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

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.