Ground Crews

The average-size ground or piece-rate crew (the names are used interchangeably) consists of a total of thirty-six workers (table 5). The major subunit of the overall crew is the three-man team or trio; an average crew will contain nine trios and nine auxiliary workers. Each trio is a team of two lettuce cutters and one packer. The auxiliary workers assemble and distribute cartons for the packers, seal the filled cartons, and load them onto trucks for transport out of the field. Top tier companies (the large grower-shippers) often have in excess of twenty crews working during the peak harvest.

The cutters lead off the crew and walk stooped through

the rows of mature lettuce cutting and trimming the heads. Packers follow behind squeezing the heads into empty cartons (24 heads per carton). The cartons are then glued, stapled shut, and loaded for transport to the cooling facilities where they will be stacked on pallets and forklifted onto trucks or railroad cars headed for market.

In the field, all the work is done by hand. With the exception of a stitching machine for constructing cartons, no other form of machine—pneumatic, hydraulic, or electric—is used in the harvest process. Cutters wield razor-sharp knives for cutting and trimming heads. Packers use crude wheelbarrows to hold cartons while they fill them. Closers carry spring-action staple guns to seal the cartons. Loaders lift the fifty-pound cartons over their heads and toss them to the back of trucks for stacking.

Although the length of the workday may vary according to weather, field, or market conditions, the physical exertion required in the work is tremendous. One need only imagine walking stooped for eight to ten hours a day or completing 2,500 toe-touches to get a sense of the endurance required in the cutting and packing of lettuce. The demanding character of the work is only heightened when the fields are muddy from late irrigation or recent rains and workers must slog through claylike soil. The speed and endurance required in harvesting takes its toll on workers. "Careers" in the industry are short: older and retired workers interviewed reported that a worker's career is generally limited to between ten and eighteen years. Most common among the physical complaints (and reasons cited for quitting the harvest) are back injuries, arthritis, hernias, and slipped discs. The age-earnings profile of workers in the survey (fig. 3) shows that earnings peak around age thirty-one and steadily decline thereafter.

The harvest labor process of the ground crew may be quite demanding and destructive, but it is also incredibly productive, efficient, and adaptive. The division of labor among crew members is quite precise and controlled: workers interact with one another in such a fashion as to minimize extraneous movement and establish a routine. A crew of thirty-six workers can, under normal conditions, cut, pack, and load between

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Figure 3.
Age-Earnings Profile for Male Lettuce Workers^a (N = 90)

3,000 and 3,500 cartons of lettuce per day—enough to fill three to three-and-a-half railroad cars. To be more specific, an efficient, experienced crew can produce a completed carton of lettuce every 15 seconds.

In most cases, the trios are paid on a per-carton, piece-rate basis. This means that cutters and packers divide among themselves the total earnings of the trio for production during a given period, usually a week. The auxiliary workers, with the exception of the loaders, are most often paid on an hourly basis. When pairs of loaders are teamed with a set of trios, a joint piece-rate may be established for the trios and loaders. In most cases, however, the loaders will be assigned a piece-rate separate from the rest of the crew. However, efficiency and productivity are based much more on crew coordination than on individual or trio ability. While individuals and trios may be particularly adept at the activities they perform (e.g., cutting and packing), wages are ultimately determined by the overall speed and, therefore, coordination of activities within the crew. Individual workers reported that the time required

for acquiring particular skills is relatively short: as little as a day or two. Crew coordination and articulation, however, is much more difficult to obtain. From my own field experience, the crew in which I worked only began to operate with a high degree of teamwork (and therefore earn near-normal pay) after the fifth week of being together.

The coordination of all crew members is quite important in determining the pace of work and, therefore, the crew's earnings. Because the auxiliary workers (closers, carton assemblers and distributors, loaders) carry out services for groups of trios, the timely performance of their jobs can affect the work of the cutters and packers. If, for example, the carton distributors (often called windrowers) fail to evenly or adequately distribute empty cartons, they slow the packers down. If the packers are slowed, the lettuce heads sit too long in the sun and begin to wilt. In the case where cutters must wait for packers to catch up, the output of the crew diminishes. Thus, in order for the crew to work at or near maximum capacity, the coordination between trios and auxiliary workers must be precise. In similar fashion, if the cutters work at an uneven pace (with respect to one another), they will throw off the efficiency of the packers who must pack for two cutters; the windrowers, who must unevenly distribute cartons; and the loaders, who must load for several trios at once. Cutters, in particular, push fellow members to coordinate their activities and to maintain a pace in the crew. For example, cutters may give pep talks to the rest of the crew during the infrequent breaks for rest or food. During one such break, the fastest cutter in the crew to which I belonged berated both the less experienced cutters and the auxiliary workers:

You guys aren't making our job easy. You have to keep up or you mess up the rhythm. My money depends on you getting the boxes closed good. And your money depends on me cutting a lot of these heads. If you [younger packers] start falling behind, then you screw everything up—because Cruz [one of the closers] has to walk back and close your cartons and then run up to close mine.

The collective dimension of skill in the harvest crew is, therefore, embodied in the high degree of mutual coordination and experience which shows up among crew members.

In this regard, the ground crews bear remarkable similarities to other work groups that rely on the immediate and mutual coordination of group members in the labor process. Gouldner's description of the contrast in interaction between surface (factory) workers and miners highlights the common features of mining and harvesting crews:

Unlike most workers in the board plant, members of the mining teams worked together in closest association. The size of their work group was larger, their rate of interaction more intensive, and their expectations of informal work reciprocities were more pronounced.... The nature of their work permitted them a greater degree of discretion. Since they themselves determined the speed at which they worked, the rest pauses they would take, and the strategy of digging the gyp[sum] out and propping the roof, the miners were in constant communication with each other. (1954:133)

Whyte's study of glass workers also stresses the individual and collective elements of skill in the performance and administration of glassblowing (1961:220). In his analysis of longshoring gangs, Finlay concludes, "The gang is an amalgamation of different activities, and the element of skill derives from the coordination of these activities—it has no single occupational base" (1980:7). For harvest crews, like the miners, glassblowers, and longshoring gangs, the administration and performance of the activities of production are united.

In addition, most harvest crews are characterized by social interaction beyond the workplace itself. That is, they also exist as relatively cohesive units external to the labor process. This shows up in two ways: in recruitment of new members and in the ways in which they deal with the exigencies of migration. In the first instance, many crews recruit and help train their own members. Though the process of labor recruitment will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 5, kinship serves as an important avenue of entry into a crew and usually involves some real or fictive attachment to one or

more of its members. Sons, brothers, cousins, or brothers-in-law may be brought in when a vacancy occurs (either at the level of cutter/packer or auxiliary worker). Alternatively, people who are in auxiliary positions may exert a claim to try out for a job. In the crew in which I worked, half the workers were or claimed to be related to at least one other member of the crew. In addition, overlapping ties, such as distant family relations or common village origin in Mexico, served to bind the crew socially and facilitate entry.

The other form of social cohesion involves the migrancy of the crew. For the duration of the harvest, the crew represents a fairly closely knit collection of married and single bachelors. Most, if not all, crew members are away from home for the majority of the season. All retain close family ties in Mexico. Crews often break down into smaller groups (usually two or three close friends) for the purposes of lodging, travel, food buying and preparation, and laundry. These small groups help make life a little more bearable during the monotonous days of the harvest.

Finally, the adaptability of the group crew is an important aspect of work organization in the lettuce harvest. Weather conditions and market prices are the major determinants of the availability of work. Even in the largest firms, where stable marketing and sales arrangements have been negotiated with large buyers, fluctuation still exists in the amount of work available in any given period. Skilled harvest crews, in contrast to capital-intensive machinery, can be activated for varying periods of time, adapted to a wide range of field conditions, and easily transported between production areas or fields at literally a moment's notice.

Taken in combination, these attributes—productivity, efficiency, and adaptability—underscore the critical role played by the ground crews in the harvest labor process. As suggested earlier, these lettuce crews constitute formidable social harvesting machines.