5
Comparative Case Studies: Miracle Vegetable and Verde Lettuce
Up to this point the analysis of the social organization of production in the lettuce industry has focused on the general effects of citizenship on labor market processes. I have argued that citizenship has been used both to affect the allocation of workers into different work situses and to perpetuate employer control over production. Here I will focus more directly on the ways in which the political vulnerability of labor enhances managerial control over the ground crew. I will use comparative material from fieldwork and interviews conducted at two major lettuce-producing firms to make the following arguments: first, that the recruitment of undocumented workers has the effect of increasing crew productivity and stability while decreasing worker control over production; second, that despite efforts on the part of documented workers to reproduce their skills as organization, the presence of indocumentados undercuts crew solidarity; and third, that the inability to control labor supply has resulted in major organizational problems for farm worker unions.
The rationale and the methodology behind the comparative case studies deserves brief comment before proceeding. The decision to include a comparison of the organization and managerial strategies of two lettuce firms was informed by a desire to make concrete the manner in which citizenship status surfaces in the labor process. In particular, the inability of the survey data to "get at" the organizational effects of nonmarket statuses made more detailed analysis necessary. Fieldwork in the lettuce harvest provided ample evidence that the manipulation of citizenship is not simply an idle sociological assertion. Rather, those practices and their consequences are indeed real, even if they are covered up or, as I will show in the first case, if they are officially ignored.
The choice of the two cases—Miracle Vegetable Co. and Verde Lettuce, Inc.—was made for several reasons. First, the companies offered significant differences. Though both had been acquired by multinational corporations, they had widely divergent financial histories. A comparison offered the opportunity to see whether their financial fortunes were at all related to their strategies of work organization. Miracle and Verde also had different histories and reputations in the field of labor relations. Miracle was widely regarded as a "leader" in innovative labor relations and had a long-standing relationship with labor unions. Verde, by contrast, has had a turbulent history of labor-management conflict from continuous and entrenched unionization drives. Differences in terms of management practice and union organization (since each company dealt with a different union) thus offered room for fruitful comparison.
Second, these two firms maintained sufficient similarities in organization to draw conclusions about the major arguments without too great a fear of intervening variables confounding the analysis. That is, both firms are vertically integrated and produce a variety of agricultural commodities in addition to lettuce; but, in both cases, lettuce remains the major source of revenue. Thus, Miracle and Verde could be analyzed without concern that major differences such as scale of production, breadth of activities, or market position might render the comparison groundless.
Finally, resources and time limited the inclusion of a larger number of firms in the sample. While this cannot of course serve as a scientific justification, it represented an inescapable condition of the research process. Descriptive data on the general organization of other firms were available from interviews and other sources (Friedland et al., 1981:chap. 3) but, since they did not offer any insight on the subject of this study, they were not included.
Miracle Vegetable Company
The enigmatic character of Miracle Vegetable Co. is similar in many respects to that of IBM and other giant corporations which have, through one means or another, successfully avoided sustained challenges to managerial control over the work process. Long a giant in the lettuce industry, Miracle remained a place of relative calm during the highly publicized union drives among lettuce workers in the 1960s and 1970s. Miracle's reputation in the industry for technological innovations is matched by its competitors' envy for what appears to be some secret in their labor relations. As the executive vice president of a major competitor confided in an interview:
We don't have any idea how they manage to consistently produce the highest quality pack and still have so few labor problems. Frankly, it's likely that we'll never learn. But, it would be worth a lot of money to us if we could.
The key element in Miracle's success has been its highly effective use of undocumented aliens in undercutting the organizational potential of the ground crews. The establishment and perpetuation of this form of control has been accomplished through two related tactics. First, and most important, the core organizational device in maintaining this strategy is the decentralization of recruitment and supervision to the level of the foreman, making him the functional equivalent of the labor contractor. Second, the company has effectively insulated itself from the intrusion of militant union organizers
through agreements with a large rival union that has shown little interest in farm workers.
I will consider these latter issues in reverse order, since the role of the foreman is much more important to the analysis.
Low-Profile Unionism
While other companies turned to the Teamsters Union (International Brotherhood of Teamsters) for protection from the United Farm Workers (UFW) only in the early 1970s, Miracle has had a long-standing relationship with it (Friedland and Thomas, 1974; Sosnick, 1978:326–348). That relationship has been built around a series of contracts which nominally cover farm workers, but which are focused more on the protection of nonfield union members, for example, produce drivers and over-the-road truckers. The Teamster contracts have generally ceded control over work organization and technology to management in return for wage packages consistently higher than those offered by non-Teamster companies.
Union representatives keep a low profile at the company. After six weeks at Miracle, I was approached by a union representative for the first and only time. The representative came because several new workers (including me) had not yet signed dues authorization forms (allowing Miracle to subtract the union initiation fees and monthly dues). At the time of the study the union had assigned three representatives for the more than 1,000 fieldworkers employed by Miracle.
Despite a jurisdictional agreement between the Teamsters and UFW stipulating that the Teamsters will gradually remove themselves from farm worker organizing, the Teamsters have a substantial vested interest in remaining at Miracle. To be more precise, they have several million dollars in pension funds collected from fieldworkers over the period of their contracts. Although the dispensation of that money is presently being adjudicated, the Teamsters are not likely to abandon the company in the near future. As the president of Miracle concluded: "I don't think they're going to walk away from the money. Not without a fight anyway."
Most important, the Teamsters have played an insulating role for the company. While seeing to it that Miracle paid slightly better wages than its competitors, the union has acted to maintain its organizational position and has, therefore, enabled the company to carry on its activities virtually free of disturbance from outside organizers.
Decentralized Recruitment and Supervision
The most important element in Miracle's labor relations derives from its internalization of the labor contractor system, a form of labor recruitment and supervision closely tied to the use of undocumented workers. As described in the preceding chapter, the foreman operates as the functional equivalent of the old labor contractor. At Miracle, this has been carried out through the decentralization of recruitment and supervision to the level of the foreman. The approach is best summarized in the words of the director of personnel:
When it comes to dealing with the men in the field, the lechugeros, we [personnel office] try to keep a low profile. The foremen are the most important representatives of the company. They think like the workers do and they know what it takes to make things run smooth ... to keep the crews running and to make sure there's no problem.
One of the foremen once told me, he said: "This isn't a big company. It's a lot of small companies put together." I think that's a good description of the way we like to run things.
Although the ideology of "many small companies" tends to show up in the public relations of many large corporations (particularly conglomerates fearful of being thought of as too big or powerful), the emphasis on the foreman's role in labor relations and work organization is quite concrete and purposive at Miracle. Higher level management practice is organized simultaneously to decentralize the functions of labor recruitment, supervision, and personnel relations and to tie the foreman's position and future within the organization to the performance of his crew. The result, as I will demonstrate,
is a system of management that rewards foremen for effectively manipulating workers and undermining their capacity for autonomous organization. This shows up most concretely in the use of undocumented workers; however, the foreman's practice in this regard is carried out without the express consent of higher level management.
Despite the fact that Miracle maintains an office at company headquarters ostensibly for the purpose of hiring and placing workers, the bulk of hiring takes place in two locations: in the field or in the company bus yard where the crews assemble each morning. The foremen are the principal conduits into a job. Foremen use a variety of networks for recruiting workers. Interviews with foremen and workers show that there are basically four ways in which workers are recruited: through friends and family of the foreman, the foreman's own kin networks; through other workers; through walk-ons, people (such as myself) who just show up looking for work; and through coyotes (smugglers), who arrange passage and employment for undocumented workers.
Within a company like Miracle where there are no intervening layers of representation between workers and management (active union representatives or a hiring hall operated by the union), the foreman is also the prime 'judge of the adequacy of an individual's skills and performance. Therefore, in a situation like the lettuce industry where there is high competition for work, individual workers feel obliged to express gratitude or to offer some sort of payment to the foreman in return for being hired. Several workers told me that they had to bring other foremen a bottle of tequila, food, or a gift from Mexico in order to get work or to regain a job after some absence, after having been apprehended and deported to Mexico. As I later found out, the other half of this ritual often involves the foreman's refusal to accept a gift—therefore perpetuating the worker's debt by refusing to discharge it.
While workers are all employees of Miracle Vegetable, the foreman's capacity to hire and fire restricts the individual worker's attention to the foreman and his authority. Thus, even when I tried to initiate discussions about the company
in general, my workmates tended to refer to the company in terms of crews and their respective foremen. In part this might be explained by the vague impressions workers have of conditions at other companies. But, more important, it demonstrates the central role of the foreman in the administration of production. Crews were largely defined in terms of the foreman: Don Roberto is a good foreman; Don Ignacio is a hard foreman; Don Pablo was easy to get along with, and so forth.
Upper levels of management legitimate and encourage such associations by making foremen the primary, if not the singular, contact between workers and the company. For example, all orders with respect to the amount of lettuce to be cut, the allocation of fields to crews, and the relative performance of crews, in terms of quality control and productivity reports, are communicated through the foreman. Most paperwork, such as forms for claims against the medical insurance program, the credit union, payroll advances, and even paychecks, is handled by the foreman. The foreman's role makes it possible for workers to get such things taken care of without having to travel to company headquarters, especially since company offices often close before the crews arrive back from the fields.
In a similar vein, the foreman comes to be viewed as an intermediary between the workers and the more imposing and often confusing headquarters staff. For many workers, the status differences inherent in the contrast between their soiled work clothes and limited vocabularies and the crisp white shirts and English-speaking dominance of the office staff make trips to the office trying experiences. The foreman's activities provide a means by which to avoid the embarrassment and/or humiliation created by such situations.
When it is necessary for a member of the staff, even the personnel director, to speak directly with a worker, he or she will go to the foreman to obtain his permission to pull a worker away or to otherwise disrupt crew operations. More than just a formality, such deference bolsters the foreman's respectability.
This is not to argue that workers see the foreman as invul-
nerable. However, the range of discretionary authority granted foremen in the area of recruitment and supervision does enable them to exercise considerable leverage over the crews.
Tying the Foreman's Position to Crew Performance
A major problem in the administration of any large-scale organization is establishing an identity of interests between lower levels of management and those of the organization as a whole. Within Miracle, upper-level management attempts to establish that commonality of purpose by tying the foreman's future to the performance of his crew. In other words, the foreman's earnings and status in the organization are linked to the performance of his crew with regard to established criteria.
In a lengthy series of interviews conducted with a former foreman for Miracle, Eliseo Mondragon, the form of this relationship was elaborated.[1] Miracle has used a variety of techniques for rewarding foremen for achieving and/or surpassing quotas in production established by higher level management. For the first year-and-a-half of his employment (he worked for Miracle a total of five years), Mondragon was paid on a piece-rate along with his crew:
I got paid just a little more than the cutters and packers. That way, I was always a little ahead of them ... but not much. Whenever there were good fields and a lot of work, I made good money. But when it rained or when the prices [market prices] were not good I suffered too.
Like most enthusiastic new foremen, Mondragon said that he used to push his crew as much as possible. While he argued that pushing workers to put out benefited workers most, it was also clear that his position (and paycheck) depended on their performance:
When you're just starting out, it's very important that your crew works fast and does clean work. It's what they call a "quality pack." The field supervisor lets you know all the time that your
job is to push the crew. They always say that the better your crew does, the better you do.
For the remaining three-and-one-half years of his tenure at Miracle, Mondragon was paid a salary and offered bonuses or incentives of as much as $100 a week if his crew's productivity (cartons per hour) or quality of pack surpassed specific criteria. But, longer range incentives were also offered, such as promises of promotion to assistant field supervisor or higher pay and better benefits.
These incentives meant a lot to the foremen, especially to those who aspired to a status and a position that clearly distinguished them from ordinary field hands:
My dream was to drive around in a carro blanco [white company car] in a leather jacket and nice pants and to spend my day just ripping open cartons of lettuce and checking them out. You know, checking to see they're packed right and that the heads are good. I'll tell you, that's a feeling of power when you can tell some foreman that he better shape up.
Aspirations, thus fueled by incentives and promises, get translated into strategies on the part of foremen to squeeze the maximum effort out of their crews. It is in this nexus that the foreman's role as labor contractor, described earlier, comes into full play. When I questioned Mondragon about the "tricks" he might use to spur his crew on, he replied:
There aren't any tricks. What there is are ways to do things. Lechugeros may not have much education, but they aren't dumb. So you can't trick them. What you have to have are ways to reward and to punish.
Rewards and punishments can be applied to individuals or to the crew as a unit. They become a way in which foremen can create indebtedness among individual crew members, for example, by grants of leave for trips to see family, hiring of crew members' friends, or forgiveness for unexcused absences. When I overslept on two separate occasions, the foreman of my crew, Don Pablo, chided me for missing work and
threatened to have me replaced if I did not work especially hard to make up for lost time. Other incidents involved workers who left on Friday afternoon and did not return to work until the following Monday or Tuesday. In all cases, the foreman did not take formal punitive action but instead either reminded workers that they were dispensable or that they owed their jobs to the foreman himself, that is, their actions were not so much an infraction against the employment contract as an affront to the generosity of the foreman. On the crew level, foremen can occasionally secure longer hours and/or better fields for the crew, though such rewards are generally based on the past performance of the crew.
Political Manipulation of Crews
The primary strategy for control is built around the use of undocumented aliens. In an organization in which the foreman's earnings and future opportunities are determined by crew output, the most logical and rational strategy for foremen is one that maximizes the likelihood of worker cooperation. Mondragon put it quite succinctly:
You get guys without papers and you get a crew that's going to be easy to handle. It's as simple as that.... They want to work and they need the money—and you're in a position to do them that favor.
Being across the border illegally creates tremendous pressures on workers, as the earlier sections of this chapter indicated. Foremen can manipulate those pressures two ways: through protection or intimidation. With regard to protection, the workplace can be made to resemble a refuge from the Border Patrol. Given that Border Patrol stations are understaffed as far north as the Salinas Valley (450 miles north of the border), raids are generally focused on sites outside of the fields—in transient hotels and bars—where the likelihood of' catching undocumented workers is greater. Thus, the chances of being apprehended in the fields are reduced, though not eliminated. Many workers, both documented and
undocumented, assumed that their employers were either in league with the Border Patrol or had paid them to stay away. Since no one had solid evidence of such collusion, I had to consider such remarks hearsay. However, an incident that occurred during my fieldwork suggested that there indeed existed an informal system through which foremen "protected" undocumented workers. This incident will be described in some detail because it clearly illustrates one aspect of the foreman's role.
The ground crew in which I was a cutter was working in a field bracketed on two sides by tall eucalyptus trees. These trees obscured the access road into the field. Several times during one particular day, a Border Patrol observation plane was spotted overhead. The sight of the plane sparked some concern in the crew but the foreman, Don Pablo, suggested that the Border Patrol was not interested in us. Instead, he argued, they were looking for scabs in a nearby ranch that was being picketed by the United Farm Workers. During a brief break at midday, however, one of the loaders reported a call for the foreman on the truck radio. One of the company truck drivers traveling on the freeway parallel to the field apparently had spotted two Border Patrol cars at the edge of the trees and another pair of vans approaching from the other side. The foreman jumped from the truck yelling and waving his arms. "Migra! Migra!" he yelled. Workers, cartons, and lettuce scattered in all directions as the Border Patrol vans belatedly emerged from their cover. I too ran, following a member of my trio as we scurried for the protection of a vineyard in a field adjacent to the lettuce. From our vantage point, Cipriano, a fellow cutter, and I watched as the Border Patrol agents, with visible disappointment, rooted out and took away three of our workmates. Nearly thirty minutes after the Border Patrol departed, the crew reassembled. Though shaken by the experience, workers fell back to harvesting almost immediately and the crew was adjusted to make up for the loss.
Later that evening, crew members celebrated our good fortune in losing so few to la migra, and speculated on their fate. Although there was an undertone of contempt for the
Border Patrol, Don Pablo was praised several times—even by workers who had grumbled about his methods of* supervision before. "So he's a bastard," smiled Cipriano, "at least he knows he's got to take care of us." Incidents such as this help to put the foreman in good stead with the crew and further the image of the company as protector of the workers.
The other equally important side of this issue is intimidation. Foremen need never directly mention a worker's status or take action on the basis of it for the consequences of being undocumented to be understood. As Mondragon, the former Miracle foreman, advised:
The worst thing you can do is turn a guy over to la migra. If he's been screwing up or causing you trouble, you talk to him. You remind him that he's got a family to feed. That maybe he wants to buy a car or something.... You maybe mention that it's tough finding work if you get fired. If he still doesn't understand, then you remind him he's got no papers. If he doesn't understand then, he won't be around long anyway.
In my own crew, it was not clear until the incident with the Border Patrol that any of my co-workers were undocumented. With the celebration that followed the aborted raid, however, Cipriano introduced me to some of the undocumented workers in the crew. As it turned out, undocumented workers outnumbered documented workers by two to one (24 to 12) and only five of the eighteen cutters carried legitimate papers.
With the exception of two of the closers, all these men had worked in the lettuce harvest before. Of the undocumented workers, the majority (15 of 24) had worked for Miracle and Don Pablo in previous seasons. The remainder had joined the crew six months before, during the harvest in the Imperial Valley. Of the documented workers, half had joined the crew in Imperial and the other half had begun work with the season in Salinas. This latter group consisted of UFW members whose companies were being struck at the time. This amalgam of workers, brought together through open hiring in Salinas as well as Don Pablo's own networks, provided an opportune unit for comparing the treatment of documented and undocumented workers.
Having observed no ostensible differences in the way in which the two groups of workers were dealt with by Don Pablo or other supervisors, I began to search out other avenues. Recruitment processes emerged as a vital link among the undocumented workers. Of the two dozen indocumentados, two-thirds had gotten their jobs at Miracle through the same network: a coyote named Dominguez who operated out of the border town of Mexicali, some fifteen miles south of the Imperial Valley town of El Centro, California. The remainder had come through other channels such as workers they knew in the crew, friends of Don Pablo, or through field-hiring, like mine. Several in the group that had come through Dominguez had similar geographic origins in Mexico (near Hermosillo), but the majority had either been told to make contact with Dominguez in Mexicali or had heard of him in a bar or a store on the border.
Dealing with Dominguez, it turned out, was no inexpensive affair: according to one worker, the trip across the border and the prearranged job with Miracle cost $500. Though it was not clear that Don Pablo was the recipient of part of that $500, Cipriano and several of the others had been placed at the same time in Don Pablo's crew. Workers in other crews, they pointed out, had also come through Dominguez.
The fact of such a sizable investment weighed heavily on the minds of the workers, even if three weeks of steady work could replenish that fund. Cipriano and another worker, Chuy, often spent time after work in hushed conversation debating alternative ways to cross the border and find work. More important, however, the time lost to repaying their loans served as a reminder of their precarious position—a position Cipriano believed they held at the pleasure of Don Pablo:
He's a sly one. He never says anything about Dominguez, but he knows. When he gave me my paycheck last Friday, he says, "Be careful with all that money. You don't want to have to buy your way across again." He knows I have to stay in line.
Ponce, another of the undocumented workers, recounted an admonition he received from Dominguez prior to being
brought to work in the Imperial Valley: "You cooperate with Don Pablo, he said, and you will make a lot of money. If you don't do what he says, you have wasted your money."
In interviews with Mondragon before I had begun my fieldwork, I had asked about the use of coyotes. Mondragon replied that he had never dealt directly with the coyotes, but knew that other foremen did. Other networks, he suggested, were equally available and occasionally provided dividends. According to him, undocumented workers were recommended by family members of friends who already worked in the crew or for Miracle. Using those channels, the foremen can get the most "cooperative" labor and, at the same time, grant favors to crew members. Those crew members, in turn, help socialize new workers to the organization of work and to the style of the foreman. Indocumentados are introduced by documented workers as well as other undocumented workers. In the former case, however, the documented worker comes to share the vulnerability of his compadre. According to Mondragon: "If his friend screws up or tries to give me a bad time, I go to the guy who brought him in and say, 'Hey, tell that guy to straighten out or you both go.'" Thus, crews stacked with a mixture of documented and undocumented workers share a community of fate determined by the status of the most vulnerable members. For the company, the investment workers make in order to get across the border acts both as a lever to compel workers to comply with the foreman's directives and as an incentive, which the company does not pay. In this sense, citizenship acts like a special human capital investment that benefits the firm, not the workers. For the foreman, the fact of illegality becomes a lever with which to move the entire crew in the direction of his (and, of course, the company's) purpose: sustaining high productivity.
The numerical dominance of undocumented workers in my own crew and their concentration in the key cutting and packing positions lent support to this argument. However, it is difficult to assess the effects comparatively; most other companies were hit by the United Farm Workers lettuce strike and data from those firms would have been biased by the presence and presumed inexperience of the strikebreaking
workers.[2] The only other group available for comparison was the striking UFW members in the crew. Their observations prove enlightening.
During the time I worked in the ground crew at Miracle, the UFW members formed a close circle within the crew. They made up two trios by themselves and often isolated themselves during breaks and before and after work. As it turned out, all six had worked for Verde Lettuce prior to the strike and averaged just over three years seniority with that company. All were working at some risk to their jobs at Verde, but as Cruz (one of the workers) explained: "When you have a wife, kids, and more family to take care of, you think of them first and the union second."
Over several days of briefly asking about the progress of the strike—a subject they discussed frequently—I began to query them about working at Miracle in comparison to Verde. Their response was unanimous: things were a lot easier at Verde. The major differences centered on the pace of work and the role of the foreman. Underlying these issues, however, was a root issue: undocumented workers.
Cruz, the most open of the workers, remarked in astonishment at the pace the crew kept:
Man, I can't believe how hard we work here. I don't even have enough time to swallow a couple of tortillas for lunch and they're already back at work. I've never worked this fast.... I hope they end the damned strike soon because it's nothing like this at Verde.
When I asked him to elaborate, he added:
Here it's run, run, run. These guys all act like Don Pablo is going to give their job away if they stop to take a piss. It's crazy.... At Verde, we work steady, but you don't destroy yourself like this. I might make a little less money there, but at least I can sleep when I'm done.... I'm so sore sometimes I want to cry.
As it turned out, during the time of my fieldwork Cruz estimated that he earned $50–$75 more per week working at
Miracle. It was an insufficient bonus, he argued, to make up for the added physical punishment.
Complaints centered on Don Pablo's style of supervision as well. Unlike foremen at Verde, who cede much of the regulation of work pace to the crew itself, Don Pablo spent most of the day walking between trios, watching and commenting on our work. His comments to the Verde workers were biting at times. "Hard to keep up?" he would ask with a laugh, continuing, "They will be happy to have you guys back at Verde once you learn to work fast." As we worked side by side, Cruz once commented, "The foremen at Verde are always telling us to work more like el estilo Milagro (Miracle-style). Now that I know what that means, I will be sure to work el estilo Verde ."
Gilberto, another of the Verde workers, summarized the difference in this way:
At Verde, the union is strong. We have a lot more to say about the work. The foreman doesn't breathe on you because if he does, you slow down. You have all your friends to back you up. Here I'll bet they never even heard of a grievance.
Nevertheless, while working in Don Pablo's crew, the Verde workers and the others kept the pace set by the leading undocumented workers. This fact did not go unnoticed by the documented workers, but it was not connected to the other issues until I raised it in roundabout fashion. I asked Cruz if the UFW required identification before they gave job dispatches out of the hiring hall. "No," he replied, but went on to argue that the union served as a buffer between the workers and the company:
There [at Verde] when you get seniority, it gives you some protection. You work with the same guys all the time and everybody backs everybody else.... It's not like here. Here, everybody looks out for themselves. They are always looking for la migra because they're scared if they don't work hard or keep Don Pablo happy, the pigs are going to snatch them away.
Thus, the lack of solidarity in the crew, occasioned by the vulnerability of its key members, affects the pace of all involved.
In essence, crews need not be composed entirely of undocumented workers to be manipulated by the foremen and the company. The placement of vulnerable workers in key positions provides the means by which crew organization is effectively undercut. By creating conditions under which the fate of crew members is fundamentally affected by the status of its most vulnerable members, political control over the labor market is reproduced as control over the labor process.
Company Policy and Foreman's Practice
Executives at Miracle Vegetable Company and other lettuce firms expressed a fairly uniform attitude with respect to undocumented workers. First, they argued, management does not knowingly hire undocumented workers. And second, management should not be held legally responsible, under any conditions, for hiring undocumented aliens. Thus, personnel staff at Miracle do not admit that undocumented workers are employed on a regular basis. Neither would they comment on the hiring practices of competing companies.
According to Mondragon, the Miracle foreman, he was never told or advised to hire undocumented workers. Rather, he observed the practices of other foremen and followed suit:
I got fired because the Border Patrol had it in for me. I gave them a bad time once when they stopped my bus and their boss told them to make life miserable for me. I guess I became a target and my bosses didn't like that.... When I started out, I just looked around and saw what other foremen did and I did the same.
"Doing the same" meant using undocumented workers as a lever, a trump card in managing the crew and achieving the goals established as criteria for the security and advancement of the foreman.
Thus, at least within Miracle Vegetable Company, higher level management, as a matter of company policy, maintains an arm's length from the actual recruitment and hiring of undocumented immigrants. By subcontracting these functions to the foreman/labor contractors within the organiza-
tion and establishing criteria of performance that cannot be achieved without an increment in control, the firm effectively mandates the practice of recruiting and manipulating undocumented workers in the crews. Of course this strategy of "official ignorance" has parallels in numerous other settings, especially when informal and historically accepted practices contradict the official purposes of ethics of an organization. The studies of white collar crime (Sutherland, 1977) and the Watergate experience are other examples of the same situation. It is not illegal, however, for employers to hire undocumented workers, while it is against the law for undocumented workers to seek employment.
The enigmatic character of Miracle's labor relations success therefore reduces to the institutionalization of the labor contractor system and to the development of a managerial strategy that places greatest emphasis on control through the manipulation of citizenship status.
Verde Lettuce, Incorporated
Verde Lettuce offers an important contrast to Miracle in several respects. Though, like Miracle, Verde is a subsidiary of a larger, transnational corporation, it has had a turbulent financial and organizational history. Created through the acquisition of several private firms by the parent corporation, Verde has struggled since its beginning to achieve some measure of financial stability. According to industry sources, Verde has run at a deficit for most of its existence.[3] Sources outside the company lay the blame on the inexperience of management imported from outside of the lettuce industry. Others suggest that having a "sugar daddy" parent corporation has tended to make Verde's management careless in its approach to cost and efficiency. All those interviewed, however, laid a portion (if not all) of the blame on the company's labor problems.
Labor problems take the shape of the United Farm Worker's union. Verde has been the scene of over a decade of continuous and aggresive labor organizing by the UFW,
which won one of its first lettuce industry contracts at Verde and has since attempted to use the company as a model for its organizational campaigns. Union officials see Verde as both the testing ground for various innovations in work organization and union representation and as a trend-setter in contract negotiations.
In interviews prior to the 1979 lettuce strike, UFW organizers boasted of the union's influence in Verde's operations. One organizer, a former lettuce cutter who had worked for one of the companies subsumed with the creation of Verde, argued:
We have the strongest and most militant union in the country. Here at Verde we have the foremen so scared of getting a grievance thrown at them that they just turn away when the workers refuse to do something.
While that may be something of an exaggeration, unionization does mean something different at Verde than it does at Miracle. However, what remains problematic at Verde, and throughout the industry, is the capacity of a union organization to overcome the effects of employers' nonmarket control over the labor force. Can an organization that is incapable of controlling access to the labor market or particular work situses still succeed in capitalizing on the organizational potential of the crews? Or, to turn the question around, can a union organization attempt to affect change in a system based on disadvantaged labor without simultaneously creating conflict between advantaged and disadvantaged labor?
To this point, the analysis has emphasized the effects of citizenship with regard to crew organization. Here I will turn to the argument that the political vulnerability of undocumented labor has created major organization obstacles for farm worker unionism. Despite the success of the United Farm Workers union in creating and sustaining an unprecedented level of worker organization at Verde and other companies, the inability of the union to "professionalize" the ground crews (organize and protect the labor market position) directly resulted from its inability to control labor supply. In
an attempt to remove the effects of politically vulnerable labor the union has sought to replace the foreman's discretion with its own regulation of employment—the hiring hall. At the same time, however, this strategy has created cleavages in the membership along the lines of citizenship.
To illustrate these issues more clearly I will focus on two organizational factors that appear most at variance with the analysis of Miracle Vegetable Company. These two factors—the role of the foreman and the strength of crew organization—are good indicators of the degree of difference between the two companies, which may be attributed to active union organization.
The Role of the Foreman
A major UFW objective at Verde and other union companies has been the reduction of the authority of the foreman. The establishment of a union-controlled hiring hall system was intended to take away from foremen the ability to directly select crew members and thus manipulate crews on the basis of favors. Workers are now dispatched via the hiring hall to union companies for job assignments. Once in a job individuals have the opportunity to establish both seniority with a company and an occupational classification (e.g., cutter or loader). Companies like Verde are officially bound by the contract to honor seniority and to notify the union of any impending job openings. Companywide rules and regulations with regard to seniority thus reduce the foreman's discretionary authority in placing and/or promoting workers.[4]
According to the union contract, harvest crews at Verde are organized along the lines of seniority: crews are composed of workers with roughly the same amount of time in their individual occupations. For example, cutters with about seven years' occupational seniority will be located in the same crew. Thus, crews can remain intact from one season or production area to the next. The major exception occurs, however, in the low seniority crews. These crews, according to interviews with workers, experience greater turnover in personnel. Turnover is attributed to two factors: (1) workers who try harvesting
lettuce and decide it's not for them, and (2) work is more intermittent and, therefore, employment (and earnings) fluctuates considerably. Because they serve as a relief valve to accommodate periods of high and low production, low seniority crews often work shorter hours.
Job security and the assurance of work are the major benefits associated with seniority. Seniority workers do not receive higher wages or piece-rates for their work but they are provided more stable work than their newer counterparts. The organizational implications of these differences are quite important.
The creation of a formal grievance procedure has also been aimed at limiting the authority of foremen. Crew representatives, the equivalent of shop stewards, have used the grievance machinery for the adjudication of complaints ranging from insufficient ice water in the fields to allegedly unjustified firings. The liberal use of grievances prompted Verde's vice president to complain:
A grievance for them is nothing.... They get a day out of work maybe and we lose thousands of dollars on each one. ... During the twenty-seven years I've been associated with agriculture, I can't remember one formal grievance being filed by any of the Teamster truck drivers ... either against this company or any of its predecessors. During the first two years of our contract with the UFW we had no less than eighteen formal grievances filed. Those are grievances that went beyond the company to outside mediation.
While the union flexes its muscles through the grievance procedure, it further acts to undermine the traditionally paternalistic relationship between foremen and workers. Throughout its organizational campaigns, the union has constantly emphasized the formality of the relationship between workers and management. An organizer instrumental in the 1979 strike at Verde described it this way:
One of the biggest things we have to do is break down the walls between workers. Everybody is so used to having a deal with
their foremen that they don't know that they are all working for Mr. So-and-So and the board of directors. We just keep saying over and over, "You're a member of the United Farm Workers union and an employee of Verde Lettuce."
To enforce that distinction, the union seeks to remain visible in the fields. Union representatives are included in every crew and a companywide ("ranch") committee of representatives meets regularly with management. Negotiation committees are also staffed by rank-and-file members, though like other unions contract negotiators are primarily paid union staff.
Although hiring halls, grievance procedures, and union representation cannot by themselves limit the authority of the foremen, they do act to circumscribe the foreman's discretion, particularly when compared with the situation at Miracle. In the ground crews particularly the union has sought to increase the strength of the crew organization as a means by which to ensure some protection from arbitrary managerial intervention. However, an examination of the organization of the high and low seniority crews suggests that crew strength, especially in terms of the crew ability to withstand management intervention in work organization, is inversely related to crew seniority.
Crew Strength and Seniority
Interviews with a lettuce worker with eight years' seniority at Verde and another with one year at the company provide very different descriptions of labor-management relations in the ground crews. Veteran workers boast of the accomplishments of the union and the strength of the crews; low seniority workers describe the insecurity of their position and the excesses of company management. Such distinctions might be attributable to the relative positions of older and younger workers in an industrial plant where seniority translates into higher skill and a more protected organizational position. At Verde, however, there is no real skill distinction in the work of those with more or less seniority. The workers with the
most seniority are more protected, as far as job security is concerned, but the distinctions to which low seniority workers refer are indications of something far more important. They are indications of a two-tiered system of employment and crew organization at Verde: a system consisting of stable, protected crews at the top and unstable, less protected crews at the bottom.
Interviews with union officials and senior workers give the impression that unionization has insulated harvest crews from direct managerial interference in work organization, recruitment, and work pace. Backed by the protections of a union contract and the machinery of a grievance procedure, they argue, workers have been able to fend off many of the abuses of the former labor system. Several Verde workers boasted that they were able to cut and pack basura (garbage or low quality lettuce) without fear of reprisal. More important, according to one union organizer, manipulation of undocumented workers has been diminished as a managerial strategy as a result of the extension of the union's organizational umbrella.
Interviews with present and former Verde workers, however, presented important departures from this overview.[5] In an effort to demonstrate how crew organization differs among high and low seniority workers, I will concentrate on three key issues in crew and work organization: demands for productivity increases; management intervention in work organization; and the role played by undocumented workers.
Increased Productivity
Work slowdowns and stoppages have been a major issue at Verde since the advent of unionization. According to the senior workers, many of these have had to do with management attempts to increase productivity. Resistance to the intensification of work is by no means unique to the lettuce fields (Roy, 1952; Collins et al., 1946; Aronowitz, 1973; Burawoy, 1979). However, the difference in the capacity of crews to present effective opposition to such moves is evident
at Verde. A lechugero with nearly nine years' seniority at Verde presented this portrait of an unsuccessful speedup:
The foreman began one week by yelling about how we were not working hard enough. He said we were going to get second-cuts if we didn't start getting over 450 cartons an hour. He complained all about quality, too....
A couple of us just told him to fuck himself ... that we were going as fast as we could. He called up the supervisor and he came out and started yelling, too. They wouldn't listen to us, so we just stopped working until a member of the ranch committee showed up. They left and we went back to work. The next day we came back and the foreman didn't say a word.
By contrast, workers in the less senior crews painted a much different picture. Said one worker,
We're always under pressure about how we do the work and how much work there's going to be. They move the crews around all the time. The foremen and the bosses are always telling us if we don't pack fast enough that there's not going to be as much work.
Complaining of the same situation, another worker compared the situation in low and high seniority crews:
In the seniority crews, when they don't want to work so hard, they just slow down. The foremen don't really do anything. With us, if we try that, the foremen just say, "Fine, one of the other crews needs the work." If we go to the union and complain, they just say we have to go along.
Following a management drive in 1978 to increase productivity, the union held a number of meetings with crews. More senior workers I questioned about these meetings tended to pass off the union's pleas for increased cooperation between workers and management as a joke. Low seniority workers, however, said they felt the pressure almost immediately:
The foreman really got down on us about quotas and quality. We went to our crew representative and he said the union told him we had to go along because the union had an agreement.
Work Organization
Conflicts over management intervention in the organization of work largely center on the issue of replacement workers. Both absenteeism and inefficiency in hiring hall procurement of new and temporary workers have been major management complaints during the life of the UFW contract. Among senior workers, the maintenance of the hiring hall and crew input on the selection of replacement workers is held as a paramount union right. In an incident described to me by a lechugero who had been with the company for seven years and with his present crew for over five years, these two points were stressed:
Two of our cutters left to go back home because they were brothers and their father was dying. So, we were going to be short for a while. The foreman brought in two of his friends ... and said they would work until our compadres got back. Nobody liked that. We told him that he had to get somebody through the hiring hall and that we wouldn't work with his friends.... He tried to put us off, but we showed him we meant business. We dropped our knives and said he had to call the hiring hall or we didn't work. He called the hiring hall.
Among low seniority crews, however, the capacity of workers to act collectively is hampered by the constraints imposed by intermittent work and lower job security. In these entry-level positions, the competition to get and keep work acts to undercut development of the solidarity exhibited in the more senior crews. Such competition gets particularly fierce as the season shifts between major production areas, such as between Arizona (in the spring) and Salinas (in the spring-summer). At Verde, operations terminate in Arizona and then shift to the San Joaquin Valley for about six weeks. Senior workers often take this break as an opportunity to return to Mexico for a brief vacation, leaving less senior crews to pick up the slack in harvesting. During those periods Verde often hires large numbers of temporary workers, many of whom seek to earn a permanent berth in the company's labor force.
Changes in the composition of low seniority crews, coupled with their shuffling between production areas, result in competition for work and divisiveness among workers. Management has interjected itself forcefully into this situation. With respect to crew control over its makeup, a green-card with six months in the company said:
The guys in the older crews have it good. They can decide whether they want somebody to join or not to join. But, for us it's different. We can't make a choice because we have no choice. The foreman decides and we have to work with anybody who comes in.
Or, as another worker in the same crew remarked:
If you hang around long enough, you can move up into one of the better crews. It seems like in crews like mine, if you don't say "si, patron" to everything the foreman wants, then you don't get as much work and you don't make as much money.
Undocumented Aliens
The most important difference in the organization of the high and low seniority crews is the role in each by undocumented workers. Whether out of loyalty to their workmates or true ignorance, the senior workers I interviewed reported that they knew of few cases of undocumented workers showing up in the company. One worker noted, "Hell, I wouldn't know if anybody was undocumented. I have worked with some of these guys for seven or eight years and I don't know if they have their papers." This is not to suggest that undocumented workers are not an issue in Verde or the UFW; they pose a fundamental organizational problem for the union. However, among the senior workers, the only salience the issue had pertained to the strike taking place in the fields. During the 1979 strike undocumented workers composed a significant portion of the strikebreakers imported by management at Verde and elsewhere. The union responded in the summer of 1979 by calling on the Immigration and Naturali-
zation Service to step up raids on the fields as a means to stop production and enforce the strike.
But, in reference to normal (nonstrike) operations at Verde, senior workers refuted the notion that one's citizenship status made any difference. A common refrain from these workers was that "we are union members first."
Workers from low seniority crews relate a very different situation, which was first revealed in conversation with a lechugero picketing at fieldside during the strike:
Those guys out there are all members of my crew.... We started working together last summer. In the winter, when the union decided to strike, I figured they would stay home like the rest of us. But they didn't. What do they care? None of them has papers and so they really have nothing to lose.
This same worker went on to describe how his crew had been made up of undocumented workers:
They take advantage of the union. Nobody asks to see your papers when you go to get a dispatch.... They just walk onto the job. The foremen find out and they try to squeeze those guys and it ends up making it rough for everybody in the crew.... You have to fight to stay up with them because if you don't you might not keep your job. I went to the union office and told them about it, too. I told them there were at least fifteen indocumentados in my crew. They said they would see about it, but they never did anything.... Now those guys are out there scabbing against the union.
Subsequent interviews with other low seniority workers, documented and undocumented, provided a similar picture. Green-cards complained of being pushed harder and having to compete with undocumented workers in an effort to keep their jobs. Undocumented workers, including some of the strikebreakers, described threats attached to foremen's assessments of their performance. For example, one worker repeated his foreman's warning: "The union won't do a thing to protect you." Several workers openly criticized the union for protecting los veteranos (the more senior workers) and
overlooking the less senior lechugeros and what went on in the crews. Union officials refused to comment on these complaints when I approached them.
The two-tiered system depicted above reflects less a union betrayal of low seniority crews than it does (1) an attempt on the part of management at Verde to reassert control via the manipulation of citizenship, and (2) more fundamentally, the inability of the union to change a labor system imposed by management.
Reassertion of Managerial Control
For most of the period of unionization at Verde, the company's organizational position, as a subsidiary of a prosperous conglomerate, provided fertile soil for the kind of achievements gained by the UFW for more senior crews. The company's ability to absorb or pass along losses in its operation to the parent corporation provided a buffer that allowed the union to acquire and enforce considerable advances in crew strength and benefits. Virtually unencumbered by the restraints characterizing less financially secure enterprises, Verde sought accommodation with the union, as it had done with unions in other phases of production, while the union sought to establish a model for its other contracts.
A major overhaul of management in 1977–78, however, accompanied by what one new executive described as a warning "that the company had three years to turn things around," resulted in an offensive to curb the union. One of the opening salvos of the campaign was a threat to replace ground crews with wrap machines, a direct challenge to the core of the union's strength. "We made it clear," the head of personnel proclaimed, "that we weren't going to put up with their actions any longer. Either they began policing membership about productivity and quality or we started shipping more wrapped lettuce."
This campaign found its strongest expression in the recent lettuce strike. Negotiators for Verde and the other struck companies opened fire on the union's major achievements: the hiring hall, strengthening management's disciplinary pro-
cedures, and management's right to introduce new technology. Complaints about the inefficiency of the hiring hall, the union's discretion in disciplining workers, and declining productivity levels dominated industry pronouncements during the lengthy strike (see in particular, Salinas Californian , May 20, 1979). Threats of movement to wrap machines and even mechanical harvesters were woven into the negotiations.
In effect, this strategy represents an attempt on the part of Verde to make itself more like Miracle and other lettuce firms. As the vice president of Verde argued in a local newspaper interview in Salinas, "Restrictions in UFW contracts over management rights are worth a lot of money. Verde will match the pay and benefits given by Miracle Co., if the UFW will give Verde the same latitude in control over the work force that is maintained by Miracle."
The Union and the Labor System
The construction of a formal system of hiring, seniority, and grievance resolution has had the cumulative effect of increasing the integrity and cohesion of the more senior crews at Verde. However, the two-tiered organization of crews reflects a structural obstacle that severely limits the union's capacity to alter the relations of production. This is a problem, then, of the union trying to deal with a management-imposed labor system.
To suggest that the creation of a system of industrial justice (Selznick, 1969) has increased the organizational strength of the senior crews is far different from arguing that the crews themselves have acquired the means by which to control the work they do. While the union has succeeded in bargaining for higher wages and benefits for its members, it has not altered the structure of the labor system. The work continues to be organized around a highly destructive labor process, with occupational mobility being severely limited. Competition for jobs goes on unabated. Despite the increased wages and benefits brought about by the advance of unionization, the system continues to operate to the advantage of management because the union does not control the supply of labor
available for work and because it alone cannot erase the political vulnerability associated with that labor.
Within agricultural industries, the United Farm Workers union has sought explicitly to use the communal characteristics of the labor force as the basis for organization. The remarkable success of the UFW, particularly in the lettuce and grape industries, has its roots in the stress laid on the common ethnicity, national heritage, needs, and social position of Mexican and Mexican-American, documented and undocumented workers. As Friedland and Thomas (1974:56) have noted:
By serving genuine needs and developing organizations within which farm workers could develop trust in one another, Chavez also created a set of organizations within which farm members could develop modern organizational skills.
The bonds of solidarity created in satisfying common needs have reinforced the ethnic and cultural heritage shared by the membership.
In the lettuce campaigns, such efforts were augmented by tapping into the organization potential of the harvest crews themselves. As a union organizer described the UFW's strategy: "We have to rely on the organization of workers in the contract (piece-rate) crews to make any headway.... They already are very organized because of the way they work and the way they travel." As important as their role in pulling workers out on strike (and/or into the union), the UFW owes an additional historical debt to the crews: during the Teamster raids on UFW contracts in the grape industry (1971–1975), dues from the lettuce workers helped keep the union alive financially. Furthermore, lettuce workers still constitute the largest percentage of union members.
The union's very success in organizing lettuce workers has, ironically, put it in a very sticky position. On the one hand, it cannot seek to regulate the labor supply—in particular to seek curbs on the volume of undocumented workers. To do so would be to alienate itself from those workers who are undocumented and supporters of members of the union.
Though limiting jobs to workers who have some measure of legal protection through their immigrant visas would enable the union to better police work conditions and hiring practices, the creation of an internal division in membership would likely tear the organization apart. Such divisions already exist to some extent, especially as noted in the comments of workers in previous sections, but they have generally been muted by the union's unwillingness to take a public stand on the issue. Nonetheless, the issue of documented versus undocumented workers has periodically hampered relations between the union and other labor, political, and social organizations of Chicano and Latino groups. In particular, Chavez's decision to request increased Border Patrol raids during the height of the 1979 lettuce strike caused a storm of protest from independent farm worker union organizers in Arizona and Texas. In the letter to UFW president Chavez in April 1979, an organizer for the Maricopa County Organizing Project in Arizona argued:
We must urge you to stop all actions that would create a greater division among documented and undocumented workers. If the United Farm Workers Union has problems with undocumented workers being brought in as scabs, the answer is to organize these scabs, like we do any other scab that comes in to break our strike. (Salinas Californian , May 1, 1979)
While Chavez and others within the union have argued that they will continue to organize and accept undocumented workers, dissension remains barely beneath the surface.
On the other hand, the union cannot attempt to regularize employment and create a modicum of job security without gaining control over access to employment. In an effort to do this, the union has two options: (1) to take unto itself the functions of recruitment and job allocation (in the hiring hall); or (2) to locate these functions in the individual crews themselves, bypassing a formal challenge to the organization of the labor process.
The former strategy has emerged as dominant in Verde. The union has sought to regularize employment through the establishment of seniority privileges and the hiring hall. While
seniority has increased the job rights of some individuals (particularly high seniority workers), neither seniority nor the hiring hall are capable of altering the basis of wage determination. Rather, the economic rewards for seniority are largely restricted to vacation and pension benefits. Without increased differentiation in jobs and wages (such as would characterize an internal labor market) or the control over work organization (such as craft unionism), performance remains the sole determinant of earnings.
Although the seniority/hiring hall approach provides the union with a broader negotiating stance vis-à-vis management, it largely focuses the union bargaining strategy on increasing piece-rates. In order to compensate crews for the loss of control over recruitment and testing—factors instrumental in determining work pace and, therefore, wages—the union has sought to increase the payment for output. Thus, in theory, while productivity may increase through a change from speed to seniority, wages may remain constant (or even increase) for the membership as a whole.
A bitter irony faces the union should it succeed in thoroughly regularizing the seniority/hiring hall process in the lettuce industry: as the union succeeds in monopolizing access to employment and job allocation, it threatens to erode the advantages to management of the crew method. Such is the case at Verde. The investment of some workers with conditional rights in their jobs undermines the managerial strategy of control by competition and manipulation of citizenship status. Success in such an effort, as borne out at Verde, converts the crew method to a much more expensive enterprise. Thus, one alternative open for Verde's management is to attempt to reassert dominance through the recruitment and manipulation of undocumented workers.
Another alternative managerial strategy resides in the reorganization of the labor process. Following the experience of such conflicts in other industries, for example, the rationalization of automobile production, a likely strategy would involve circumventing craft-type labor through the introduction of machines. To some extent, this has already begun with the increasing volume of production from the wrap machines,
which reorganize production into a set of unskilled activities coordinated by machine technology. In place of a piece-rate, workers are paid an hourly rate with the pace of work determined by the machine. In replacing the piece-rate crews with wrap machines, migrant male workers have been supplanted by women from local labor pools. Thus, gender replaces citizenship as the communal status characterizing that segment of the labor force.
The UFW walks a tightrope. If the union attempts to use monopoly access to employment as the basis for steadily increased piece-rates, while lowering the productivity of crews, it undermines the advantages of the labor system to capital. If the process of recruitment and testing are turned over to the crews, the employer strategy of competition and manipulation of citizenship will remain viable, thus reinforcing the extant characteristics of the labor system.