6
Gender, Labor Supply, and Commitment
In increasing numbers, large hulking machines resembling grounded World War II bombers are seen lumbering through the lettuce fields of California and Arizona. Groups of workers, some standing on the machine, others walking behind it, busily cut, wrap, and fill cartons with heads of lettuce.[1] Each head is individually wrapped in soft, clear-plastic film emblazoned with the logo of the company that produced it. The product of this labor process, commonly referred to as "wrapped" or "source-wrapped" lettuce, is transported to eventually grace the shelves of produce counters, looking (ironically) both antiseptic and farm fresh.
Though the wrap machine technology is not as sophisticated as an electronic tomato harvester or a robot welder in an automobile plant, it does represent a significant change in both the labor process and the labor system. Unlike the ground crew, wrap crew productivity is much less a function of crew regulation and skill and much more a function of mechanical coordination. And, in contrast to earlier production systems characterized by massive inputs of labor and individualized piece-rates, the wrap machine employs large amounts of labor and capital.
Like the process of capital intensification undertaken by the Ford Motor Company some fifty years earlier, these mobile "lettuce assembly lines" have transformed the social organiza-
tion of production. But, as in the automobile industry in 1914, capital intensification has raised important issues in labor organization and utilization. In other words, the profitability of the investment in the machine and in the new technology is dependent on four factors: (1) the continuous use of the equipment; (2) the availability of a stable labor supply; (3) the appearance of the same worker on a regular basis; and (4) the continuing demand for wrapped lettuce (especially from institutional buyers), demonstrated in the premium price paid for it. That is, in order for the investment to be realized, labor turnover and training costs must somehow be minimized. In 1914, Henry Ford sought a resolution to this problem with the introduction of the $5.00 day. Faced with nearly 400 percent turnover annually and the threat of unionization, Ford more than doubled the prevailing wage rate (Sward, in Braverman, 1975:149–150). According to Braverman, Ford's move
raised pay at the Ford plant so much above the prevailing rate in the area that it solved both threats for the moment. It gave the company a large pool of labor from which to choose and at the same time opened up new possibilities for the intensification of labor within the plants, where workers were now anxious to keep their jobs. (1975:149–150)
Though, ironically, hourly wages in the lettuce industry reached $5.60 an hour (in 1981),[2] employment in any one production area does not exceed six or seven months out of the year. Furthermore, the high costs of transportation and housing have made migrancy difficult even with the higher wage rates. Therefore, it would seem, changes in work organization and wage rates brought on by capital intensification have undercut the basis for worker commitment to crew and company. How, then, do lettuce firms resolve this problem? How is sufficient labor found? How is work force stability induced? In more general terms, what are the consequences of change in the labor process for the organization of the labor systems?
In comparing the ground and wrap crew situses, I will suggest that the elimination of the mutual coordination and
experience of the ground crew has simultaneously undermined the advantages to management of the use of undocumented labor. The replacement of crew skill by centralized control has not, however, made the economics of production impervious to the potential effects of low worker commitment and work force turnover. Therefore, labor force stability remains an issue. Because of their disadvantaged labor market status, subordinate family position, and sources of nonwork support, women have been tapped as a more attractive, but equally stable, labor pool over undocumented workers.
The analysis that follows is divided into two parts. The first part examines the effects of change in work organization for managerial control over production. In it I will argue two major points. First, I will show that while the foreman's role as "labor contractor" remains essentially unchanged, the mechanical coordination of work pace has increased managerial control. And, second, I will suggest that the combined negative effects of alien status and gender serve, like citizenship, to enhance employer control over wages and working conditions. The second part of the chapter deals with the construction of the labor market as a whole. There I will demonstrate how gender is used to generate a reliable labor supply and to increase work force stability.
Work Organization and Control in the Wrap Crew
The most visible change in the physical organization of harvesting with the wrap process is the machine itself. Looking like an airplane stripped of its skin, the wrap machine takes the element of mutual coordination out of the hands of experienced crew members and reconstructs it as the physical property of a set of conveyor belts. With that change alone, the discretion and judgment of the ground crew has become an instrument directly controlled by a force outside the crew. Thus, the pace and direction of work has been further subordinated to managerial control.[3] Yet, as in the case of the ground crew, considerable informal control is used to augment formal regulation. The exercise of informal control by
management is, at one and the same time, a product of the allocation of discretionary authority to lower levels of management in the organization and a product of the manipulation of the communal status of labor external to the organization. Where in the ground crew the latter derived from the political vulnerability of undocumented workers in particular, in the wrap crews it derives from the manipulation of women. In both cases, nonmarket statuses are used to enhance managerial control over productivity and over the supply of labor.
To elaborate on these points, I will now turn to a comparison of work organization and control in the ground and wrap crews.
The Labor Process in Comparative Perspective
For a stranger to the fields, a visual comparison of a wrap crew working alongside a ground crew would most likely focus on the relative speed and motion of the two groups. A ground crew, as one grower earlier described it, looks like a buzz saw in action: workers move at a rapid pace through the field, leaving in their wake a jumble of excess leaves and a straight line of packed cartons. A wrap machine, in contrast, lumbers slowly forward like an awkward airplane taxiing along a rutted runway.
Workers' movements on and around the machine appear no less methodical than in the ground crew, but they are much more constrained. Cutters trail closely behind the outstretched wings of the machine, standing and stooping like automatic pistons as they reach down to cut the heads and stand to place them on the machine. Cutters in the ground crew, however, move fluidly along in a bent position, pausing only occasionally to straighten their backs before returning to their work. Packers on the wrap machine stand with their feet firmly planted on the fuselage, extending only their arms to reach for the packaged heads as they travel by on the conveyor. Packers in the ground crew, stooped like the cutters, hurry along behind, deftly plucking the heads from the ground by twos and threes and squeezing them into bulging
cartons. Closers walk slowly alongside the machine sealing and stapling shut the cartons that are slid down a short ramp by the packers. Closers in the ground crew follow on the heels of the packers sealing and then upending the cartons.
Wrappers, absent from the ground crews, are motionless from the waist down as they stand perched on the wings of the wrap machine. In one continuous movement they draw plastic film from a roll in front of them, individually diaper the lettuce stacked beside them, and toss the sealed product on an adjacent conveyor belt (see fig. 4).
The economy of movement in both crews, however, belies the means by which activities are structured and coordinated. Though fundamentally the same activities are carried out on the ground and around the machine, the high degree of coordination evolves from two different sources. On the ground, the crew of thirty-six workers carries out a set of activities in which the coordination of work is a product of the experience of workers with one another. Coordination of the disparate activities of the packers, cutters, and others is achieved through the collective skill of the crew unit. The level of coordination, in turn, directly affects the productivity of the crew and the earnings potential of the individual crew members.
On the wrap machine, however, the element of coordination is provided by the machine itself. Coordination has been reconstructed as a problem of mechanical engineering: the conveyor belts directing the flow of lettuce substitute for the social construction of mutual coordination. The individual activities of the ground crew remain, but the capacity of the crew to affect the pace of the work or its content is greatly diminished.
Formal and Informal Controls in Production
The organization of work in the wrap crew largely removes the incentive for crew coordination beyond that which is organized by the machine. Workers are paid on a flat hourly rate with an increment for overtime, in most cases, over nine hours a day. Small differentials in pay may be associated with
different positions on the machine, but those differentials rarely exceed 40 cents an hour (see table 20).
The conversion from a piece-rate to an hourly pay scheme has the effect of making work pace a matter of greater managerial concern. Given the frequency of complaints about the machine "going too fast" which I heard while working on a wrap crew, it would be reasonable to assume that, left to themselves, workers would have slowed the pace of work in return for the same wages. Many workers were pleased (both openly and out of sight of the foreman) when workdays were disrupted by machine breakdowns or reduced demand from headquarters. Ground crew workers, by contrast, loathed shortened days because they meant reduced earnings. Ground crew workers arrived fieldside in the mornings anxious to get started; wrap crew workers, however, had to be prodded into action.
While the volume of complaints and gripes was greater in the wrap crew than in the ground crew, dissatisfaction never coalesced into organized job actions aimed at the foreman or the company. Rather, the most common expression of opposition took the form of leaving the crew—either temporary leave or quitting. The low level of organized action has
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its roots, I will argue, in the individualizing effect of work organization.
The individualizing effect of assembly-line production has received considerable attention by sociologists concerned with industrial organization.[4] What is pointed to here is the effect of the detailing of the harvest labor process on control over production. Rather than trios of cutters and packers interacting with one another to determine the pace of work, the wrap crew cutters, wrappers, and packers carry out their tasks in isolation from one another. For example, the volume of lettuce to be cut appears to be determined external to individual or group control. For cutters, the adjustment of the work of other cutters, wrappers, and packers is less important than the individual performance of a singular set of activities. Thus workers come to interact with individual commodities as they present themselves and with the machine as the determinant of the volume of these commodities. Contention between human and machine would sometimes take the form of a physical attack on the machine or the commodity. When workers attempt to keep pace with the machine and fail, they may stop momentarily and give it a kick or slam it with an open hand as a symbol of frustration. Along with fellow cutters, I often mutilated acceptable heads of lettuce as a means by which to vent my anger with falling behind. Wrappers would occasionally bang the wrapping device viciously when it failed to operate correctly and thereby cause themselves to be swamped with lettuce heads.
Workers recognize that the machine and the lettuce are inanimate objects, but, at the same time, the form that the interaction takes tends to diffuse dissatisfaction and/or frustration. Thus, individuals struggle to keep pace with the machine or the flow of work confronting them rather than act in concerted fashion to oppose the foreman's authority.
An additional element contributing to managerial control is the physical separation of the different operations. In the case of the machine on which I worked, the cutters, wrappers, and packers all worked at different levels of the machine. Cutters walked on the ground. Wrappers rode on the wings and were elevated about four feet above ground (so that the
wrappers' waists were at about eye level to the cutters). Packers, in turn, stood on a platform behind the wrappers and were separated from them by canvas curtains. Almost everything taking place on the machine is therefore above or out of sight of most workers. As a result, problems confronting one group of workers generally escape the attention of the others. The physical proximity in which the work is performed, however, enhances the foreman's capacity to observe most of the operations.
The separation of workers and the mechanical coordination of tasks thus acts to undermine the degree of interaction and interdependence of crew members. These factors facilitate centralization of control by the foreman directly. As a result, the somewhat disparate and worker controlled and coordinated activities of the ground crews (especially the trios) are eliminated by the mobile assembly line.
Beyond muttered complaints and occasional displays of anger, the most direct forms of response to managerial practice were absenteeism and quitting. Though absenteeism was most common among the cutters, whose job most workers agreed was the most difficult and onerous, many workers used a day or two off as a means by which to escape and cool off. On several occasions workers who acted particularly frustrated or angry were advised by fellow crew members to take a day's rest. As one older cutter (age 46) told me: "It's better to stay home one day than to risk getting in trouble." At times, workers were absent for other reasons, but among crew members a shared understanding existed about the purpose of time away from work. Foremen complained about the problem of absenteeism, but rarely took direct punitive action against the occasional dropouts.
Quitting stood as the strongest statement of opposition to the foreman or the organization of work. During the time of my fieldwork (approximately eight weeks with the crew), three workers quit in anger. All had come from other jobs outside lettuce and began as cutters. Two of the three left after several confrontations over the speed at which they had to work. The third left several days after I began work. According to other crew members, he had attempted to organize job actions (in
the form of slowdowns) in response to the foreman's practice of working the crew until the last break. It was company practice to pay workers for the 15-minute breaks in the morning and midafternoon if they worked after 3:00 P.M. (the time of the afternoon break). Antonio, the wrap crew foreman at Miracle, however, made a practice of working the crew until 3:15 P.M. and then stopping for the day. Thus, almost every day the crew lost 15 minutes (about $1.10) of paid rest time. This worker's plan was to refuse to work the last 15 minutes, or to stop working at 3:00 P.M. even if the machine continued moving. Several cutters reportedly went along with the scheme. Each attempt failed, however, as the foreman either threatened to fire the participants or slowed the machine temporarily and then gradually increased its speed. The plan failed because other crew members did not go along. Later, after the dissident left, several workers rumored that he had actually been a UFW organizer.
Formal and Informal Controls
The foreman on the wrap machines has a variety of devices for controlling the pace and organization of work. The most important device, as well as the most direct, is adjusting the forward speed of the machine itself. The foreman can instruct the driver (a Teamster whose pay rate is double that of the wrap workers) to speed the machine up or slow it down, depending on field conditions and the flow of work on the machine.
Such adjustments in speed operate within limits. Running the machine too slow results in a sparse flow of lettuce from one work station to the next. A common practice among cutters, in particular, when the machine ran too slow was to attempt to appear busy by remaining stooped. The lack of heads waiting to be wrapped by the wrappers, however, will spur the foreman to give a thumbs-up signal to the driver, an indication that the speed should be increased. Running the machine too fast, however, overloads the cutters, wrappers,
and packers. If cutters fall back farther than an arm's reach of the platform on which trimmed lettuce is to be placed, they must either cut the lettuce, walk forward to place it on the platform, and then run back to cut more, or stay within reach of the platform and cut as much as possible, while leaving a percentage of mature heads behind. Furthermore, when the machine is going too fast, lettuce tends to pile up on the platforms in front of the wrappers. In such situations, attempts by cutters to further stack the heads are frustrated by their roundness, that is, they tend to fall to the ground and get bruised or dirty. For packers, a surfeit of lettuce clogs the conveyor belts. When this happens, the machine must either be stopped or slowed in order to allow the packers to catch up.
By contrast to the ground crew, however, the adjustment of work pace in the wrap crew need not require overt coercion or manipulation of workers by the foreman. Rather, since most workers (especially the wrappers and packers) ride on the machine, they can neither escape their tasks nor the foreman's action. And, because wrappers and packers tend to work around the same conveyor belts, they cannot shirk their own individual responsibilities during a speedup without causing others to work harder.
As an indirect adjustment of work pace, many foremen attempt to locate individuals in the jobs they do best. Such actions generally discourage the rotation of workers between jobs. For example, women who show themselves to be particularly adept at wrapping are assigned to the wrapping positions most likely to receive the largest volume of lettuce. Similarly, an experienced cutter will most often be teamed with an experienced wrapper. Several weeks after I had begun work as a cutter in a wrap crew, the foreman, Antonio, paired me with a new wrapper. However, when it became clear that I was cutting faster than Margarita, the wrapper, could handle, I was moved to work with a faster wrapper.
As in the case of the ground crews, however, informal devices are used to supplement the foreman's control over the pace of work. I will refer to three in particular: (1) the foreman's discretionary authority; (2) kin networks; and (3) the manipulation of gender roles.
The Foreman's Discretionary Authority
As in the ground crews, foremen exercise considerable influence in the recruitment and placement of workers in the wrap crews. Foremen mediate most interaction between workers and the company and are therefore in a position to grant favors to crew members. Given the physical isolation of crews and machines during the daily work process, the workplace comes to be dominated by the presence and authority of the foreman. They can excuse absences, okay short vacations, hire friends or family of crew members, and, in so doing, accrue substantial personal debt from crew members. As I found out from my own experience, such debts cannot be entirely repaid if this form of control is to be maintained.
A perplexing situation can develop for the foreman if one refuses to incur a debt. In my case, I began to realize after several weeks' work that the foreman's iciness toward me was not so much a result of my ethnicity or uniqueness (being the only Anglo in the fields). Rather, I had performed according to what I had initially believed to be the norm: punctually showing up for work, not complaining, and not bothering the foreman. In conversation with other workers, however, it became clear that owing something to the foreman was the norm. I experimented by asking for two days off. Though Antonio granted permission reluctantly, he warmed visibly when I returned and announced that now I "owed him" for that favor. On several occasions in subsequent weeks, he reminded me of my debt as a spur to get me to work harder. "Other foremen," he chided, "aren't so easy to get along with. You're lucky."
Kin Networks
Family networks provide a ready means of labor recruitment on the machines, as well as in other agricultural employment.[5] Foremen for the wrap machines often enlist their own family networks as well as those of crew members to fill empty spaces
in the crews. One advantage of this recruitment technique is that it allows the foreman to exert control over the work indirectly through the family structure. Two examples of this situation will help illustrate.
An older woman, Señora Sandoval, and her two teenage daughters worked in my crew. The mother was a packer and both daughters wrapped. Complaining about her arthritis during lunch one day, she told me that she wanted to go back to live in Mexico with her son (she lived in Salinas at the time) but that her daughters wanted to stay and work in the United States. In order to work with them, Señora Sandoval had struck a deal with Antonio: in return for her job, she would see to it that her daughters worked well. Thus, she cracked the whip on her daughters. When they talked or allowed work to pile up in front of them, a sharp look or a stern command issued from Señora Sandoval and their errant behavior ceased.
A somewhat different example of family control centered on the foreman's and driver's wives. The wives of both Antonio and Jose (the driver) worked as wrappers on my crew. These women were good friends, worked side by side, and shared lunch and rest breaks with their husbands. They were also the fastest wrappers in the crew. But, beyond that, they often acted as subforemen. For example, at times when certain wrapping positions were busier than others, they would order their fellow wrappers to either pick up the slack or work harder. Most workers saw them as extensions of management and, as such, they were an unpopular pair in the crew. They were also capable of exerting leverage with Antonio: they could jeopardize workers with whom they did not get along and they were the only nonmanagement employees capable of getting Antonio and Jose to slow the work pace. With regard to the latter, on several occasions Luisa (Antonio's wife) convinced Jose to slow the machine while Antonio was away and the crew had begun to fall behind. The presence of Luisa and the driver's wife had the effect of tripling the amount of surveillance and supervision on the machine.
Manipulation of Gender Roles
The informal manipulation of women's status in the wrap crew situs resembles that found in other situations where male supervisors oversee women employees (Kanter, 1977; Tepperman, 1970). However, the capacity of the male foreman to exercise greater control over women is accentuated by the highly traditional sex roles characteristic of Mexican society. In the wrap crews this takes several forms. First, some foremen attempt to intimidate women workers through overt displays of anger or physical force. These are usually accompanied by threats of firing (i.e., abandonment) if correct behavior is not forthcoming. Incidents of this sort occurred infrequently in my crew, but when they did, they evoked embarrassment on the part of the chastised women. Men were never subject to such assaults. Several male workers commented after one of Antonio's verbal barrages that they would not stand for that kind of abuse if it were aimed at them. But they would not intervene on behalf of the women. As Armando, a fellow cutter, explained: "To a man, that would be a challenge to fight. To a woman, it is not right ... but women are treated that way."
The other side of the same coin is flirtatious behavior. While there are limits to how far this can go[6] (as in the case with intimidation), flirting by foremen can evoke some degree of cooperation. Several women workers I interviewed complained that foremen flirted with younger women in an effort to get them to work in one job or another or to increase their cooperation with the foremen's rules. For example, a wrapper from Verde complained that foremen attempted to undercut job rotation (described as a way for wrappers and cutters to beat the boredom of the work) in order to speed up production. The foremen, she explained, would flirt with or differentially attend to the needs of young unattached women in order to convince them to stay in one position and not rotate. Flirting or attention-giving is not limited to younger, unmarried women; on several occasions Antonio attempted to placate the complaints of older, married women with charming behavior and compliments.
These devices—discretionary authority, family networks, and manipulation of gender roles—are all elements of control manipulated by the foreman and management to affect the level of productivity and effort of the wrap crew. Together they indicate quite clearly that informal mechanisms of control are at least as important as formal organizational rules and regulations.
On the whole, the reorganization of harvesting into the wrap crew acts to enhance managerial control over the labor process. The structuring of work into isolated activities diffuses the potential for substantive response to speedups or other managerial directives. Formal measures of control are augmented through the manipulation of statuses produced external to the organization. These factors in combination serve to enable the wrap crew's harvest to compete with the ground crew's.
Gender And Labor Supply
The preceding discussion showed that the transformation of the harvest labor process has had a number of important consequences for the organization and utilization of labor. The shared experience, commitment, and coordination of the ground crew has been replaced by a system that minimizes group interaction, individualizes skill acquisition, reduces skill requirements, and enhances managerial control over work. For workers, wages are less a function of crew skill than they are of the total number of hours worked in any given period.
The reorganization of harvesting has re-created the traditional conditions of agricultural employment: a high demand for low skill labor, low (hourly) pay, restricted occupational mobility, and little or no incentive for employment stability. Yet the change in harvesting techniques has been accomplished by means of a substantial increase in fixed capital investments.[7] The combination of high demand for labor with an increase in fixed costs raises a major organizational question: how are capital investments protected and the cost competitiveness of the technique maintained through the em-
ployment of what is generally considered to be unstable or casual labor? Asked a little differently, how is an abundant and stable supply of labor created and maintained?
Firms have been able to simultaneously increase capital intensity and labor demand through recruitment from another low status labor pool: women. While the costs associated with turnover have not been eliminated, they have been reduced by means of recruitment from large local, stable pools of women workers. The advantage of this system resides in the disadvantaged social, political, and economic status of women, especially noncitizen and Mexican-American women. The concentration of women in the wrap crews, in turn, represents an effort on the part of the industry to translate the low status of women into stability in the labor supply.
Through an analysis of data collected from survey, interview, and field research, I will demonstrate how gender is used to generate labor supply and to enhance labor commitment.
Gender and Labor Force Characteristics
The effects of gender on labor market organization are demonstrated quite clearly by the survey data. In comparing the demographic and organizational characteristics of men and women in the wrap crews, three major differences are important.
First, as summarized in table 21, men and women differ considerably in terms of their demographic characteristics. Men tend to be either younger or older, at the beginning or near the end of their work careers. Women, by contrast, are drawn from across the age distribution. In terms of marital and family status, the differences between men and women again are clear. Women tend much more often than men to be married and to have children young enough to need some sort of daily care. The combination of younger and older men results in a relatively small percentage who are married and/or with dependent children. Finally, among those who are married, women are much more likely to have a working husband in the family unit. In addition, as at the bottom of table 21,
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women's spouses earn on average much more than they do. Though only rough figures are available, women in the sample earn about 62 percent of what their husbands earn.
Second, women working the wrap crews tend to be much more stable in terms of residence and employment than men (see table 22). Among workers surveyed in the Salinas Valley, 60 percent of the women and only 13.6 percent of the men made their permanent residence in the United States. Men were much more likely to move with work than women were; nine out of ten men worked in two major production areas or more in 1978, while less than two out of ten women migrated.
Third, women appear much more stable than men with respect to type of employment (job), company, and crew. As table 23 shows, women generally have greater experience in the kind of work they do—working in the wrap machine harvest—than men. The much higher percentage with three or more years' experience in the harvest (70 percent of women vs. 45.3 percent of men) suggests that women are much
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more likely to remain in their type of work than men. The median number of years' experience for women is 4.2 but for men the median experience is 2.6 years.
With respect to company tenure, again women are more stable than men. The outstanding feature of table 24 is the very high percentage of men who have worked with their present company for less than one year (half the sample). Women, on the whole, tend to have worked for the same company, though not necessarily in the same job, much longer than men. The median company tenure for women is approximately 3.6 years, whereas for men it is something less than one year.
The data for crew tenure mirrors that of company tenure (see table 25). The overall lower crew tenure among women suggests that they have moved or been moved between crews in the same company.
What remains a question, however, is why women, especially local and citizen women, should constitute such a large portion of the labor force. The issues of stability and commitment, generally reflected in the data on employment tenure, are important elements of the answer. To understand how and why women show up in these positions, I will now
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turn to an examination of the factors that affect women's employment chances.
Labor Market Status, Family Position, And Employment
The greater overall stability of women in terms of work, company, and crew is itself a product of the factors that serve
to segregate women into a separate labor market. Two major constraints operate on women's labor market chances: those imposed by women's status vis-à-vis all over labor market participants, and those imposed by women's family roles. Together these constraints reduce the range of job opportunities for women and, in turn, make women highly accessible as a pool of labor for low paid, low status employment. It is not possible here to discuss sex segregation in employment in great detail.[8] It is important, however, to show how it is that women come to constitute the primary source of labor for wrap crew production and how those jobs come to be defined as "women's work." The type and duration of employment experienced by women workers is strongly influenced by their disadvantaged status as women, as (frequently) noncitizens, and by their family roles.
Labor Market Status
Many of the women I interviewed in the course of this study were acutely aware of the range of jobs open to them. For example, Juana, a nineteen-year-old wrapper born in Texas, who attended high school in Salinas, described her own employment outlook:
I got two more years of school if I want to get a diploma. Even if I do, what difference would it make? I want to do something like be a hairdresser, you know? But there's no work. So, what have I got but to work out there [in the fields]? Maybe after a while I'll go to work someplace else.
When asked why she did not work in some other job in town, she replied:
You mean like at Penney's or Mervyn's [department stores]? I make better money out here! Anyway, those jobs are no better. All the men have the good jobs.... If you're a woman, nobody wants to hire you. Everybody says that they don't want to train you to do a job because you'll just run off and get married. If you're a woman, that's one strike against you. If you're a woman and Mexican, forget it.
Another wrapper had gone back to work at age thirty-four after ten years of rearing children. She described her reasons for working the fields this way:
When we got married, my husband didn't want me to work. But he lost his job last year and we don't have any money. It hurts him to see me work, but we need it.... If I could work someplace else, I would. But there aren't any jobs anywhere for women unless you got an education. So, I went to work here. I didn't know where to look so I called one of my comadres . She already worked here, so I came out, too.
For other women, the fields represent the only source of employment. A recent immigrant to Salinas told me, "I've always worked in the fields. I don't know anything else." Another wrapper, a forty-year-old woman named Manuela who commutes across the border to work in the Imperial Valley, commented straightforwardly, "Women can thin, weed, and work on the machines. Maybe sometimes there is work in the canneries. Sometimes there is work transplanting. But, mostly women work in the fields."
Even when women seek work outside the fields, they are often steered back there. In an interview with a male counselor at a state employment office in Salinas, I was told:
Most Mexican-American women who come in here are given the names of employers who need field help. We have one woman who all she does is handle those calls. When a Mexican woman comes in, we just send her right over to talk to Dolores. It saves us a lot of time ... especially if they don't speak English.
The barriers to nonfarm employment are real ones for women and, within agriculture, work opportunities are restricted. In a study of women farm workers in California, Barton (1978) shows that even when women workers seek to acquire more skills or higher skilled jobs, they are often met by hostile employers and insufficient training programs.
Compounding the constraints imposed by nonmarket statuses, employment in many heavily agricultural production
areas offers little opportunity for higher earnings or status. Among women in the survey sample, less than 10 percent had held jobs outside agriculture in the preceding five years. In the Salinas, Imperial, and San Luis valleys, where the bulk of lettuce production is located, the only real alternatives to work in the fields are the canneries and packing sheds. These jobs, however, bear remarkable resemblance to wrap harvest employment, that is, work is seasonal, low paid and, for the most part, unskilled. Yet the canneries and the packing sheds have thrived historically on the availability of local supplies of female labor—particularly the wives of farm workers and other local workers.[9] Thus, the appearance of large numbers of women in the wrap crews represents, in part, an extension of employment practices (and assembly lines) from the canneries to the fields.
Women's Role in the Family
The position of women in the family acts as the other major factor influencing employment tenure and opportunities. Two elements of family organization are important here: the division of labor between husband and wife, and the economic position of the family.
The division of labor in the family is often cited as a major obstacle to the working careers of married women (Brown, 1977; Gubbels, 1977; Jones, 1970). The obligation to perform household labor and childrearing has traditionally fallen to women farm workers, even those who migrate (Barton, 1978). The women interviewed in this study were no exception. Of the sixty women interviewed in the survey, forty-five were married and/or had children. Of that number, over three-fourths had children who needed some sort of daily attention while their mother worked. Nearly all these married women reported that they performed all the major household chores on a regular basis. The remainder said they divided that labor between themselves and older children, in most cases older daughters. All this work is carried out in addition to working
in the fields during the harvest season. As one of the women with whom I worked explained methodically:
Every morning in the summer, I get up at 4 to make my lunch, his lunch, and the children's breakfast. At 5 I take the kids to my mother's house down the street. At 6 I leave for work. Then at 3 in the afternoon he gets home and takes a nap ... he works real hard.... I am usually home by 4. I start dinner and then get the girls [daughters]. After dinner I do the dishes and maybe some cleaning.... If I'm lucky I get to bed around 8 or 8:30.
While many of the women complained about the tremendous amount of daily and weekend work to be done, the dual roles of housewife and wage earner are most often accepted (willingly or unwillingly) as a condition of their employment and the family's well-being.
The subordinate position of women in the family is also reflected in the practice of determining whether or not a wife will work. In almost all instances, women reported having to secure their husband's permission prior to taking a job; 93 percent of the women lettuce workers surveyed said that their husbands held veto power over their employment.
According to data collected in interviews, the extent to which the husband's objections result in actual refusal to let his wife work is strongly affected by the economic position of the family. Beyond the husband's employment, the most important factor affecting family economic position, and therefore the wife's employment, is the residential location of the family itself. Whether the family lives in the United States or in Mexico has considerable influence on the decision about employment, even to the extent that economic necessity may override traditional objections. To wit, married women living in the United States or near the border are much more likely to work (in lettuce or some other industry) than are married women living in the interior of Mexico.
In this regard, two major components of residential location emerge: the relative cost of living in the United States and Mexico and the proximity of the family to work. For many
lettuce workers living in the United States, the added income for a second paycheck is necessary for the family to stay afloat financially. As one woman explained:
With the inflation and all the bills here [in Salinas], I have to work, too. My husband makes good money, but it's just not enough.... Back in Mexico, we could get along with less. Here it's harder.
In this regard farm worker men and women share in the common plight of many working-class families in the United States.
Economic necessity can overcome even the staunchest of opposition from men, particularly among those families committed to living or remaining in the United States. The husband of a wrapper who himself worked in the packing sheds argued:
We have lived here [in the U.S.] for almost five years. I want my kids to get an education and to do better than I have.... If that means my wife has to work, she works. Sometimes I feel like I'm doing all a man should do. You know, taking care of his family? But I let her work because the kids have to have a chance.
For some families, both spouses working is a precondition for settling in the United States. A common explanation among permanent immigrants sounded like the one given by a young woman with two children:
I have two sisters who live nearby in Chualar. They have lived there with their husbands for almost six years. My brother-in-law told my husband that if we wanted to move, we'd have to both work. My husband told me that he would get me a job in the sheds or in the fields. That was the only way we could live here. ... I don't like working on the machines ... but that's what he wants. We can afford to stay only if I work too.
Among residents of Mexico, there is a decided split between those families in which wives do not work and those in which
they do. Mexican men were the most openly opposed to their wives working, on traditional grounds. A common response to questions about wives' employment was a blank stare. Many of these men believed that either women should not work outside the home or that they should do so only under the most extreme circumstances. A smattering of representative comments echoes these conclusions:
A woman cooks, sews, and cares for the children. That is woman's work.
A man is less of a man if he has to make his wife work.
If I get sick, maybe I will have my wife work.... I would rather borrow money first.
Even for the most traditional/chauvinistic men, the lower economic standards and the lesser availability of employment in Mexico acted against wives' working, as well. Several of the migrant ground crew workers explained that their income alone was sufficient to support their families. Using the standard of living in Mexico as the relevant criterion for comparison, one loader explained:
We are not rich, but we have enough to get along. We live better than most of our neighbors. None of them has a car or a TV.... As long as I can make money this way, she should not work.
Another lechugero, from deep in the interior of Mexico, added that his wife's work at home was important economically:
She takes care of our few chickens and goats when I am away. If she worked, who would do that?
The restricted character of employment opportunities in Mexico also reduces the likelihood of a wife working. A typical explanation went like this:
If we lived near the border, maybe she could work in the fields. We live near Hermosillo [over 100 miles from the border] and
there's no work.... She stays with our family and cares for the children while I work.
At the extremes, therefore, the economic conditions of the United States and Mexico have different effects on the employment behavior of married women. The higher cost of living in the United States compels women to seek work, even over the initial objections of their husbands. The specific conditions of that employment must, however, mesh with wives' dual role as wage-earner and housekeeper/babysitter. In contrast, the lower cost of living and lack of alternative employment in Mexico bolster husbands' traditional objections to wives' employment.
To summarize briefly, the type and duration of employment experienced by married farm worker women is strongly influenced by their generally disadvantaged status, by their role in the family, and by the economic position of the family. In almost all instances, women's work careers are organized in such a way as to carry out the traditional duties of wife and mother, in addition to that of wage earner. A wife's wage may represent an integral part of the family budget, particularly in the case of families living in the United States and border areas, but the range of work opportunities and the duration of employment are limited by her subordinate status in the family. Thus, the availability of work in low skill, seasonal production allows women to carry out the dual roles of wife and wage-earner. At the same time, however, the availability of this attractive labor pool facilitates expansion of those jobs.
The Construction Of Men's And Women's Work
The forces that restrict the employment opportunities of women also act to stabilize that labor pool residentially. The role of wife and mother, the subordinate status of a woman's work to that of her husband, and the various family earnings strategies severely limit the geographic mobility of married women. In some instances, migrancy is a feature of the work career, but only under the condition that the family migrates as a unit. In the majority of cases, married women remain in
one location whether or not their husbands have jobs that require seasonal relocation.
According to interviews with personnel offices, union staff, and workers, the majority of women working on the wrap machines are drawn from labor pools in the separate production areas. In other words, most of the labor for the Salinas harvest comes from the Salinas Valley; likewise labor for the Arizona harvest comes from southwestern Arizona and the area directly across the border (e.g., San Luis, Mexico). The same sources also indicate that the localization of employment has increased in recent years.
The major indications of this trend were revealed in interviews with growers and union staff. First, employers reported that, in contrast to their ground crews and skilled maintenance labor, very few wrap crews migrate as units with the companies. The vice president of Salad Giant reported that only parts of two wrap crews (out of a total of 14 employed by the company) worked in more than one production area. The president of Miracle estimated that only 10 percent of his company's nearly 600 wrap workers followed the crop in any given year. Second, the increased localization of wrap and thinning crews, along with harvest workers in other crops, has spurred the UFW to press for seniority by geographic region in addition to company seniority (interviews with union staff; see UFW contracts, 1975, 1979).
The availability of women from local labor pools offers distinct advantages for employers. The most important advantage derives from the increased likelihood of a stable and returning labor force in successive seasons. The survey data presented earlier provides evidence for the relationship between localization and stability in company and crew employment among women. For employers, recruitment from localized labor pools thus provides one means by which to reduce the costs of training labor to work on the wrap machines. This factor is particularly important with regard to the wrapping jobs, the positions that have the greatest potential for creating bottlenecks in the labor process. As the personnel director at Miracle explained:
Stability is the most important thing. If we have to spend time training our crews every year or season, we lose money because we slow down. It's very important that the people know what they're doing and that they know how to do it the Miracle way.
Though few employers or their staff would speak explicitly about their recruitment techniques in this context, the vice president of Salad Giant did provide some illustration. His remarks are instructive with respect to the relationship between labor stability and productivity.
Turnover is still a problem in our wrap crews. We, like everyone else involved in wrapping, feel like we've trained everyone who works in the industry.... At first, we expected all of our people to move with the company through the loop. But we found that just wasn't feasible. So we now make a practice of keeping contact with our workers in the different [production] areas. We just call them up when we get into their area and they come to work.
Beginning around 1974, Salad Giant began concentrating on maintaining contact with local workers through the circulation of a company newsletter to all permanent and seasonal employees. According to the Salad Giant official, the newsletter was designed to "bring the employees and managers closer together." More important, however, the newsletter provided a bulletin for production in the different regions. Coupled with this effort was the development of an elaborate phone network intended to inform workers of start-up dates for harvesting.
Despite efforts such as those undertaken at Salad Giant and other companies, turnover in the wrap crews remains a major issue. Like most low paying seasonal jobs, work on the machines is not rewarding financially or aesthetically. Thus, some workers find the pay too low or the working conditions unacceptable and leave. Though the rate of turnover among women is decidedly lower than among men, the subordination of women's employment to that of their husbands sometimes means that they will withdraw from work for childbearing,
trips out of the area, or relocation. The greatest turnover, however, takes place among men who work on the machines.
There are several reasons why men are less stable. First, especially among the younger men, working in the wrap crews is designed as a means by which to gain entry into a ground crew or other better paying work. In the wrap crew in which I worked, the consensus among cutters was that wrap crew jobs provided both the training and the networks necessary to join the ground crews. As one young cutter remarked: "You can't make enough money in this work. The thing to do is learn how to cut or pack and then keep your ears open for jobs in the [ground] crews."[10] During the time I worked on the wrap crew, the turnover among men was about 75 percent; among women the turnover was only 20 percent. Most of the men joined company piece-rate crews in lettuce, broccoli, or celery; the remainder took off in search of work in other companies.
Second, the companies themselves often use the wrap crews as recruitment centers for their piece-rate operations. Company-sponsored tryouts for new crews often draw upon men already working on the wrap machines. For example, three days after I joined my crew, 8 of the 16 men on my machine (7 cutters and I packer) left to try out for positions in a newly formed ground crew. Though such "raiding" of the wrap crews provides a convenient internal recruitment device for the company, it does act in a counterproductive fashion as far as machine output is concerned; with each successive raid or defection, new workers have to be trained.
Finally, turnover among men is partially a product of the expectation of workmates that able men will attempt to find better paying work. The effect of peer pressure is considerable. First, peer pressure is exerted when new or replacement ground crews are in the process of formation. The move from working on the hourly wrap crews to the ground crews is more than an attempt to increase one's earnings. It also involves an attempt to take part in the mystique of the ground crews themselves—they are the hard-working, fast-living "champagne of farm workers." Trying out for the ground crew represents more than a test of skill: it is often
equated with a test of manhood. As one worker described, it's a test of whether one has "the balls to work like a madman and survive." The fear and apprehension brought on by that mystique is so great that, especially among the younger workers, the friendships created during work on the wrap machines are used to pressure groups of workers to try out together. Friends and even passing acquaintances are used as the supports for deciding to try out and then remaining in the new situation once the decision has been made. Thus, I was urged almost insistently by fellow workers to join them in a tryout when new openings were announced.
The other way in which peer pressure is manifested is the attitudes of women workers. Though I will discuss the relations between men and women on the machine shortly, women can, in an indirect way, exert influence over the job tenure of men. Several women in my crew asked me and some of the other cutters when we were going to "move on" on the ground crews. Their expectation was that men would naturally seek better paying jobs. Though such expectations did not differ from those of the men, the fact that they came from women made the ground crews look like "men's work."
Older men, by contrast, are much more likely to remain in jobs on the wrap crew. In large part, this derives from the fact that they, like women, are more residentially stable. Most of the older men I interviewed were trying to keep working after long and arduous careers in the fields. Work in the wrap and thinning crews provided the only real opportunities for employment. However, this group in particular is the most likely to be plagued with physical ailments developed over the years.
Thus, by and large, locally based women have proven to be the most stable and predictable supply of labor in the reorganized harvest. What remains to be considered is the means by which female concentration in the crews is perpetuated.
Making It "Women's Work"
The ratio of women to men found in the wrap crews differs from company to company and sometimes from crew to crew.
However, the numerical predominance of women in that segment of the harvest labor process is clear. Evidence from the survey data, my own fieldwork and observations shows that, with the exception of jobs that require considerable physical strength, women are represented in all occupational categories, in wrapping, cutting, and packing positions.
A search for the origins of the concentration of women on machines yields little illumination of the present situation. More important are the processes by which certain jobs (and, to some extent, all jobs) become "women's work." There are three related processes taking place: (1) employers actively recruiting women; (2) men reacting to the negative status attached to the work; and (3) efforts on the part of women to monopolize access to those jobs.
For most employers the actual recruitment of' women is taken more as a matter of standard procedure than as an innovative technique. The fact that in certain situations women are more attractive labor is not constantly rediscovered. Employers instead simply look around and see that women have been continuously employed in canneries, packing sheds, and harvesting in other industries (the mechanical harvest of canning tomatoes) and follow suit. Said one grower: "So far we haven't found anything better or faster than women doing the wrapping. They're fast and efficient" (Packer, May 14, 1977, 16C).
The recruitment and job allocation process, however, is an active part of making and perpetuating women's work. Here employers intervene directly in an attempt to ensure that the same category of labor continues to show up where it is most advantageous. This takes two forms in the wrap crews. First, wage reductions eliminate the economic basis for men working in those jobs because they are neither sufficient to encourage migration nor high enough to support the single family paycheck. Second, women are actively recruited through a variety of networks to occupy positions on the machines. The utilization of foremen's networks and those of women crew members enables firms to perpetuate identification of gender with occupation.
The successful construction of enclaves of production as
women's work also acts to discourage the voluntary entry of men into those positions. As in most organizations where women are concentrated into an occupational category (e.g., secretarial and clerical work), the occupation comes to reflect the status of the occupants, not the requisite skills or aptitudes of the work they perform. There is nothing feminine about the job of wrapping, for example, though most employers assert that women are better suited to do the work (women are "more patient" or are capable of doing "mindless chores"). Nonetheless, workers and managers both respond to the status associated with the occupants and internalize it as a condition of employment.
Two illustrations from my fieldwork help elaborate this point. On six separate occasions when one or more wrappers were absent from work, the foreman shifted women from their packing jobs and made them wrap, or did the job himself. This took place even when male cutters could have been more easily spared than packers. No union rules or pay differentials between jobs prohibited men from being put temporarily in the wrapping jobs. When I asked the foreman why he did not use the cutters, he replied simply: "It's a woman's work." The brevity of the explanation assumed that enough was said.
The foreman's remark proved an understatement in comparison with the view held by many male workers. After the incidents described above, I pursued the issue among my workmates. Several workers told me straightforwardly that men who wrap are usually suspected of being homosexual (maricon ). An incident that took place near the end of my work on the machine provided evidence of those sentiments. A seventeen-year-old Mexican working his second day on the machine volunteered to take over the wrapping position of a woman who had taken ill. Though a few derisive comments were made quietly among the cutters, nothing was said overtly. The following morning, however, when the sick wrapper failed to appear, the same young man climbed on the machine to replace her. Before he could settle in, he was met by a chorus of hoots and by vicious jokes questioning his sexuality. Confused and embarrassed, he climbed down and
resumed his cutting position behind the machine. Afterward, one of the older male workers took him aside and explained the "facts of work." Nothing further was said and the cutter did not volunteer again. Interviews with men and women from other crews and companies confirmed that similar stereotyping takes place throughout the industry.
Finally, the construction of women's work is a process in which women themselves take a hand. Though certainly not intending to further management's purpose, women may organize around their communal status for the purpose of monopolizing access to jobs defined as women's work. For example, Felicia, a 32-year-old wrapper, explained that her crew was entirely female with the exception of the closers and loaders. That situation, she argued, "is much better than having some men and some women. The women all get along together. We can talk and work and not worry what the men think." Any time an opening occurs in cutting, wrapping, or packing, kinship networks are used to fill it:
We don't have any agreements ... that men shouldn't be hired. It's just that we like having all women together.... Nobody's ever tried to bring a man in.
On the one hand, the making of women's work involves purposive activity on the part of management and, to some extent, women; on the other hand, it involves the reaction of men to the sexual identification of the occupations in which women are concentrated.
Conclusion
Gender differences are used to create and enforce the distinction between crews. Like citizenship, gender is a communal status that, while socially constructed external to the labor process, has considerable consequences for the organization of work and wages. The status of women external to economic organizations, such as the lettuce firms described in this chapter, enables employers to use their labor in particular ways.
The severe restriction of women's labor market opportunities is seized upon by employers as a means for recruiting large quantities of low-skilled labor.
But, additionally, the enforced geographic stability of farm worker wives and children enhances the availability of women's labor on a regular, seasonal basis. Thus, employers can avail themselves of this element of an internal labor market without having to pay wages sufficiently high to encourage labor migration with the firm. Put slightly different, women's geographic stability, a product of their subordinate family and economic position, makes their labor available on a regular, seasonal basis. Employers, therefore, are ensured that at least a portion of the labor they trained (at an earlier juncture) will be available in local labor pools in each production area. As a result, the high costs of regularly training new workers are reduced through the attachment of local women to the firms.