equivalent to internal labor markets?

Second, even in those enterprises or industries ostensibly employing internal labor markets, job segregation by race and gender have not been eliminated. As Doeringer and Piore (1975) point out, internal labor markets can operate quite effectively to produce segregated job ladders in which the recruitment of women and minorities facilitates the separa-


26

tion of labor processes. Equally important, supposedly objective testing criteria within internal labor markets are often suborned by subjective assessments made about workers by supervisory personnel.

In this light, Burawoy's assertions about the primacy of activities in the labor process must be questioned. If statuses created external to the organization do indeed have consequences internally, then how are those statuses produced and what impact do they have on work organization? Similarly, if those statuses are manipulated to the advantage of employers, ought we not expect them to have a direct bearing on relationships between workers as well?

Citizenship, Gender, And The Organization Of Work

In this study I will address those questions initially through a detailed analysis of citizenship, gender, and the labor process in capitalist agriculture and then in connection with a broader consideration of citizenship, gender, and race as systems of inequality parallel to class. Using the case study of the lettuce industry as the starting point, the analysis will progress in three steps. First, chapter 2 will examine how highly sophisticated economic organizations, such as are found in the lettuce industry, have been able to develop within what has traditionally been referred to as a competitive sector of the economy while employing what others have termed "primitive" labor relations (Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, 1982:13–14). In the early stages, I will argue, economic prosperity and control over work was facilitated by the direct manipulation of labor supply, most especially through political intervention in labor market processes, for example, the direct importation of alien workers. In the later stages, by contrast, direct manipulation of' the supply of' labor has been replaced by more general political and economic processes which have created a labor market distinguished by citizenship status (citizens, documented aliens, and undocumented aliens) and gender (men and women).


27

But, in contrast to most segmented labor market models, I will argue that segmentation in the labor market is as much a product of processes external to the workplace as it is a result of the way workers are used internal to capitalist enterprises. More specifically, I will argue that agribusiness firms, as well as their counterparts in other sectors of the economy, do not create the distinguishing statuses of citizenship, gender, or race, but rather seize upon them and transform those characteristics to the organization's advantage. In this sense, I will argue that it is crucial that we move beyond notions of the simple exploitation of disadvantaged workers to analyze how the use of those workers may further the employer's purpose. This focus is particularly important in developing less mechanical schemes for explaining different systems of control over labor and the labor process.

The second step, beginning in chapter 3, will involve a closer examination of how externally created statuses—citizenship and gender—are related to organizational advantage and control. Through an analysis of income determination among lettuce workers in chapter 4, I will demonstrate that citizenship status and gender have a tangible effect on earnings, that being an undocumented worker or a woman not only distinguishes you from other labor market participants but also materially affects how much you will earn, though not necessarily in the direction one might expect. Thus it will be argued that differences in citizenship status and gender do not necessarily reflect market-based characteristics (e.g., skill, education, experience, or seniority) but do reflect statuses produced external to participation in economic organizations. This part of the analysis will be linked back to an examination of the type of labor relations system found in the lettuce industry. In chapter 5 I will argue that, though they may lack the outward manifestations of internal labor markets and bureaucratic controls found in other settings, labor relations and methods of managerial control are no less complex. Specifically, chapters 5 and 6 will show that citizenship and gender affect not only the distribution of individuals into the labor process but that they also provide distinct advantages to employers in the creation and maintenance of


28

different labor processes. Through a comparison of two separate harvest processes—ground-pack and wrap-pack—I will demonstrate how citizenship and gender are manipulated to enhance managerial control over the organization and the pace of work. In considering the way in which these statuses augment managerial control, I will also argue how those statuses affect relations among workers.

The third and final part of the study involves a broader analysis of the relation among nonmarket statuses, labor market structure, and organizational control. In this section (principally chapter 7), I will argue that citizenship and gender have a material basis external to the labor process, that is, that they are not simply labels attached to workers. But to understand the origin of those statuses, it is necessary to step outside the confines of the labor process. In this regard, I will suggest that it is necessary to conceive of systems of inequality that are related to but not directly determined by the class structure of capitalist society. Political inequality, as it pertains to citizenship in capitalist society, will be offered as an example of one such system. Citizenship, I will argue, must be more broadly conceived—to include its political and economic dimensions. Thus, citizenship will be used as a key mechanism for reconsidering the processes of labor force segmentation, particularly in terms of differential claims against political institutions and economic organizations.

Design Of The Research: The Case Study And Multimethod Approach

As argued earlier, this investigation is not intended solely to explore the interstices of the lettuce production system, nor, for that matter, does it restrict its sights to capitalist agriculture, though only a small number of systematic analyses have yet appeared. Rather, the intent is to utilize the analysis of a specific production setting as a means to address much more general problems in the sociological study of work organization, labor market structure, and political inequality, both separately and in terms of their interaction. The fact that a


29

case study design is employed reflects two considerations: first, as mentioned earlier and discussed at greater length in Thomas (1980) and Friedland, Barton, and Thomas (1981), the availability of good, systematic research on the political and economic structure of agricultural production in the United States has been extremely limited until recent years. As Friedland (1979) and Buttel and Newby (1980) have argued, organizational constraints and ideological blinders in the discipline of rural sociology and a predominantly urban/industrial focus in general sociology have combined to virtually exclude agriculture from sociological investigation. While rural sociology contented itself with questions of "who will adopt new techniques?" and "why farm children leave the farm?" and general sociology pondered the "big" questions about the future of urban-industrial society, little of the data necessary for cross-sectional analyses has been generated. Thus, this case study benefits from comparative data drawn from a limited number of cases but lacks the desired breadth of an exhaustive political economy of agriculture.

Beyond the dearth of comparative data, however, the southwestern lettuce industry is representative of a much more distinctively capitalist agriculture than other segments of agricultural production in the United States. Using the analytic distinction between capitalist agriculture and "simple commodity production" outlined by Friedmann (1981), firms in the lettuce industry are profit-maximizing enterprises whose primary source of labor is satisfied through hired workers and whose economic livelihood is dependent upon direct interaction with product markets. Thus, in contrast to simple commodity producers whose primary source of surplus is a combination of land rent and nonmarket exploitation of family labor, capitalist agricultural enterprises operate in much the same environment and under generally similar circumstances as other recognizably capitalist organizations, such as auto companies, textile manufacturers, and so on. Though as I have suggested, the lettuce industry poses distinctive problems for recently developed schemes for analyzing types of capitalist enterprises (e.g., the monopoly-competitive analysis of economic segmentation suggested by


30

O'Connor, 1973, and others), the value of an in-depth case study in the lettuce industry (as opposed to attempting to characterize agriculture apart from manufacturing or construction) is that it allows for comparison across agriculture/industry boundaries. Indeed, given the diminution of "pure" agriculture with the rise of an integrated food industry (Friedland et al, 1981: chap. 2; Frundt, 1981; and Hightower, 1972), one is virtually compelled to drop traditional but outworn distinctions between agriculture and industry in an effort to analyze the course of structural change in both. Hence, the questions posed in the introduction to this chapter must necessarily be answered in terms of the forces and relations of production characterizing capitalist production in general.

The design of the study was also directly affected by a strong desire to develop some means by which to link macro and micro processes. The questions posed at the outset suggested that data had to be collected from a variety of sources at different levels. Thus the analysis of historical records had to be supplemented by interviews with key figures in the setting. The goal of connecting structural arrangements with day-to-day practice demanded that other forms of data collection had to be employed. Fieldwork in the lettuce harvest therefore became part of the research design.

However, the elaboration of a multimethod research design was important not only because it could potentially cover "all sides of the question" but also because it seemed the only available means by which to attempt to measure the interaction of macroprocesses with people's lived experience. In reaction to many macrostructural analyses that, by their very nature, are compelled to ascribe meaning to the experience of people "on the line" or in the fields, I felt (and still do feel) it necessary to put myself in a position to ask people meaningful questions about their experiences and about their theories of how and why things work the way they do. Rather than assume that people are unconscious of the world around them (and that, by inference, only sociologists are), or assume that their consciousness is false and thus be forced to ascribe true consciousness to a few remotely observed acts, I undertook intensive interviews and field work to try to get a clearer


31

sense of the meanings people attach to their actions and those of people and groups around them.

A further predisposition stimulated my use of a combination of approaches to data collection: a healthy distrust of a priori theory. Though I find it absolutely essential to use theory as a guide to sociological investigation (and thus would not argue that this study began without a fairly elaborate set of hypotheses), I also began with the working hypothesis that many of my ideas were probably wrong. For some, this approach may not appear all that extraordinary; indeed it seems directly in line with accepted canons of scientific method. But my own observations of sociological research had given me the (perhaps unfounded) impression that too often concern for the integrity of a priori theory leads to a rather restrictive approach to data collection—that which fits the model is data and everything else is noise. In an effort to maximize the chances that I could be wrong and therefore to be compelled to alter my assessments, I consciously exposed my ideas to those people with whom I came into contact via interviews and field work. Thus the methodology of the research attempted, within the limits imposed by my role as researcher, to make possible both theory testing and, as Glaser and Strauss (1967) so aptly put it, "the discovery of grounded theory."[2]

Data collection for this study took place over the period of a year and centered on three main activities: in-depth, open-ended interviews; fieldwork in the lettuce harvest; and survey interviews with a sample of harvest workers.

The in-depth interviews were designed to be both exploratory and focused. Involved were an initial set of interviews with representatives of the major actors in the industry: (1) growers, managers, and industry representatives; (2) organizers and staff from the leading unions involved in the lettuce industry (i.e., the United Farm Workers and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters); and (3) active and retired lettuce workers. The latter interviews as well as the survey interviews were conducted primarily in Spanish. These interviews sought to establish basic characteristics of work organization, labor-management relations, and labor market


32

structure. The first round of interviews were followed at intervals during the study period both by further interviews with original respondents and more focused interviews with a larger group of new respondents. In all, sixty-two such interviews (averaging 60 minutes in length) were completed.

Between the first and second round of in-depth interviews, over four months were devoted to participant observation research in the lettuce harvest. During that period I worked with two different harvest crews and kept daily field notes for later reference. Both crews in which I worked (i.e., one ground crew and one wrap crew) were employed by one of the largest firms in the industry: Miracle Vegetable Company.[3] The fieldwork provided two important inputs to the research. First, the work experience and informal contact with lettuce workers on a day-to-day basis enabled me to identify major aspects of the labor process which might have gone unnoticed. For example, the role of individual and collective work experience emerged as a central feature of the ground crew. Beyond specific features of individual and crew experience, the field work helped me formulate pertinent questions for the survey instrument and, perhaps more importantly, it aided me in figuring out how to ask them. Second, contacts with work mates in the fields provided the basis for carrying out interviews with undocumented lettuce workers. These interviews (both in-depth and survey) added a very important comparative perspective for the analysis of work organization and income determination.

Finally, a quota sample of 152 lettuce workers was selected for the survey interviews. The sample was drawn from men and women working as lettuce harvesters during the summer of 1979 in the Salinas Valley of California. The sample was split 3:2 to reflect the approximate ratio of men to women in the labor force. The choice to sample in this fashion was based on a desire to compare work histories and earnings of men and women. As it turned out, this procedure resulted in an oversampling from the wrap crews. However, this facilitated a stronger comparison of ground and wrap crews than would have been possible with a more accurate representation of the proportion of workers in each organizational situs.


33

The survey included 188 items focusing on three major areas: work history by crop, company, and crew; patterns of migration, residence, and family organization; and items concerning earnings and citizenship status. Although the majority of questions were closed-ended, a number of open-ended questions were included to allow respondents to elaborate on important items, for example, views of work organization, unions, specific management practices, and alternative careers.

The lengthy and, at times, tedious nature of the survey instrument was necessitated by the lack of data about farm workers. Though some researchers have called for the establishment of a more detailed reporting system on the characteristics of farm labor (Barton, 1978), data drawn from specific labor markets and/or industries remain unavailable. The reports filed by the Department of Employment in the state of California (Report 88 1-A) only provide an employer's estimations of demand for labor in particular areas, crops, and activities. To overcome this obstacle and to avoid the assumption that harvest labor is undifferentiated, I sought to include a range of survey items which would prove useful in this study and, perhaps, in other more systematic researches at a later date.

This combination of methods permitted a much more holistic approach to the empirical subject. Of particular importance, observation, participation, and structured interviewing helped inform one another so that insights or issues raised through one approach could also be explored through another. For example, without the fieldwork it would have been impossible to include the undocumented workers. Likewise, the initial round of in-depth interviews facilitated access to the field and helped shape both the content and conduct of the survey interviews.

Beyond the informational interplay, the melding of methods provided insights into issues and problems which could not be gathered through more formal data sources. In particular, as will be seen in chapter 4, the fieldwork revealed organizational dimensions to citizenship inequality which were not accessible by way of the survey instrument. That is,


34

while data could be collected on earnings and work tenure in the survey, the effect of differences in citizenship status on crew organization and control over productivity were beyond the reach of even the most incisive formal questions.

Finally, it should be noted that equal weight and emphasis were given to each of the elements of the research design. Though at times certain parts of the argument in this study will rely heavily on one or another method, the belief was held throughout the research that the individual elements would provide equally important and rigorous contributions to the overall work.


35

previous section
1 Citizenship and Labor Supply
next chapter