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2
Politics of Labor Supply

The numerical dominance of alien, noncitizen labor constitutes a distinctive feature of labor markets in southwestern agriculture. Despite the periodic influx of citizen workers, with the Dust Bowl in the Plains states, for example, the past 150 years have been marked by the continuous employment of foreign workers in the fields. Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and Mexican workers have, over the years, harvested the crops of the fertile western valleys. Mexico has been the major source of farm workers (compesinos) for the past four decades. Why have foreign workers been such an important factor in agricultural production? How has their numerical dominance in farm work been maintained? What has been the impact of a noncitizen labor force on the organization of work? These are the central questions to be addressed throughout this study of the social organization of lettuce production. To lay the groundwork for the study, I will begin in this chapter with an examination of the relationship between labor demand and labor supply in agriculture.

Continuity and Change in Southwestern Agriculture

The traditional praise of the agricultural employer as a "last frontiersman" and guardian of rural values is nowhere more incongruous than in the agricultural economy of the Southwest. While a few descendants of the original pioneers and


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homesteaders continue to farm the fields in California and Arizona, most have forsaken the farm for more lucrative employment in other, urban locales. Many were driven out of business by larger corporate competitors. Some traded their farms for managerial positions in giant agribusiness enterprises.

Yet, despite the growth of vertically integrated firms, the specialization of input industries, and the concentration of production into fewer and fewer firms, employers and their political representatives paint a picture of agriculture remarkably similar in its detail to that of a century ago. An editorial in a leading agribusiness journal proclaimed in 1979:

At no other point in time has the farmer been in graver danger than now. Without the assistance of the state and federal governments in helping farmers cope with the special conditions of agricultural production, this nation will waste its greatest economic strength....The vulnerability of the farming enterprise to the unpredictability of weather, natural disaster and labor shortage makes it unlike any other industry in our economy. (Western Grower and Shipper , November 1979)

It has been precisely this kind of platform—which Friedland and Thomas (1974) dub "agricultural exceptionalism"—that has served as the basis of employer demands for special treatment in relation to economic policy and, more importantly here, in terms of labor supply. Lloyd Fisher (1953:94) described this paradox succinctly:

The California farmer, like other American farmers, is one of the principal audiences for the physiocratic legend. No matter whether he travels by private plane, employs a chauffeur, ships by air express and owns a produce market or two in Baltimore and New York, he is insistently a farmer engaged in society's most useful and necessary enterprise, and entitled to the special consideration which the dignity of his occupation commands. He regards himself as a natural agent of the forces of freedom, which he is more likely to define as freedom to raise, harvest and market his crop than as freedom of speech and assembly for those whose stake in society is less than his own. He believes that he has a right as a farmer to an adequate supply of labor.


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Historical consistency in the ideology of exceptionalism should not, however, obscure the fact that considerable change has taken place in the organization of southwestern agriculture and agricultural enterprises. The average production unit has more than doubled in size since the 1920s (Census of Agriculture, 1954, 1978). The value of investments in machinery, including harvesting equipment, in the fruit and vegetable industries has increased by more than 250 percent since 1940 (Census of Agriculture, 1954, 1978). A secular decline in the number of unincorporated enterprises has been charted since the early 1960s (Census of Agriculture, 1954–1978; Villarejo, 1980) and the well-publicized incursion of nonagricultural corporations into agribusiness has significantly changed the capital and product markets of a number of major commodity groups (see Villarejo, 1980; Fellmeth, 1973; Friedland and Barton, 1975; Zwerdling, 1980).

Moreover, seasonal producers remain but many industries are now dominated by enterprises that are no longer dependent on the profits of a single season or commodity to remain viable. Many of the new agribusiness giants (e.g., Tenneco, United Brands, Castle and Cooke) have freed themselves from restraints of seasonality by expanding production between geographic areas (Villarejo, 1980; Fredricks, 1979; Hightower, 1972). In many of these cases production is spread across disparate regions, allowing planting and harvesting to be carried out on a multiseason or year-round basis.

Changes in organizational structure have also coincided with changes in employment and work organization. Although the precise relationship between these factors will be a central question to be considered in this analysis, it is important to briefly note some effects here. In some cases, employment has been converted from highly seasonal to more permanent (see Friedland and Barton's 1975 study of the processing tomato industry). In other cases, seasonal hiring remains but has been accompanied by employer efforts to stabilize employment relations in order to ensure themselves of experienced labor (e.g., in the citrus and fresh-market grape industries). And, in other instances, more traditional casual employment has persisted. The increased diversity of


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employment patterns is the important point here. Changes in work organization are equally significant. The introduction of mechanical harvesting devices (e.g., in processing tomatoes and grapes) has added greater differentiation in the occupational structure of some industries (see Friedland and Nelkin, 1972, for a study of similar effects in northeastern agriculture). In others, such as the lettuce industry, two work processes—one a craftlike division of labor built around stable teams of workers and the other a machine-paced "assembly" (wrap) division of labor—have been developed. In still others, highly labor-intensive work processes founded on the coordination of very simple tasks continue to exist, unchanged for over half a century.

More accurately, then, it should be understood that the economic organization of southwestern agriculture is far more diverse and complex than the ideology of exceptionalism tends to portray. Though all firms have a vested interest in acquiring inputs (including labor) at the lowest possible price, not all firms are structured the same, or have the same demands for land, capital, and labor, or organize production in similar fashion. Indeed, some of the largest and most prosperous firms have much more in common with nonagricultural firms than they do with the stereotypical family farm.

What has appeared constant or stable, in contrast to changes in the organization of agriculture and agricultural enterprises, has been the supply and the structure of agricultural labor markets. Viewed broadly, agricultural enterprises—large and small, well-heeled and struggling—have had in common access to a distinctive supply of labor: a supply distinguished historically by its mobility, its elasticity, its responsiveness to fluctuating economic conditions, and perhaps most important, its lower price relative to other segments of the national labor force. As the figures below indicate (table 1), wages in southwestern agriculture have historically lagged well behind those received by workers in the manufacturing sector.

What has been described to this point as diversification in the organizational structure, employment conditions, and


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Table 1. Average Hourly Earnings for Farm Labor
as Percent of Hourly Earnings in Manufacturing, 1948–1975

Year

California
farm labor
(%)

U.S.
farm labor
(%)

1948

65

58

1949

57

53

1950

54

51

1951

55

53

1952

55

53

1953

55

51

1954

52

49

1955

51

47

1956

51

47

1957

49

45

1958

47

45

1959

45

46

1960

47

45

1961

46

45

1962

46

44

1963

46

45

1964

46

45

1965

46

45

1966

49

48

1967

50

48

1968

49

50

1969

50

49

1970

50

49

1971

49

49

1972

48

49

1973

51

45

1974

55

45

1975

50

57

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Statistical Research Service, Farm Labor , 1948–1977. State of California, Office of the Governor, Economic Report of the Governor , 1964 and 1977, Sacramento.


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labor process in agriculture should lead one to expect substantial change in the structure of the labor market. How, then, do we account for the capacity of complex and highly profitable firms to acquire labor so cheaply? Do agricultural firms have unchallenged access to that labor? If so, why? And, perhaps more to the point, has the agricultural labor market changed? If so, how have changes in the supply of labor affected the organization of production and the organization of agricultural firms?

The questions raised here pose thorny problems for both radical and mainstream theories of labor markets and work organization. Though I will argue later (chapter 7) that these problems are not unique to the lettuce industry or to agriculture, starting from an empirically grounded set of questions offers the opportunity to assess the robustness (or flexibility) of more general theoretical approaches that have been constructed on the basis of rather broad assumptions about "what's going on in the factory or the field." In this section I will consider the appropriateness of sectoral explanations for the organization of labor markets and work in agriculture. The general model, borrowing from more conventional theories, will be shown to provide a useful but partial approach to understanding the dynamics of industrial structure, labor market operation, and work organization. The limitations in the model derive in part from an incorrect assessment of change in industrial structure and, more broadly, from insufficient attention to the interactive character of demand and supply in the labor market. This latter point will be used as the starting point for a reanalysis of the relationship among industrial structure, labor markets, and work organization in southwestern agriculture.

Sectors, Segments, and the "Structureless Labor Market"

Research on the relationship between labor market organization and economic sectors (i.e., the sectoral approach described by Kalleberg and Sorensen, 1979) has tended to locate the whole of agriculture in the "competitive" or peripheral


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sector. In other words, agricultural firms are conceived of as falling into that segment of the economy characterized by small-scale, labor-intensive production and low levels of capitalization (Averitt, 1968; O'Connor, 1973; Edwards, 1975; Beck et al., 1978). Likewise, agricultural labor markets are seen as consisting of low skilled, unstable, low status workers, that is, members of competitive or secondary labor markets (Piore, 1975). Following the general identification of sectoral organization and labor market structure suggested by Edwards (1975) and others, the undifferentiated demand for labor within small-scale firms results in the creation of a comparably undifferentiated labor market.

While monopoly/competitive and primary/secondary distinctions may serve as useful analytic devices in comparing forms of organization, the application of the schema to the lettuce industry presents a peculiar result: the conjunction of "monopoly" type firms with "secondary" labor. That is, the extant characteristics of the dominant economic organizations in the lettuce industry (called "grower-shippers") resemble most closely the category of monopoly firms described by sectoral analysts (as will be outlined in chapter 3). The two largest firms, Miracle Vegetable and Verde Lettuce, are subsidiaries of corporations ranked in the top two-thirds of the Forbes 500 (Forbes magazine, 1982). While other firms in the industry do not have such illustrious parentage, neither are they peripheral economic organizations. Firms like Miracle Vegetable and Verde Lettuce are large, vertically integrated, and diversified agribusiness giants. These two firms rank in the top 2 percent of agricultural firms in California, including cotton and livestock producers, in terms of acreage and sales (Villarejo, 1980). In a state in which large corporate organizations dominate most agricultural production, these firms can hardly be equated with the small, localized, and marginal position accorded competitive/peripheral firms. Finally, within the lettuce industry alone, the top four firms (including Miracle and Verde) account for 50 percent of the half a billion dollar annual sales of head lettuce (see table 3, chap. 3).

Since many agricultural firms have been mislabeled as com-


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petitive or peripheral, agricultural labor has tended to be incorrectly characterized as uniformly belonging to a secondary labor market. As Piore (1975:126) describes the secondary labor market: "Jobs in the secondary sector ... tend to be low-paying, with poorer working conditions, little chance of advancement ... and tend to be characterized by considerable instability in jobs and a high turnover in the labor force." Yet, as I have suggested (and will demonstrate in chap. 3), the harvest labor force in the lettuce industry appears much more stable and more skilled than would be expected within a secondary labor market. The use of the term "secondary labor market," at least as defined by Piore and others (e.g., Edwards et al., 1975; Edwards, 1975), is further confounded when the labor market in lettuce exhibits certain characteristics consistent with the definition—low wages, poor working conditions, limited advancement—and others that are inconsistent—high stability and low turnover.

If sectoral approaches to the study of southwestern labor markets are problematic, so are the mainstream analyses. Like the sectoral theories, neoclassical explanations tend to focus on the undifferentiated character of firm and labor market organization in agriculture. Indeed, harvest labor markets in California and the Southwest have been pointed to by both groups as the closest available approximation of the orthodox economic conception of the competitive labor market (Cain, 1976; O'Connor, 1973:21; Doeringer and Piore, 1975:1–2). In the competitive labor market

The actors, workers and firms, have perfect information, maximize utilities in particular earnings, and are unable to influence prices given by the market. Furthermore, wages respond to changes in supply and demand, and workers can move freely in response to changes in supply and demand in different parts of the market. (Kalleberg and Sorenson, 1979:354)

The high degree of seasonality in production, the variability in demand for labor, the low level of skills, and the competitiveness of firms with respect to the market, according to this


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characterization, make agriculture the paradigm of the competitive labor market.

Two major problems, however, confront competitive labor market theory when applied to agriculture. The first concerns the relative political and organizational strength of firms and workers historically. The second concerns the process of wage determination. The most efficient manner in which to examine these problems is to focus on what has come to be considered the classic study in this field, Lloyd Fisher's (1953) Harvest Labor Markets in California .

Fisher characterized the harvest labor market in California as "structureless" (1953:7). By that he meant to specify a form of labor market in which:

 

1.

there were no unions, seniority hiring, or other limitations on access to the labor market;

2.

there developed no personal relationships or obligations between employer and employees, that is, employment was mediated by a third party, such as a labor contractor;

3.

employment was uniformly unskilled and therefore accessible to a large, unspecialized labor force;

4.

piece-rate payment schemes predominated;

5.

production employed little or no capital in machinery (1953:7–11).

The structureless labor market, he argued, was ideally suited to the needs of agricultural firms. Without restrictions on access to work or differentiation in the skills required for harvesting, workers could be drawn from various sources to meet the highly seasonal and variable needs of agricultural employers.

Fisher, however, went well beyond simple description to question why such a labor market existed and how it was maintained. Taking as his starting point the physical and temporal isolation of preharvest and harvest activities, he argued that for the majority of firms the harvest represented the single most important part of the production cycle: "The


44

agricultural employer approaches the harvest as though it were a separate enterprise. The necessary costs antecedent to the harvest are costs which have been irrevocably incurred" (1953:96). Under conditions in which (1) the demand for harvest labor was undifferentiated by skill or experience; (2) individual piece-rate payment tended to level any qualitative differences among workers; and (3) the size of a given crop determined the volume of labor for the harvest, the profitability of the harvest enterprise rested almost entirely on the market price for the commodity and the labor cost per unit of the commodity (1953:95).

Like any other category of entrepreneur, Fisher suggested, agricultural employers sought to reduce costs and increase prices where possible. Given the fact that few firms (if any) were capable of influencing market prices, on the one hand, and that the amount of product marketed was limited by the size of land holdings, on the other, labor cost became the main target of strategies to increase profits. However, the organization of production around individual piece-rates and unskilled labor also made the demand for labor fixed in the aggregate. In other words, with a fixed volume of output and an immutable division of labor (or a division of labor that could only be replicated across a larger volume of product), reductions in labor cost could only come about through reductions in the wage rates for a fixed volume of output, that is, what Marx referred to as an increase in absolute surplus value.

The most common strategy pursued by agricultural employers, which Fisher documents thoroughly, was wage-fixing:

The profitability of the harvest enterprise, in large measure of the total enterprise, depends upon the relative bargaining position of employer and worker.... The agricultural employer in California takes every precaution to see to it that there is no doubt or uncertainty as to where the bargaining power resides. (1953:96)

Through the creation of durable political and business organizations, agricultural employers succeeded in gaining substan-


45

tive control over wage rates offered to farm laborers. A variety of weapons were held in the employers' arsenal, including labor importation, vigilante tactics, stimulation of ethnic rivalries among workers, and red-baiting. Thus, while the market prices for agricultural commodities varied, the price of labor was held at a consistently low level. According to Fisher, therefore, the functioning of the structureless labor market depended on the political intervention of employers in the process of labor recruitment and organization.

The importance of political intervention in the labor market extends into control over the production process as well. However, the point to be made here is precisely that the "perfect" or near perfect competition commonly attributed to harvest labor markets in California is itself the product of a rather severe structuring of the labor market. That is, the situation in which a model of perfect labor market competition appears is not one characterized by political equality between labor and capital, but one characterized by the most severe inequality. Clark Kerr, in addressing this issue with regard to industrial relations in large-scale cotton farming, understates this critical conclusion:

Except for this organization of buyers, there would be a substantially perfect market for labor. There exist many buyers and sellers, homogeneity of units of labor, mobility of workers, relatively full knowledge of the market on both sides, constant bargains, and free entry into the market, among other characteristics. (Cited in Fisher, 1953:97, emphasis added)

This point is emphasized for a very important reason: it makes the analysis of the relative political and organizational strength of employers and workers an integral part of the study of the labor process and wage determination. Rather than beginning the analysis of wages and employment with a presumption of pure competition (as is commonly done with most agricultural/neoclassical economics), the focus on political intervention in the labor market questions the conditions under which competition is produced. Though this will be explored more fully later in the study, the implications for


46

other, nonagricultural settings are important: how are we to conceptualize "competition" in other labor markets, for example, especially those in which women, blacks, Latinos, and young people tend to show up most often?

The connection of a political dimension to the economic process, however, necessarily raises the question of how employer monopsony over labor is perpetuated or reproduced over time. Here Fisher is less helpful. Though he points to three principal causes for the peculiar organization of agricultural labor markets—segregation, accessibility of work in the fields, and employer noncompetition for labor (1953:13—16)—only the last speaks directly to the political construction of the labor market. Even then, the fact of employer cooperation in wage-fixing does not explain (1) how political control is created and maintained as a continuous feature of labor market organization, or (2) what effects changes in the organization of production or in agricultural enterprises have on the system of control.

Recent work by Burawoy (1976) expands on Fisher to conceptualize political intervention in the labor market as part of the organization of a labor system. In comparing research on migrant labor in California and South Africa, he concludes that the enforced circulation of workers between politically and economically distinct units enables employers to perpetuate the political vulnerability of labor and to lower the costs of reproducing labor. That is, the circulation of labor between two separate political units serves to make inequalities in political status (especially citizenship) part of the structure of the labor system. Thus, Burawoy argues, the denial of employment rights and protections associated with citizenship in the United States serves to impose a distinctive, nonmarket status on Mexican workers; likewise for black mine workers from the reserves who are denied full citizenship in South Africa. The physical separation of predominantly male workers from their families (what Burawoy terms the separation of the "productive" worker from the "reproductive" worker) further stimulates the circulation of labor across political boundaries and thus serves to reproduce the distinctive status of workers (1976:1052).


47

According to both Fisher and Burawoy, then, the employer monopsony over labor ensures firms of an abundant supply of seasonal, temporary labor which can be engaged when needed and jettisoned to an alternative polity and economy when not needed. Labor's disadvantaged political status precludes the creation of large-scale worker organization against employers and, at the same time, restricts workers' mobility between agricultural and nonagricultural employment.

Fisher's analysis provides considerable insight into the persistent disparity between agricultural and nonagricultural wage levels. However, the applicability of the "structureless labor market" is limited by the fact that it is not so much a theory of labor market organization as it is a model that operates under certain specific conditions. The key element in the model is the structure of labor demand, that is, holding constant the capacity of employers to exercise political leverage in the labor market, the organization of production into small-scale, unsophisticated, and largely undifferentiated firms serves as the single most important precondition for the development of Fisher's structureless labor market. The undifferentiated structure of demand, and therefore of the enterprises themselves, creates the need for seasonal, unskilled, and undifferentiated labor. Any substantive violation of' that particular condition would presumably sunder not only the homogeneity of labor demand but, following the conditions Fisher lays out (1953:3–11), it would also likely dissipate the cooperation between employers which provides the organizational basis for political control over labor supply. Put more concretely, were any agricultural industries to undertake change in the way they produce or the way they are organized, the assumptions of Fisher's model would be violated.

To summarize, two problems emerge directly from an examination of sectoral and labor market approaches to the situation of southwestern agriculture. First, the assumption of homogeneity in demand for labor and/or homogeneity in the environment faced by firms leads to faulty conclusions about the dynamics of industrial structure and labor market organization. While it is clear that there are still many small


48

firms in agriculture which "fit" the competitive market model, changes in the political economy of agriculture suggest much greater diversity in organizational form and, implicitly, demand for labor than the sectoral model gives credit for. Moreover, even in those theories (such as Burawoy's) which seek to provide an explanation for the common interest in vulnerable labor, the assumption of homogeneity of demand among firms leads one to question if it is possible for such diverse organizations to consistently produce unified action. And, second, Fisher's model of the structureless market and, by extension, much of the sectoral literature which builds off it, assumes a crucial feature which it needs, in fact, to explain: the continuous availability of a category of people that can be acted upon in such a fashion as to suit the demands of agriculture. The appearance, historically, of a succession of alien and/or low status workers has been used to a large extent as its own explanation when, I will argue, the production and reproduction of those groups and their distinctive political statuses have to be explained.

More broadly, I suggest, these problems derive from three general difficulties: (1) mistaken or historically partial assumptions about the manner in which demand for labor is structured; (2) partial explanations about the organization of labor supply; and (3) a relative insensitivity to the interaction between demand and supply. With regard to the first issue, it is conceivable that agricultural capital acting as a unified force has, for at least part of its history, succeeded in translating its demands for labor into an appropriate supply. But the capacity to act in a unified fashion depended on a relative homogeneity in demand, as reflected by employment of quite similar labor processes in production. To the extent that agricultural capital or agricultural labor processes have diversified, then the capacity of agricultural capital to act in a unified fashion should be undermined. One indicator of this should be the removal from agricultural capital's direct control influence over the structuring of labor supply.

As for the second issue, explanation for the organization of labor supply, it is necessary to think more broadly about how labor is made vulnerable. It is one thing to argue that


49

agricultural firms demanded politically vulnerable (or unprotected) labor; it is quite another, however, to explain how that vulnerability is produced and reproduced over time. The direct importation and confinement of alien workers may provide an adequate explanation for the ability of agricultural employers to fix wages or unilaterally determine working conditions for a time; it does not account for why alien workers and not some other disadvantaged groups. Nor does it explain why the composition and the structure of that supply should change.

Finally, with regard to the interaction of demand and supply, it is necessary to consider how each may structure the other. That is, while both the sectoral and structureless labor market approaches orient one to looking at how industrial structure shapes the system of labor supply, it is also necessary to analyze how a system of supply may shape industrial structure. I will argue that a labor supply system which effectively serves the needs of a relatively homogeneous industry may prove an impediment to the diversifying industry it helped make possible (e.g., through its inability to provide a source of stable, experienced labor). Such a situation attempts to alter the system of labor supply. Alternatively, changes in a system of labor supply may occur beyond the reach or against the wishes of any industry or group of employers. Thus, exogenous factors or relations can have an impact on the structure of supply and, by extension, the organization of production.

Politics And Labor Supply

The demand for an adequate and consistent supply of labor has long been a rallying cry among agricultural employers. As a precondition for economic survival, that position is not, of course, unique to agriculture. The means by which demands for labor have been met, however, constitute a factor separating agriculture from other sectors of the economy. In particular, the overtly political character of labor market construction involving direct intervention by the state in issues


50

of labor supply has served to distinguish the industry (see Majka and Majka, 1982; Weiner, 1978; Galarza, 1964; Burawoy, 1976; and Sosnick, 1978, among others). Specifically, the importation of alien workers, the creation of contract labor programs, the dual standards of protective labor legislation (exclusion of farm labor from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act) have directly and indirectly set agricultural labor markets and employment conditions apart from other basic industries.

The argument that agricultural labor markets have been affected by political forces is not unique to this study. This analysis departs from previous work, however, in its emphasis on the interaction of industry structure, labor market operation, and work organization. There are three parts to the analysis. First, I will argue that while the relative homogeneity of agricultural enterprises prompted early efforts to construct a separate but internally undifferentiated agricultural labor market, the increasing diversity in organizational structure and demand of agricultural enterprises resulted in a differentiation in demand which could not be satisfied by traditional means.

Second, the extension of the trade union movement and pressures for broader social welfare legislation in the post-World War period affected the structure and operation of the agricultural labor market in several ways. Most important, efforts to break down the political barriers separating agricultural and nonagricultural employment coincided with the expansion of social welfare and political entitlements, making both employers' political power over labor and farm laborers' alien status appear antithetical to the gains sought by citizens. Thus, I will argue, efforts to alter the system of labor supply from outside agriculture help explain changes in the structure of agricultural labor markets.

Third, strategies pursued by nonagricultural business in the post-World War period had further impact on the structure of agricultural labor markets and, by extension, on the organization of agricultural production. Of greatest consequence, rising union wages and social welfare costs prompted some employers to seek reliable sources of less expensive


51

labor. For some firms, this took the form of expansion into the Southwest where such labor was easily within reach. More generally, however, many employers began to recruit unprotected, noncitizen labor for work in the United States. But, by contrast to agricultural employers who had exercised direct control over the system of labor supply, these firms (many of which were urban and spread across numerous industries) sought an unregulated supply of labor, that is, one which capitalized on the growing differences in legal protection and entitlement between citizens and noncitizens but which did not directly challenge (through overt action) the trade union or civil rights movements.

To understand how employer demands for labor have been transformed into political policy and what impact that intervention has had on the organization of production, it is first necessary to analyze briefly the structure and development of agriculture in the Southwest.

The development of agriculture in the American Southwest (especially in California and Arizona) can be broken into two broad and roughly overlapping historical periods. The first period (from 1800 to 1890) was characterized by extensive dry-farming (i.e., grains and feed). The second period (from 1870 onward) is characterized by the increasingly irrigated production of fruits and vegetables (McWilliams, 1971:59–60). With the annexation of the territory of California, Arizona, and New Mexico in the mid-1800s, the large Mexican land grants were converted from production for the consumption of wealthy aristocrats to production for national and international markets. As the benefits of climate, irrigation, and soil fertility came to be realized, large tracts of land were turned over to more lucrative fruit and vegetable production. Some of these tracts remained under the tillage of large entrepreneurs; others were broken into smaller acreages that were then leased or sold to small farmers.

Three factors in the development of agricultural production in the Southwest combined to create a highly uneven demand for labor. First, the environmental and physical characteristics of crop production (particularly fruit and vegetable production) created a pattern of labor use quite dif-


52

ferent from that found in other production systems. Most important is the temporal separation of the activities of planting and harvesting. The resulting process of production is characterized by periods of considerable activity (planting and harvesting) separated by periods of slack while plants mature or seasons change. This pattern of labor use is not peculiar to the Southwest, but it is especially important when the commodity under production is highly perishable and must be harvested within specific time limits.

Second, the intense market orientation of production made labor availability crucial to the success of the agricultural enterprise. The high value of farm production for rapidly expanding urban markets and for export (stimulated by the growth of rail transport in the late 1800s and by the expanded use of refrigerated rail cars at the turn of the century) undercut subsistence production and intensified cash-farming. Large farmers sought to capitalize on the production of lucrative fruits and vegetables. Smaller farmers, many of whom were tenants, were forced to produce cash crops in order to make payments on highly valuable land (McWilliams, 60–65).

Finally, the geographic separation of farming areas and the variety of property forms in the Southwest led to the creation of seasonally and geographically disjointed production. Though large landholdings were (and are) far more common in the Southwest than elsewhere in the United States, few individual firms bridged production areas and seasons. For example, large enterprises developed in the Central Valley of California, but until the 1940s only a handful produced crops in any other production areas in the state. Thus, geographic regions were characterized internally by diversity in sizes and types of production units, and production across regions was organizationally and seasonally discontinuous.

These three factors—the environmental effects of weather and crop perishability, intense market orientation, and geographically and organizationally discontinuous production—combined to create a highly seasonal and variable demand for labor (see fig. 1). This interaction of environment, market, and property form produced a demand for labor which could be available in steady supply despite the fact that employment


53

Figure 1.
Structural Conditions Affecting the Structure of Agricultural Labor Markets and Worker Organization


54

might be intermittent (or intense for only limited and segmented periods of time).

This conceptualization of the demand for labor flows from a relatively straightforward analysis of the interaction among industry, enterprise, and labor process as determinant factors. What remains problematic is labor supply: to wit, how was a labor force created? And how was it constructed so as to satisfy the demands of burgeoning agricultural enterprises?

The development of this agricultural economy fostered a variety of strategies for organizing and utilizing labor. However, two modal forms of labor organization emerged. The first, prevalent among tenant farms and small family operations, engaged the family itself as a means by which to organize and extract labor. That is, within the context of a heavy emphasis on seasonal cash-farming, family members could be trained in the totality of production skills and maintained to be available despite the periodic application of those skills. Equally important, if one leaves aside the issue of inheritance as a form of return on labor investment, the labor of children could be remunerated at less than its market value. That is, the nonmarket character of the social and economic exchange between parents and children facilitated the employment of children's skilled labor at a fraction of its market value. A marketization of that relationship would have altered considerably the social and economic relations of production. However, the normative bonds of family and the likelihood of return on labor investment (i.e., in terms of inheritance of property) provided the inducements necessary to sustain the nonmarket exchange.

The second strategy of labor organization focused on the recruitment of labor that could be available in steady supply but that would be only intermittently employed by any one organization. Rather than acquire or train labor skilled in the totality of production activities, as in the family labor system, firms sought instead to simply avail themselves of sufficient quantities of labor for specific activities and limited periods of time. The strategy sought, in effect, to externalize the uncertainties of weather, market price, and seasonality onto the labor force. Thus, no individual organization would be


55

saddled with the responsibility of supporting skilled labor for which there was no productive employment. The problem of steady employment would have to be solved by the workers themselves. Such a strategy was employed by larger firms and by those which had grown beyond the capacity of family labor. It is this latter strategy for meeting labor demand which is critical to the understanding of the organization of work and labor markets in southwestern agriculture.

A seasonal or periodic demand for labor is not peculiar to the history of agricultural production. Indeed, many industries have been characterized by regular periods of high and low labor demand. The construction industry, as Stinchcombe (1959) has pointed out, is marked by both fluctuations in market demand and seasonality in production. However, organizational response, and the response of the workers themselves, to fluctuations in the construction industry differ markedly from that found in agriculture. Stinchcombe, in comparing the administration of construction and manufacturing industries, argues that the reliance on teams of highly skilled workers to both interpret and execute complicated demands in construction represents a rational form of administering production (1959:168–187). While Stinchcombe underemphasized the importance of workers' organization in protection of their market position, the pattern of "craft" administration in construction enables firms to avail themselves of highly valuable labor when it is needed—at wage levels sufficiently high to sustain workers during periods of low employment—and to disemploy it when unneeded.

A different practice emerged in agriculture. In place of highly skilled labor, firms sought to acquire labor skilled in very limited aspects of the production process. Instead of paying a high price for labor skilled external to the organization or investing in the training of workers in the totality of production tasks, agricultural firms sought instead to minimize costs of training labor by reducing or limiting the skills required in production. This approach combined a relatively unsophisticated division of labor, that is, a division of labor based on the temporal isolation of activities and the performance of unskilled chores during periods of peak


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labor demand (e.g., planting, weeding and harvesting), with a demand for undifferentiated gangs of workers to carry out those simple tasks. Workers would be hired for the duration of planting or harvesting (which could last a few days or several weeks) and then would be sent on their way.

The Politically Mediated Labor Market

The demand for labor in the mid-1800s was satisfied in a variety of ways. Family farms carried out most chores themselves, hiring labor on occasion from other farm families when harvests did not overlap. Other, larger enterprises sought out Native Americans from the abandoned missions and Chinese workers who had left railroad construction projects in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona (McWilliams, 1971:58–67).

As farmlands were improved and market possibilities expanded with better transport facilities and urbanization, the demand for labor increased. Indeed, as viewed in the late 1860s, the only real obstacle to further growth in the agricultural economy was labor (McWilliams, 1976:152). The extreme importance of adequate and timely supplies of labor was accentuated by the sensitivity of crops to temperature variations (which could hasten or delay a harvest by several weeks) and by the economic vulnerability of many firms to the loss of all or a portion of their seasonal output. The uncertainties of weather and market price argued against the creation of stable and permanent employment of the labor necessary to work only two to five months out of the year. Equally important, the investment in sufficient numbers of skilled or, at least, permanent employees would make employers vulnerable to wage negotiation or strikes at harvest time.

While regional demands for labor were satisfied by using local labor pools through the 1860s, a regularized labor system began to take shape in the latter part of the decade. At root was the disemployment of large numbers of Chinese immigrant workers following the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1860 (London and Anderson, 1970:7–8). Though state and federal legislators helped to stimulate the movement of the Chinese into agricultural labor markets


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through direct importation, another issue was also important in the creation of that labor pool: opposition among domestic white workers and unions to the potential use of the Chinese as replacement labor in the expanding factories and mines (McWilliams, 1971:67–109). The militance of both organized labor and urban merchants (who feared competition from Chinese entrepreneurs) helped close off alternative employment to fieldwork. Furthermore, the lack of political rights and the generally low status of the Chinese made them virtually incapable of mounting a sustained battle against either labor or agricultural capital. As early as 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese immigrants would be restricted in their legal and political rights along with blacks and Indians (McWilliams, 1971:68). Thus, the Chinese formed the core of the first regularized supply of labor for agriculture.

The history of the Chinese labor force is important at several levels. First, the availability of Chinese labor facilitated the expansion of agricultural production. The large and relatively stable labor pool spurred investments in land improvement and increased plantings. As McWilliams notes, "The value of California farm land came to be capitalized, ultimately, upon the basis of actual and anticipated profits accruing from the extensive use of cheap labor." The amount of acreage under irrigation climbed steadily in the 1870s and 1880s as did the volume of fruits and vegetables marketed and sold to the canneries (Taylor and Vasey, 1936a , 1936b ). The expanding agricultural economy of the Southwest therefore came to bank heavily on the availability of Chinese labor.

Second, the vulnerable political and economic position of the Chinese workers served not only to limit their alternatives in employment but also to undermine their capacity to bargain over wages and working conditions. Backed by local police and merchants dependent on farm business, employers dictated the terms of employment to Chinese gangs and enforced the movement of workers from one production area to the next. Formal and informal committees of ranchers organized to formulate "acceptable" wage scales in order to prevent price competition in their own ranks (Fisher,


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1953:chap. 5; McWilliams, 1971:74). These committees, in turn, became the foundation for later cooperative labor supply and union-busting efforts.

Third, low wages, unsanitary conditions, and migrancy combined with the already disadvantaged position of the Chinese to attach a low status to farm work in general. Farm work (particularly that of hired labor) had historically been viewed two ways in the United States: as a temporary station occupied by younger men trying to make a stake in order to purchase their own land, or a condition of servitude characterized by indentured labor and slavery. The Chinese farm worker was mired between the two statuses: never openly referred to as a slave but never as highly valued socially as a hired hand on his way to becoming a farmer. Differences in language and custom further isolated the Chinese. Because the immigrants accepted the brutal conditions of employment out of need and powerlessness, growers and rural populations came to view their (i.e., the Chinese) migrancy and low living standards as a group trait rather than a condition of employment. Adaptive behavior became a symbol of the inner character of the workers themselves. Equally important, that negative connotation (along with the undesirable conditions of employment) served to discourage the influx of domestic workers who might have been able to demand an upgrading of conditions (McWilliams, 1971:76; London and Anderson, 1970:chap. 1).

The Southwest's growing agricultural economy thus was fueled by the creation of an abundant and politically ostracized supply of low-status labor. However, the actual construction of a labor system, that is, an organized system of labor recruitment and allocation, did not develop until the supply of Chinese workers became problematic.

The opening rounds in the battle over Chinese labor were fired as the giant railroad projects declined in the 1870s and Chinese workers began to spill into urban centers, especially San Francisco, and into the mining districts. Organized Anglo workers in the cities and mining districts confronted the dilemma of wage competition and undertook a campaign of harassment against the Chinese. The entrapment of citizen


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workers in a contest with Chinese immigrants fueled union opposition to legal protections for aliens and contributed to the xenophobia and anti-black bias that characterized segments of the labor movement in other regions of the country (see Bonacich, 1976, analysis of the role of white labor unions in the curtailment of employment of black workers during the same period). In an effort to shore up their endangered labor market position, Anglo unions terrorized Chinese workers, struck businesses and mines employing the Chinese, and boycotted goods produced by the immigrants.

Unions were not alone in their opposition. Small manufacturers who were incapable of withstanding strikes and boycotts and who could not use Chinese labor as efficiently as larger firms joined the fight against the importation of Chinese immigrants (McWilliams, 1971:72–74; Majka and Majka, 1982:21–36). Employers in the service sector who found themselves in competition with Chinese entrepreneurs pressed for restrictions on the immigrants' entry into business. Urban politicians, in the name of civic betterment and labor peace, sought to appease unions and employers by removing Chinese settlers and prohibiting farm workers from "wintering" in the cities. Finally, small farmers who relied on little or no hired labor suffered from the deflated market prices for their crops resulting from the low cost of Chinese labor. The campaign of political pressure and harassment culminated with congressional action in 1882 to suspend Chinese immigration. It was followed by the Immigration Act of 1885, which prohibited the use of foreign contract labor (London and Anderson, 1970:8).

Though the tumult over Chinese labor created significant economic and political headaches for agriculture, the large employers and processors of agricultural goods were not bereft of resources or political support. Furthermore, while the Chinese experience demonstrated the vulnerability of agricultural enterprises to fluctuations in labor supply, it did not prompt a decrease in the scale of production units or in the intensity of production. Rather, the exclusion of the Chinese accentuated the importance of the large producers to the regional and national economies. Uncertainties in the


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market for fruits and vegetables resulted in higher prices for consumers in the expanding urban markets. The sugar beet industry in the Southwest, which had already come to prominence for the national economy, appeared directly threatened by the collapse of the Chinese labor supply. The railroads, which had expanded broadly into the rural areas of California, banked heavily on the commissions they charged for transportation and crop brokering and on the inflated value of land they had acquired as right-of-way.

Faced with the potential for considerable growth in an expanding economy yet limited by the curbs of Chinese immigration, large employers, processors, and their financial backers sought to replace the laissez-faire politics of labor supply with a more systematic approach to creating and maintaining adequate sources of labor. Labor recruitment organizations, which had previously been regional in character, began to make linkages across production areas and crops (Chambers, 1952). Statewide conventions of growers met to discuss state and federal legislative strategies (Fisher, 1953:103–105). State and local political action committees were formed and funded by membership dues and contributions from the financially powerful canneries, refineries, railroads, and banks (Chamber, 1952).

While the Chinese experience demonstrated the vulnerability of agricultural enterprises to fluctuations in labor supply, it did not promote a decrease in the scale of production units or in the intensity of production. As suggested above, the exclusion of the Chinese instead accentuated the importance of the large producers to the economy of the Southwest. As the furor over Chinese labor slowly subsided, consortia of large farmers, canners, and refiners (particularly in the rapidly expanding sugar beet industry) sought successfully to open up other labor pools (McWilliams, 1971:105–110). Capitalizing on the economic potential of the domestic sugar market (protected by high tariffs) and the already high level of concentration in the industry, refiners and growers persuaded Congress to sanction the importation of Japanese and Mexican workers (McWilliams, 1971:105–110). By 1910, over 70,000 Japanese and nearly 100,000 Mexican workers were


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weeding and harvesting southwestern crops (McWilliams, 1971:106).

With frequently successful efforts on the part of Japanese workers to bargain over wages and to acquire their own land, employers focused their energies on establishing a more durable labor system built around Mexican nationals (McWilliams, 1971:110–116). Acquiring Mexican labor had never been a problem for growers: poorly fed peasants and refugees from the battles of the Mexican Revolution streamed across the border in large numbers (see Gamio, 1930). But to simultaneously insulate the labor supply (i.e., restrict its employment to agriculture) and prevent it from becoming a political and economic burden on local communities, external supervision of the labor force was needed. Thus, in 1926 a grower spokesman in Washington, D.C., urged Congress to "get us Mexicans and keep them out of our schools and out of our social problems" (cited in McWilliams, 125). Congress responded by lifting sanctions on the influx of Mexican workers and gave local communities the right to refuse relief to unemployed Mexican migrants (London and Anderson, 1970:28).

At the same time that lobbying efforts at the federal level were bearing fruit, employers expanded and intensified their organization at the state and local levels. In the period of the 1920s and 1930s, powerful employer associations emerged in the Southwest. Among the most influential were the Agricultural Producers Labor Committee, the Western Growers Protective Association (of which most lettuce firms were members), the San Joaquin Valley Labor Bureau, and the Associated Farmers (McWilliams, 1971:188–95; Fisher, 1953:103–118; and Glass, 1966). With overlapping memberships, these organizations enrolled the majority of large agricultural producers in the Southwest.

Though some of these organizations, like the Western Growers, ostensibly sought to regulate marketing procedures, their primary focus was on regulating labor. For example, the Associated Farmers grew out of a collaborative effort of the California Farm Bureau Federation and the state Chamber of Commerce to deal specifically with labor issues


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(McWilliams, 1971:231). In that regard, they served two major purposes: controlling the supply of labor and prohibiting the entry of unions. Labor supply functions were handled through regional employment centers that generated employer estimates of demand, recruited labor from Mexico, and distributed the workers among firms. Employer organizations also provided staunch and unified opposition to the encroachment of trade unions in the fields. By decrying the "red menace" of communist and socialist unions (e.g., the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packinghouse and Allied Workers, and the Industrial Workers of the World) and declaring their defense of the free farming enterprise, the Associated Farmers, Western Growers, and others marshaled support for continued labor importation and opposition to unionization. Though farm worker organizations occasionally succeeded in winning wage increases, most of their gains were temporary (Jamieson, 1945; Galarza, 1964, 1971; Weiner, 1978; Jenkins and Perrow, 1977; Majka and Majka, 1982).

The Bracero Program: Managed Migration

Two factors contributed significantly to the success of southwestern employers in insulating and protecting their labor supply from Mexico. The first, as suggested previously, was the importance of food production to the regional and national economy. While the methods with which employers quelled worker insurrections were considered crude, farm output was critical. This was even more the case with the onset of World War II. As domestic labor deserted their strongholds in the canneries and packing sheds for duty in the armed forces and more lucrative employment in the war industries, employers pressed harder their demands for federally supervised labor supply programs (Galarza, 1964: 46–71). The necessity of food for the armed forces enabled growers and their political representatives to put the slogan "national defense" alongside "defense of free enterprise" in their lobbying campaigns.

The second factor contributing to employer control over


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labor supply resided in the considerable political strength of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Though, as McConnell points out, the Farm Bureau never developed a coherent set of programs reflecting the varied concerns of farmers, it did serve as a powerful lobbying force in the matters of labor supply (McConnell, 1977:chap. 8). The Farm Bureau became both a clearinghouse for information on legislative action and the prime spokesman for southwestern agribusiness. The concentration of financial support in the political muscle and acumen of the Farm Bureau paid off handsomely: administration of relief programs for unemployed agricultural workers was transferred from federal to state and local control in 1933; fieldworkers were excluded from coverage by the National Labor Relations Act in 1936 (an exclusion that remains in effect); and, in 1942, the first long-term arrangement for contract labor from Mexico was established. The latter, generally referred to as the bracero program (formalized as Public Law 78 in 1951), was the crowning achievement.

The bracero program, described initially as an emergency measure designed to meet the World War II labor shortage, remained in effect for twenty-three years (1942–1965). During that time, nearly 5 million braceros were imported for seasonal work (Kiser and Kiser, 1979:67) and, in 1959 alone, nearly one-half million Mexican workers were admitted (Sosnick, 1978:378). The overwhelming majority were put to work in Texas, Arizona, and California.

The terms of the bracero program ceded to employers and their labor recruitment organizations direct control over the volume of workers, the level of wages, and the conditions and duration of employment (Galarza, 1964; Scruggs, 1960; Craig, 1971). Braceros were bound to a labor contract elaborated and enforced external to any labor market process. Work certifications, generally good for six weeks to three months, were subject to manipulation by employers. As Galarza documents in his study of the program, threats of decertification and deportation were used to squelch independent efforts at wage negotiation (1964:183–198). Though wage rates were supposed to be set by the Department of


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Labor (to prevent any adverse affect on the earnings and employment of domestic workers), wages were almost unilaterally set by employers. As Fuller notes, the wage determination process reflected what employers, not workers or the federal government, considered just earnings:

The procedure that became typical was for an Employment Service agent to attend the farmers' meetings, listen to wage discussions and report the consensus to his administrative superiors as the prevailing wage. (1955:29)

Finally, the labor contract prohibited the importance of braceros for any work other than fieldwork. When no longer needed in a particular region, they were returned to Mexico.

This "enforced circulation" of labor (Burawoy, 1976:1051) prevented the development of worker- or union-organized barriers to entry into the labor market (i.e., through seniority, job rights, or union membership). The federally approved low "prevailing wage" levels prevented the equilibration of wages between comparable work in agriculture and nonagricultural industries. This, in combination with virtually unregulated working conditions, gave domestic workers the option of competing with the braceros or seeking alternative employment (Galarza, 1964:143–182). Farm labor organizing efforts were severely restricted and some unions, such as the Teamsters, sought primarily to protect the jobs of members in the transport and canning industries which were already covered under the NLRA (Friedland and Thomas, 1974). Moreover, the combined state/employer regulation of labor supply heightened the distinction between the rights accorded to citizens (as formally free labor market participants) and the noncitizen braceros (who were accorded neither equal protection before law nor market freedom).

The Bases of Discord

Despite its outward appearance as the perfect solution to the question of labor supply for agriculture, the bracero program created new conflicts while solving old problems. One set of conflicts that, for analytic purposes, can be considered


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internal to agriculture arose from the changing organizational structure of agricultural firms and the differentiation in demand for labor. The other set of conflicts involved the support of a growing civil rights movement and elements of organized labor for increased social welfare entitlements, a movement in direct opposition to state intervention on behalf of employers. Examination of each of these factors will provide important background to consideration of the present situation.

Internal Conflicts

Despite the broad support for a program of contract labor voiced by political representatives such as the Farm Bureau Federation, the benefits of the bracero program were unevenly distributed among categories of agricultural enterprise. The major labor supply organizations, such as the Western Growers Association and the San Joaquin Valley Labor Association, were heavily dependent on the financing and support of the largest and most prosperous agribusiness firms. During the period from 1942 to 1951, when these associations directly supervised the recruitment and distribution of Mexican workers, they sought first to meet the needs of their most powerful members and, in the process, often left smaller firms waiting for labor while their crops baked in the sun (interviews with retired vegetable grower, 1979). In some cases, large growers abandoned the labor supply associations when the latter could no longer respond quickly enough to fluctuating demands for labor. Furthermore, during this period employers were expected to advance expense money to cover the recruitment, allocation, and transportation costs of braceros (Majka and Majka, 1982:143–145). For many smaller employers, cash was a scarce commodity and the additional debt burden ate into profit margins.

When the federal government took over the role of principal administrator of the bracero program in 1951, problems in the distribution of labor were reduced (Galarza, 1964:156–171) but the cost-effectiveness of bracero labor remained tilted in favor of larger employers. Since the market price of


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fruits and vegetables reflected both the low cost of Mexican labor and the economies of scale accruing to large producers, small enterprises found themselves in a bitter struggle for survival. As Mandel (1968:chap. 5) points out in his analysis of profit margins in agriculture, the returns to investment in the least productive unit are forced to a minimum and the returns for more efficient units are thus inflated. More concretely, as in the earlier case of farmers faced with market prices reflecting the cost of Chinese labor, the income of the small producer barely exceeded that of the labor force. Given that the larger firms also exercised greater leverage in determining the prevailing wage (Fuller, 1955), the bracero program amounted to an even larger subsidy for agribusiness.

In addition to the disparities in benefit accruing to sheer size, the competition among firms in the same industries continued. That is, despite the appearance of harmony among employers when it came to issues of labor supply, the construction of the bracero program did little to enhance cooperation among firms in the marketplace. In most industries, particularly those engaged in the production of "fresh-market" or "consumer-market" commodities, the cutthroat character of competition hardly abated. While industry representatives and employers interviewed during the course of this study alluded occasionally to efforts by some companies to disrupt or misdirect orders for braceros from their competitors (as a way to foul up their harvesting schedules), much more common were efforts to succeed through effective price competition. Thus, even with fairly regularized supplies of labor at predictable wage rates, market competition between and among large and small producers expanded.

In an effort to compete successfully in the marketplace and thereby increase their share of sales, many of the larger firms undertook aggressive marketing strategies. One particularly significant approach undertaken by a number of producers of fruits and vegetables was forward integration to the market. This strategy was often accompanied by a move to diversify production—both to provide a broader range of fruits and vegetables to buyers in terminal markets and to balance


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overall profits to the firm (see Fredricks, 1979, for a case history of one successful diversified producer who followed this strategy).

Forward integration and diversification offered opportunities for growth, but even the largest firms were incapable of affecting prices or, for that matter, withstanding the impacts of highly volatile markets. Hence, the profitability of agricultural production and survival in the market for even the largest firms could not leave untouched the problem of increasing the productivity of labor. But here the advantages of the bracero program began to break down. Most important, as these larger firms sought to diversify and extend their production over time and space, the bracero program became more of a constraint than an advantage: (1) the limited work certifications of braceros meant they had to be replaced at intervals, necessitating the retraining of workers and the added expenses of transportation; (2) the uniformity and level of product quality—a factor of great importance to firms seeking to establish a reputation in the market—fluctuated as workers were cycled through their tenure in the fields; and (3) the potential for increased productivity of field labor was thwarted both by the nature of the system itself (i.e., the provision of undifferentiated and largely inexperienced labor) and by the lower levels of commitment to be expected from coerced or semicoerced laborers.

The degree of constraint felt by different enterprises undoubtedly varied and, without detailed analyses of work organization during this period, it is quite difficult to assess how a cross section of firms responded. However, interviews with several lettuce growers (to be discussed in greater detail in chapter 4) indicated that it was recognized that an alternative source of labor was necessary. Specifically, employers seeking to contravene the legal limitations on braceros turned to an equally accessible, if virtually unregulated, labor pool: undocumented workers. In contrast to braceros, undocumented workers had no legal protections and were subject to harassment by police and border authorities. They were, paradoxically, a more flexible labor supply than braceros: un-


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documented aliens were not limited by work certifications and could be trained in a broader range of activities (or, at least, made to achieve consistency in product quality).

Additional evidence about the role of undocumented workers which is provided by Galarza indicates that indocumentados were not only an important alternative source of labor but that they were often used to fill positions requiring greater skill than braceros (1964:30, 57–62, 69–71). Before and during the life of the bracero program,

Braceros found the Wetbacks as anxious to please as they were willing to endure. From among them the employer selected the more able workers for tasks requiring skill, such as irrigating and truck driving. They became differentiated from the common run of illegals, serving in specialized operations and becoming stable, regular employees. The employer would make unusual efforts to keep them and to arrange for their return if by chance they were picked up by the Border Patrol. (1964:30)

These workers, often referred to as "specials," acquired a status above that of the bracero or "stoop laborer" in large part because they were multifunctional:

As the Wetbacks spread from crop to crop and area to area, they proved adept and useful in many farming operations besides stoop labor. They became handy men, irrigators, pruners, tractor drivers, sorters and pickers. In these and other tasks the lower wages they accepted made them a favored lot. Employers chose experienced illegals and sought to prolong their employment by more than customary precautions against arrest. (Galarza, 1964:59)

The attraction between specials and large employers was mutual: (1) the bigger firms offered greater anonymity as well as implicit protection from deportation—they were rarely raided by the Border Patrol; (2) large employers offered longer-term employment, thereby reducing the amount of exposure (which accompanied the job search) undocumented workers experienced, and allowing greater potential earnings for individual workers; (3) those firms more often required


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a substantial number of relatively skilled workers (e.g., for pruning vines, irrigating, and spraying fields); and (4) many of those firms were the ones engaged in efforts to integrate forward to the market, placed greater emphasis on high levels of consistent product quality, and, therefore, placed a premium on a stable and experienced labor force.

While reliable data on the composition of the harvest labor force are not available, it is clear that even during the height of bracero importation—roughly 1955–1959 (Galarza, 1964:79)—undocumented workers constituted a sizable fraction. Besides their utility as a source of labor to fill the gaps created by the inefficiencies of the bracero program (Majka and Majka, 1982:142–146), however, indocumentados (and specials, in particular) filled an important need that braceros could not: they could be hired, trained, and used to fill important positions for which braceros, by virtue of the program itself, were unsuited. Thus, as I argued at the outset of this chapter, changes in the structure of agricultural enterprises were initially fueled by the availability of low-cost, managed labor; with efforts in increase market share leading to concerns with product quality and productivity, however, the bracero program came to represent a limiting factor. The search for an alternative to the highly regulated bracero led to the undocumented special.

External Conflicts

Far more visible than conflicts arising from the relative inflexibility of the program was the opposition among liberal, labor, and religious groups to the exploitative conditions of farm work. For many of the groups allied with the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the bracero program (P.L. 78) and its abuse at the hands of agribusiness came to symbolize another side to poverty and discrimination in America (Jenkins and Perrow, 1977). As such, attacks on P.L. 78 increased in intensity at the federal level from 1959 onward as a coalition of forces sought to dismantle agribusiness' "ideal" labor system (Pfeffer, 1980:34). These attacks, coupled with renewed efforts on the part of local


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worker organizations to demonstrate the adverse effects of bracero labor (Majka and Majka, 1982:158–160), began to eat away at the political fortress protecting the program. Finally, in 1964, the anti-bracero forces and Kennedy administration appointees forced the expiration of the last bracero agreement.

Why did the bracero program finally succumb to its opponents' blows? This question has attracted a great deal of attention from social scientists and journalists (Bach, 1978; Craig, 1971; Galarza, 1977; Hawley, 1966; Jenkins and Perrow, 1977; Majka and Majka, 1982; Pfeffer, 1980; and Scruggs, 1960, among others) and, while their accounts vary, most, like Jenkins and Perrow (1977), peg the changing mood in national politics as the principal explanation. According to Jenkins and Perrow, the combination of efforts to eradicate the vestiges of legal discrimination in the South and the mass media coverage of poverty and exploitation in the Southwest (e.g., through such vehicles as Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame" in 1960) made it possible for financial and organizational resources to be mobilized in opposition to the bracero program (1977:252–258). Majka and Majka (1982:160), arguing that national elites were not solely responsible for the demise of P.L. 78, point to the long-standing efforts of poorly staffed and underfunded farm worker unions to create a local infrastructure of opposition as equally important factors in the victory. While the Majkas' analysis offers a better picture of the combined local and national efforts, it is clear from the historical information that both levels of action were important in stripping away at least the surface layer of agriculture's ideology of exceptionalism.

Missing in the detailed analyses presented by Jenkins and Perrow and the Majkas', however, is a more general consideration of the factors that guided efforts to terminate the bracero program and that, I will argue, had a significant impact on the post-bracero labor system. Two factors are important here and both are linked to the ideology and the practice of citizenship. First, the civil rights movement, which provided both a backdrop and a vanguard to the anti-bracero campaign, formulated two broad objectives: (1) the formal,


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legal guarantee of citizenship rights and entitlements to black Americans and other minorities; and (2) the extension of the practice of citizenship beyond the traditional boundaries of voting and legal equality to include new categories of claims against the collectivity (or national community) to ameliorate poverty and underemployment. These objectives called upon the state to mitigate the negative effects of the prejudicial attitudes and structural barriers which denied formal market freedom to blacks and other minorities and, where necessary, to extend collective resources to those who suffered from ideological and structural discrimination. The objectives were constructed with the language of communal equality—citizenship—and directed both to the state apparatus as a collection of visible institutions and to the society as a whole. They called upon "Americans" and America's "heritage of freedom and equality" to guarantee equal treatment to all citizens.

Demands for citizenship rights provided a powerful linkage to anti-bracero sentiments in all but one crucial respect. They made the bracero program and all other forms of alien labor inimical to the guarantees of citizenship. By positing a program by which the rights and entitlements associated with membership in the community were strengthened, the civil rights movement accentuated the significance of differences between members and nonmembers of the national community and, as I will later argue, helped increase the vulnerability (and, therefore the attractiveness to all employers) of those who were least members of the community: undocumented workers.

The second factor that needs to be considered is the role of organized labor, both with respect to the bracero program and, more importantly, with respect to citizenship. As the Majkas (1982:158–166) and Galarza (1964, 1971, 1977) describe in fascinating detail, organized labor on a national scale demonstrated a profound ambivalence with regard to the bracero program and its predecessors. The American Federation of Labor (AFL, and later the AFL-CIO) occasionally sponsored forays into the fields but provided only minimal financial support to domestic workers attempting to organize. The Teamsters and various AFL affiliates made progress in


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some of the more stable and skilled occupations (e.g., in canneries, packing sheds, and trucking) but all but threw in the towel when it came to farm work. Even the Teamsters, who acquired the first major contract covering field labor in 1961, ventured forth only when it was financially productive and the employer in question offered a contract in exchange for a loan from the union's pension fund (Friedland and Thomas, 1974). When organized labor finally stepped into the fray, it did so as much out of pressure from its progressive elements—particularly its more militant union affiliates like the United Auto Workers and the Longshoremen's Union—and general sympathy for the civil rights movement as out of concern for farm workers.

Here again, the broader linkages to the ideology and practice of citizenship are important. For organized labor, the formal guarantees of market freedom—the freedom to enter into the wage contract—had been cemented through state intervention to facilitate unionization. Moreover, trade unions, as Marshall (1977:121–126) argued, had come to represent collective citizens in the economy, negotiating the terms and rewards of the labor contract within the broad mandates of a system of industrial justice/collective bargaining (Selznick, 1969). At the most general level, an affinity between organized labor and the civil rights movement grew out of a common interest in the political enforcement of citizenship guarantees in the face of an unequal distribution of economic resources. More specifically, protections from the discriminatory practices of employers reduced (though it by no means eliminated) the potential for blacks and other minorities to be treated as second-class citizens and to be used to undercut the position of organized labor. Moreover, the extension of political intervention in the economy (e.g., through a strengthened minimum wage) and the broadening of entitlements for those who are disemployed (e.g., aid to children, medical care for the elderly and poor) served both to buttress the position of unionized workers and to provide greater protection for workers dislocated as a result of business cycles. The net effect of organized labor's focus on citizenship, however, was a strengthening of the distinction


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between citizens and noncitizens. Where blacks or other minorities suffered from discrimination by employers, American workers (black, white, and Hispanic) suffered at the hands of both agricultural employers and braceros, argued leaders of the AFL (Fuller, 1955; Majka and Majka, 1982:164). Braceros and other aliens, it was contended, should be replaced by Americans.

A significant paradox was created through the victory over the bracero program: gains for citizens had been won and the guarantees of citizenship extended, but the political and economic vulnerability of noncitizens was increased. Without a frontal assault by labor on the conditions and the structure of agricultural employment and a demonstration that sufficient supplies of citizen labor were available, the bracero pipeline would be closed but the indocumentado floodgate would be opened.

Exit Bracero, Enter Green-Card And Indocumentado

On the surface, the cancellation of P.L. 78 signaled the arrival of optimal conditions for the entry of domestic workers and unions into the fields. The legislative victory of the anti-bracero forces was, however, soon muted by the tactical successes of agricultural employers. Though employers had lost direct administrative control over the supply of labor, the gap left by the cutoff of the bracero pipeline portended serious consequences for the southwestern regional economy. Some industries immediately sought to replace braceros with mechanical harvesting devices (Friedland and Barton, 1975) and others raised wages slightly in a feeble effort to attract domestic labor. But domestic workers did not rush into the fields. Since the termination of the bracero program did not mandate change in the conditions of the status of agricultural employment, workers with potential alternatives in urban labor markets or more extensive entitlements from the welfare system (which had been expanding rapidly during the period of the Great Society, see Piven and Cloward, 1971) chose not to pursue low-status, low-paying jobs in the fields.


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In response, employers sought once more to parlay their economic strength in the region into political support for labor importation. That support appeared in two forms: "green-cards" and undocumented workers. Green-cards (named after the color of the identification card formerly given to permanent resident immigrants), certified under provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, began to be admitted as early as 1965. With the grower's written promise of employment in hand, thousands of former braceros flocked across the border to reclaim their jobs. In addition to these seasonal workers, many more daily commuters were given passes to shuttle back and forth across the border to work in California, Arizona, and Texas. Current estimates show that at the peak of production, more than 40,000 commuters cross the border into these states on a daily basis (Kiser and Kiser, 1979:215).

By far the largest group to enter southwestern agricultural labor markets with the end of the bracero program, however, have been the undocumented immigrants. Although accurate figures on the number of undocumented workers in the United States are impossible to develop, estimates based on apprehension of illegal immigrants show clearly that they constitute a sizable segment of the agricultural labor force (see table 2). Failing sufficient mordida (bribe money) or time to obtain one of the limited number of legal passes, Mexican workers have been drawn across the border to work "illegally" in the fields (Portes, 1977; Jenkins, 1978).

The Broader Functions of Unprotected Labor

Until recent years, a common misconception was that undocumented immigration was a phenomenon restricted largely to the rural Southwest. Now, however, it is generally recognized that undocumented workers have come to play an important role in a number of urban labor markets for a distinctive category of employer (North and Houstoun, 1976). Moreover, as data presented by Portes (1978) and Jenkins (1978) suggest, undocumented immigration has persisted even in the face of increased unemployment.


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Table 2. Undocumented Immigrants Apprehended by
Type of Employment in the U.S., 1970–1981

Fiscal
year

Agricultural
workers

Total
workers

Agricultural as
% of all workers

1970

55,909

129,681

43

1971

78,713

154,782

50

1972

85,795

184,003

46

1973

105,726

231,646

45

1974

117,071

241,376

48

1975

114,926

250,388

45

1976

122,820

259,085

47

1977

109,046

248,337

43

1978

107,572

233,403

46

1979

113,495

233,746

48

1980

58,205

142,031

40

1981

82,314

168,369

48

Source: United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, Form G-23.18, for the years cited.

The broader distribution of undocumented immigrants represents an effort on the part of nonagricultural and non-rural employers to avail themselves of the advantages of vulnerable labor. Undocumented workers have come to serve a broader set of functions than before and those functions are directly related to the achievements of the civil rights movement and the post-World War II wage gains of organized labor. Indocumentados serve to replace a segment of the urban labor force protected by expanded citizenship entitlements in the form of welfare; these aliens must remain economically active in order to survive because they have no other viable alternatives. Eschewing simple models of "push-pull" in elaborating a similar argument, Portes (1978:37) contends:

Reasons why massive illegal immigration is permitted in the United States must be sought in the interface between the needs


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of the competitive capital sector and the nature of illegal labor. Relative to other countries, especially those of the periphery, the American economy is one of high labor costs. This occurs less because of the exhaustion of the domestic labor supply than because of its organization and power. A series of labor-promoted legislative measures have, in turn, resulted in a welfare system that supports the unemployed and maintains a "floor" under the salaries of domestic workers. Other things being equal, higher labor costs tend to decrease the rate of profit. This is especially true of small competitive firms which, unlike those in the monopolistic sector, find it difficult to pass on labor costs.

Thus, employers in quite different sectors and regions find a common use for undocumented labor.

Though the termination of the bracero program greatly diminished growers' direct control over the supply of labor, a new and far broader system of labor supply has replaced it. This new system of labor supply is not only broader and more flexible in its use but it is much less susceptible to challenge as the property of one or another industry, unlike the bracero program.

Despite recurrent protests from organized labor and urban politicians concerned about employment and the cost of social services for undocumented workers, efforts to deal with the issue have been focused on the near impossible task of policing the 1,000-mile border between Mexico and the United States. Legislative attempts to affix penalties on employers for hiring the undocumented workers have been consistently blocked. As a result, employers in the Southwest have retained access to Mexican labor and farm worker unions, as I will show in chapter 5, have been stymied in their efforts to regulate the supply of labor.

I have attempted to show in this chapter that the construction of agricultural labor markets in the Southwest has been and remains an overtly political process. Political intervention in matters of labor supply and control has been manifested through the ability of agricultural interests to transform their economic power into governmental policy and administrative apparatus. The politically mediated labor market, in turn, has


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served to perpetuate low wages, low levels of unionization, and highly labor-intensive production.

This discussion, however, really only provides the framework for understanding how nonmarket statuses are manipulated to the advantage of employers. What must be considered next is how those statuses, such as citizenship and gender, directly and indirectly affect wage determination and work organization. In particular, how have changes in the structure and organization of firms interacted with labor market processes? How have firms, such as those found in the lettuce industry, created skilled work teams without ceding control over production to them? What role do citizenship and gender play in the maintenance of stability and regularity in labor supply?

To begin to answer these questions, a more focused analysis of the social organization of production in the lettuce industry follows.


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