Preface to the Paperback Edition
I grew up in a small California town that was surrounded by lush fields of lettuce, broccoli, and strawberries. Although the area had been nicknamed "the nation's salad bowl," when I rode my bike on back country roads I hardly noticed the people who bent and stooped to fill that salad bowl. They, like the crops in the fields, were just part of the landscape. Farm workers didn't live near me, they didn't shop where I did, and while some of their kids went to my school, they were usually tracked into other classes.
One day in the summer of 1969, however, the harvesting stopped. Men and women gathered along the hot asphalt waving flags and carrying signs. Some shouldered Mexican flags while others bore handpainted placards emblazoned with black eagles. Shouts of "Huelga!" were directed to the fields and to the occasional passing cars and trucks. A farm labor strike was in progress.
Strikes were by no means unprecedented in the valley. To the aerospace workers like my father who belonged to the Machinists' union, job actions were an accepted method for improving wages and benefits. The Teamsters who drove the vegetable trucks routinely walked out when contract talks stalled. By the late 1960s, even the local police and firefighters had tried their hand at similar forms of collective action.
Thus, the image of people on strike for better wages and working conditions was not all that unusual but, in this case,
many of the details were unfamiliar. The strikers were working people but they weren't Machinists or Teamsters; it wasn't clear what union they belonged to or if they even belonged to a union. The picketers proclaimed their strike in Spanish and waved Mexican flags instead of neat prefabricated signs. Picket lines weren't set up in front of factory gates or packinghouse entrances; they stretched along roadsides far from the edge of town. And, unlike at the scene of an industrial job action, there were many women taking part in the strike. Their heavy work clothes and scarves made it clear that they, too, had walked off the job.
The odd combination of familiar and unfamiliar provoked puzzlement and confusion in the community. Perhaps predictably, the local press made much of the anomalous details: farm workers were not part of the community; they were migrants whose stake in the town was as transient as the harvest. The strikers, according to newspaper editorials, admitted as much in their choice of symbols: the Mexican flag confirmed their status as "outsiders." Commentators went so far as to suggest that if the strikers didn't like their jobs they could simply go back home to Mexico. The right to strike might be part of the law, but somehow it pertained only to those who had "earned" the right by being members of the community.
Unionists (and their children) might understand why people went on strike, but the specter of Mexican workers striking against American employers was difficult to understand. Thus, I recall my friends and their parents voicing sympathy with farm workers ("you couldn't pay me enough to do that kind of stoop labor") while, in the next breath, muttering anger (and fear) about Mexicans who should "stay in their place."
Employers portrayed themselves as the "real" victims. Outsiders, they claimed, had stirred up anger and resentment among otherwise quite happy workers. These weren't factories, they were farms , owned by farmers , the backbone of Jeffersonian ideals. That some of the farms were actually owned by industrial conglomerates and the farmers were managers was not mentioned. That many of the independent farmers were growing crops under contract to large packinghouses and wholesalers—powerful financial forces in the industry—went largely
unnoticed. That at least some of the aggrieved owners were second-and third-generation Japanese-Americans who had suffered discrimination (and expropriation) by the community as little as two decades prior was carefully omitted from public discussion.
While the work stoppage that began that summer was short-lived, the images and questions it evoked lingered in my memory for years to come. If working men and women felt they were being mistreated, what difference did it make that they were not citizens of the United States? Why didn't other working people find their grievances understandable? What did citizenship have to do with the value of someone's labor? Most broadly, what did citizenship mean in modern industrial society?
This book is an effort to answer those questions. It began as a study of agricultural work and workers but the more I struggled to decipher the puzzle I'd encountered in the fields near my home, the more I began to realize that the answers I sought could not be found in the library or in a textbook or in an econometric model. The search for answers required an investigation that telescoped from the fields to the corporate board-rooms, from the picket lines to the labor market, from small town California to the broader society and polity, and from the specific conditions of lettuce production to the general conditions of work in a capitalist economy.
Citizenship, I came to discover, is an elusive concept and one that had been all but ignored in theories of work and stratification. For example, sociologists who focused exclusively on the United States seemed to find little reason to be concerned with citizenship. Either people were citizens or they weren't. If they were, then citizenship fell out of the equation because there was nothing to suggest that citizenship was a variable status. If people weren't citizens, then it was presumed either that they were on their way to becoming citizens or that they were marginal numerically and socially and, therefore, didn't need to be included in the analysis. Alternatively, citizenship was characterized as a set of obligations and entitlements, like voting, paying taxes, doing military service, and making claims on the welfare state. Writers like Marshall (1977) entertained the idea that citizenship might have different meanings in different spheres of
social life (e.g., political and economic); but, even then, citizenship was deemed a status applicable to all members of a given society. In other words, they failed to seriously consider the possibility that citizenship was a variable, rather than an invariant, status or that citizenship might surface as a distinction among groups of people.
The further I investigated, however, the clearer it became that both the meaning and the consequences of citizenship did vary in important ways. Having or not having citizenship had real economic consequences. To be a non-citizen, especially an undocumented "alien," was to forfeit any real market power; your bluff could always be called by your employer. Even having papers did not provide unrestricted access to market power: the conditions imposed on residence made documented immigrants vulnerable to discrimination against which they had little legal recourse. Clearly, to understand the organization of work in agriculture, it would prove essential to more deeply explore the meaning and the consequences of citizenship in U.S. society.
However, I also found that citizenship was not the only basis upon which distinctions were made among agricultural workers. Gender differences mattered, too. Men and women were sorted into different work roles in what had appeared for many years to be an "unstructured" labor market (Fisher 1953). Moreover, the feminization of certain segments of farm work redounded to the benefit of agricultural employers: gender differences diminished wage competition among employers and stabilized the supply of low-cost labor.
Findings such as these suggested not only that agricultural labor markets and work organization were far more complex than had been recognized, but, more importantly perhaps, that extant theories of the labor process needed to be amended if they were to explain the structural foundations of citizenship and gender inequalities. Close reading of neo-classical economics suggested that it provided no more satisfying an explanation than did Marxian labor process theory—but it was the latter that proved particularly deficient and, in my mind, the most in need of repair. As I point out in chapter 1, labor process theory tended to characterize race and gender inequality largely as a derivative of class stratification. This formulation has enabled
both theory and research to focus primarily on the division of labor as the driving force behind class struggle and class formation. Missing in theory and research, however, was any serious consideration of the role of non-work institutions and relationships in the structuring of the labor process—i.e., institutions and relationships that were beyond the control of individual capitalists or even a "self-conscious" class of capitalists and managers.
Citizenship and gender, I suggest, are examples of statuses which are socially constructed but which are not reducible to functional aspects of a system of class stratification. Neither is completely independent of the other. However, as I go on to argue, it would be a mistake to assume that citizenship and gender lack structural foundations of their own. Categories of citizenship are more than just legal distinctions; they are rooted in the state as an historical construct and in the institutions of welfare essential to maintaining social integration and social control. This means that citizenship, rather than being an ideological "fiction," has real and significant consequences for the operation of a market economy and for the life chances of those who can claim it, as well as those to whom it is denied.
Likewise, as the growing body of feminist research has demonstrated, gender stratification is rooted in institutions of patriarchy that parallel and, in many instances, predate the rise of a capitalist mode of production. Labor process theory, concerned as it has been with "productive" labor, is incapable of accommodating, much less explaining, the persistence of social inequality by gender. As this study suggests, gender differences do have economic consequences (especially, though not exclusively, in terms of earnings) but they cannot be derived solely from the division of labor. Gender differences may be employed as part of a strategy to rationalize seasonal production, but categories of gender are a priori to managerial strategy. Thus, to explain why women show up in the jobs they do—or why gender plays a critical role in the maintenance of a split labor market—it is necessary to explore the material foundations of patriarchy apart from the labor process.
The ideas about citizenship and gender presented in this book are very much a product of what I learned while doing the
research. They are findings in the literal sense—especially since prior to undertaking the study I had leaned strongly toward an uncritical acceptance of labor process theory. In this sense, I became convinced that doing field work—in my case, as a lettuce harvester—and engaging in analytical induction are essential to the improvement of sociological theory, whether it be in the domain of the labor process or in broader aspects of social life.
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
MAY 1992