7
Conclusion
By contrast to the characterization of agricultural labor markets as "competitive" or unstructured, I have shown that those markets have been severely structured historically. A core feature identified in the process of labor market construction has been the political intervention of employers and the state in matters of labor supply. But, as I argued in chapter 2, the politics of labor supply have been directly affected by structural changes taking place internal and external to the agricultural economy. In particular, differentiation in the structure of agricultural enterprises—a product of the uneven development of different segments of the agricultural sector—resulted in a differentiated demand for labor. For some firms an undifferentiated labor supply continued to be most attractive, in part because of the constraints imposed on them by their subordination to larger firms placed between the farm and the market. In those cases, the lack of direct access to markets, and blocked opportunities for expansion via forward integration, made the availability of a low wage, unskilled, and seasonal labor force quite important. For other firms, however, organizational expansion and product diversification suggested new ways to organize production and, subsequently, new demands for labor. Few of these firms reorganized production so dramatically as to open themselves to the influx of domestic workers and unions; instead, they sought out the same workers but imposed new conditions of employment. As was shown in the case of the lettuce industry,
the bracero program proved incapable of providing the kind of labor attractive to employers. But, instead of hiring domestic workers, employers sought foreign workers (especially indocumentados) who could be used in new ways. Thus while political intervention continued unabated, its form has been partially shaped by structural change internal to agriculture.
External structural changes also shaped the politics of labor supply. In particular, the broader struggles taking place in manufacturing industries following World War II and in the civil rights movement in the 1960s brought the political and economic rights of citizenship to the forefront of political debate. Efforts by organized labor to cement legal protections for their members and strengthen such basic guarantees as the minimum wage meshed directly (though not always openly) with the demands by civil rights proponents for extended guarantees of citizenship entitlements for blacks and other minorities. These forces provided an important grounding for both the national and the local political opposition to state intervention on behalf of agricultural employers. The demise of the bracero program at the hands of these forces directly influenced the strategies undertaken by employers to meet their demands for labor. Some firms moved rapidly in the direction of labor displacement through harvest mechanization; others, like the lettuce industry, expanded the use of politically vulnerable labor. The availability of that supply of labor, undocumented workers, continued to rest on a process of political intervention in the labor market—one now characterized not by direct regulation of individual workers but by the denial of access to citizenship for an entire category of workers. The achievement of broader guarantees of rights and entitlements to citizens therefore simultaneously acted to increase the vulnerability of noncitizens and to make noncitizens more attractive as a source of labor to agricultural and nonagricultural employers.
In combining the analyses of structural changes internal and external to agriculture, I have attempted to argue against the notion of unidirectional determination of labor market structure by capitalist enterprises. I have argued instead that labor market structure is affected by factors directly related
to employers' demands for labor and by factors and processes external to the industry and the workplace. In contrast to the thrust of the literature on segmented labor markets (Edwards et al., 1975; Edwards, 1979; Gordon et al., 1982), I have tried to combine analyses of the ways in which enterprises and industries structure job and career opportunities through the way they organize production, with an analysis of how social and political processes acting on labor markets can themselves influence the organization of production. In this sense, this study has tended much more in the direction of a split labor market explanation. While it shares with split labor market theory an emphasis on the ways in which fractions of the working class (especially organized labor and noncitizen labor) have interacted to influence employers' recruitment strategies, the approach undertaken here has made much more problematic the processes through which those fractions are produced and reproduced over time. Thus, in contrast to both the segmented and the split labor market theories, I have tried to call into question: (1) why certain identifiable groups have proven attractive or useful for employers, and (2) how those "attractive" characteristics have been produced and reproduced over time. In the following discussion I will show how these facets are linked and use them to argue for a more systematic analysis of the relationship between class, citizenship, and gender as systems of inequality.
Citizenship And Undocumented Immigration
This study of the lettuce industry has shown that an employment system built around citizenship and gender inequalities has provided considerable advantage for employers. The construction of a system of labor recruitment around noncitizen workers has made possible satisfaction of a particular demand for labor: skilled and stable, but also politically vulnerable; capable of carrying out tasks that require considerable group experience and mutual coordination, but competitive as well. The employment system built around gender inequality has served to satisfy another particular demand for labor: large
in supply and largely unskilled, but also stable in its availability and in its attachment to individual firms. The principal dimensions of advantage accruing to employers through the utilization of these two particular categories of labor are found in: (1) labor productivity; (2) labor stability; and (3) control over the labor process. Each of these will be considered in turn.
Productivity of the Labor Process
In the ground crew harvest, in particular, the recruitment of noncitizen workers enhances managerial control over the productivity of the labor process. The lack of political protections or avenues for redressing grievances for undocumented workers and the incapacity of workers generally to stem the flow of labor into the industry severely limit claims for higher status and reward. These two factors act to create an intense competition among workers to find employment and, once employed, to keep their jobs. Thus, the channeling of undocumented workers into the ground crews, as demonstrated in chapter 4, leads not only to competition but to differing employment strategies on the part of documented and undocumented workers. While documented workers attempt to "stretch out" their work careers, undocumented workers seek to maximize their short-run earnings. Because employers seek to sustain high levels of productivity, the decentralization of recruitment to the level of the foreman enables indocumentados to fulfill their employment strategies while at the same time undermining those of the documented workers.
Beyond the pace of work, the organization of the labor system also serves to undercut the organizational potential of the crews themselves. The recruitment of undocumented workers makes it possible for a labor process built on mutual coordination and collective skill to be highly productive without being subject to control by worker organizations. In the case of unionized workers at both Miracle and Verde, differences in citizenship status severely hamper efforts to translate crew skill into a more traditional career. At Verde, where union organization has been most aggressive, the only real
achievement has been the tying of seniority to job security. Senior workers may enjoy greater security in employment, but the result has been the construction of a two-tiered system in which greater demands are made on low seniority workers. Within the industry as a whole, the availability of a highly elastic and politically vulnerable labor supply enables employers to use workers in a physically destructive labor process without being held accountable for its effects. This was clearly evidenced in the sloping age-earnings profile (fig. 3), in short work careers, and in the high rate of physical disability among workers.
In the ground crew, the recruitment of undocumented workers serves as a form of insurance for the organization's investment in training individual workers and crews. The nonmarket control exercised by employers over undocumented workers virtually prevents that skill (acquired within the organization) from being appropriated by labor and withheld from the firm for the purpose of wage negotiation or control over the work itself. The political vulnerability of undocumented labor—especially with regard to petitioning state regulation of occupational attainment or certification of skill—prevents skill from showing up as the property of the worker independent of the organization. Political vulnerability and the availability of competitive labor also prevent crews, the larger unit of skill, from effectively bargaining with employers. Even when skills are acquired external to the organization that purchases them, that is, in the event that individuals or crews are trained in another firm, workers cannot use that skill as the basis of wage negotiation.
In the wrap crews, by contrast, the pace of work is much less influenced by the skills or coordination of workers than it is by the technology of the machine. Thus the value of undocumented workers in the ground crews, their vulnerability to political coercion over work pace, is less important in the wrap crew. However, the recruitment of women (both citizen and noncitizen) enables firms to reorganize production without having to make concessions or compensation to the labor force. At the same time, the concentration of women in the crews creates a gender identification with key positions in
the crews, especially in wrapping, and acts to enhance external control over production.
Stability in the Labor Force
In both the ground and wrap crew harvests, the recruitment of noncitizens and women enhances the stability of the labor force. That stability, measured as a function of turnover in the labor force, translates into savings in production costs: it reduces the number of workers who have to be trained to carry out the tasks associated with the harvest.
In the wrap crews, the recruitment of women and older workers enables firms to turn labor's vulnerability to the organization's advantage. The disadvantaged status and the restricted labor market position of women serve to severely limit occupational opportunities, especially for women with children. The division of labor in the family constrains women's choice of occupations: the dual role of wife and mother removes many career options from women's grasp. Beyond that, women's status as the secondary wage earner means that most women are limited in terms of the geographic area they can cover occupationally (e.g., as migrants). Thus, women can be employed seasonally. Citizen women, in particular, can be supported financially by an alternative set of institutions—the family or the state—when they are not employed. In other words, the highly restricted occupational opportunities for citizen and alien women and, in turn, the availability of alternative sources of support ensure the creation of an abundant and stable supply of wrap crew labor.
Control Over the Labor Process
The distinctive legal and political disadvantages imposed on farm workers have been used to isolate agricultural employment as an enclave for immigrant workers. The manipulation of ascribed characteristics has further been used to drive a wedge between groups of workers: citizens and noncitizens, men and women. The efforts of organized labor unions to gain a foothold in agricultural labor markets have suffered
from the ability of employers to stimulate conflict and competition between domestic and foreign workers, as well as between different ethnic groups making up the alien labor force. These kinds of tactics have been cited in numerous other settings as well (Castles and Kosack, 1975; Castells, 1975; Burowoy, 1976; Paige, 1975).
Efforts by organized labor to extend into agriculture have demonstrated the difficulties inherent in overcoming both the political power of agricultural employers and the conflict generated between protected and unprotected labor (Galarza, 1971; McWilliams, 1971; Friedland and Thomas, 1974). While the major labor unions and the AFL-CIO consistently opposed the importation of alien labor, forays into actual labor organization were scattered and largely unsuccessful. Differences in the structure of agricultural and industrial work practices and employment, on the one hand, and differences in legal status of agricultural workers, on the other, acted to diminish the progress and the persistence of union organizing drives. In the case of the AFL, minimal returns on investment led to diminished efforts in organizing. In the case of the Teamsters, a strategy of containment—where the union sought to prohibit the expanded use of alien labor—was developed to protect nonfield workers. As a result, the conditions and earnings associated with agricultural labor remained under the control of employers.
The irony of the most successful of farm worker unions—the United Farm Workers—is that its organization around the common national and cultural heritage and employment situation of farm workers has made it subject to severe whipsawing by employers. The political and social divisions in the membership along the lines of citizenship and gender have blunted the union's ability to challenge the organization of work and has forced it to pursue two restricted and costly strategies. One strategy, the pursuit of political protections through state extension of labor legislation to include farm workers, has limited the union's ability to carry on extensive organizational campaigns. Time and organizational resources that might otherwise be devoted to membership campaigns at the local level have had to be focused on legislative and
electoral battles on a state-by-state basis instead. The other strategy, admittedly a last resort, has focused union efforts to negotiate the highest possible wage settlements for workers, with secondary emphasis on the conditions or organization of work. This strategy, prevalent in the lettuce industry, has demonstrated the implicit notion that many of the workers presently covered will eventually be displaced through mechanization (Thomas and Friedland, 1982).
Citizenship And Immigration Policy
The economic and organizational attractiveness of noncitizens as labor market participants has been heightened by the increased political and economic claims associated with citizenship. Of the general category of noncitizens, undocumented immigrants offer the most significant contrast with persons who have some claims to make on either economic or political citizenship. Undocumented immigrants are politically unenfranchised labor whose presence in the nation-state is almost totally dependent upon their participation in economic organizations. As nonmembers of the community, undocumented immigrants can make no claims against the collectivity for politically mediated transfers or support payments. When employed, they are severely restricted in their ability to make claims against employers/economic organizations for higher status or reward. They cannot make claims on the state to regulate or enforce their occupational, labor market, or organizational position; skill or training certification is either denied or devalued as the basis for negotiation over the price of labor power. Furthermore, undocumented immigrants are denied the capacity to use citizenship entitlements—unemployment compensation or general assistance aid—as the basis for establishing geographical stability. Thus, they cannot draw welfare to make up for periods of seasonal disemployment or industrial relocation in order to sustain a stable residence. Undocumented workers are forced to be more mobile and, subsequently, more "responsive" to economic conditions.
The lack of protection, political or economic, associated
with this labor pool makes it particularly vulnerable to manipulation by employers. Undocumented workers may be paid less than their enfranchised counterparts in the domestic labor force—though they cannot be paid less than what is necessary to sustain them at a given level of skill. Undocumented workers represent cheaper labor in price terms. Beyond pay levels, however, undocumented workers can be used to sustain more labor-intensive production processes because they are less able to reproduce skill as higher status or reward. Undocumented workers, if not used directly to undercut the bargaining position of citizen and documented labor, can be used to politically and organizationally fragment labor at several levels. First, they can be brought into competition with negatively privileged citizen labor, most particularly blacks, Latinos, women, and youths. As competitors for the same category of jobs (e.g., in service and retail trade), undocumented workers provide the equivalent of a decrease in the overall wage levels associated with those jobs or a diminution of minimum wage laws in that sector. The latter strategy provides the equivalent of a reduction in the guarantees of citizenship without directly expressing the battle in those terms.
Second, undocumented workers can be used to politically fragment ethnic organizations. In particular, the question of strategy regarding the undocumented worker has strained organizational efforts in the Hispanic community (Thomas, 1981). In this case, common ethnic and national heritage draws undocumented workers and citizens together but differences in political protection/vulnerability pull them apart. Third, and at a more general level, the emphasis on "illegality" as portrayed in the popular press and political debate focuses organizational strategies among trade unions on the characteristics of undocumented workers as nonmembers of the community, not as members of a common class. Thus, undocumented workers have been viewed by leading figures in the labor movement as an "external" explanation for the deteriorating position of American labor. Although unemployment due to economic decline has captured national attention most recently, it was not so long ago that George
Meany and colleagues in the AFL-CIO were decrying the illegal alien menace as the principal cause for increased urban unemployment. Caught up in the worsening national economic situation, Meany, and others far to his left, focused on the supposed threat to the national community posed by the alleged invasion of Mexican and Latin American workers.
The capacity of employers to manipulate undocumented workers politically, using communal status as the lever, depends on the reproduction of the distinctive negative privileges associated with noncitizenship. Not only does the supply of labor have to be perpetuated but labor's distinctive quality must also be sustained. It is not surprising, therefore, that efforts to deal with the illegal alien/undocumented immigrant issue focus not on employer involvement in the recruitment of labor but on regulating the flow and restricting the claims available to noncitizens.
In recent years two major directions for immigration policy have been developed to perpetuate political manipulation and reproduction of political vulnerability. The first has focused most directly on regulation of the flow of labor across the borders. Greater efforts to monitor border crossings and to apprehend and deport border violators have had the effect of sensitizing the public to the alleged threat of unchecked immigration and, at the same time, has increased the circulation of labor across the border. This "enforced circulation of labor" (Burawoy, 1976) has not proven any more successful in curbing the flow of labor between Latin America and the United States. But that was not its intention. Rather, increased surveillance and apprehension has served to prevent the stabilization of undocumented labor in the United States and, in the process, has increased the risk for individual migrants. That increased risk has redounded to the advantage of employers: fear of apprehension and deportation makes workers that much more committed to employment where they can find it, especially when employers offer a form of protection against apprehension. A proposed program to further regulate the flow of labor, though not to eliminate it, has been offered in various circles: something on the order of a revised bracero program (Craig, 1971, and Galarza, 1964, for detailed
discussions of the bracero program, Public Law 78) or an American version of the "guestworker" (gastarbeiter ) system found in West Germany. Such a program would directly involve the government in the licensing or certification of noncitizen workers for employment in the United States for a limited duration. Both these systems create a semi-caste system of labor. Both provide for political mediation of labor market processes where the denial of access to citizenship entitlements provide the equivalent of a denial or (at least) an abridgment of economic citizenship (i.e., formal market freedom).
Equally important, efforts to "distribute the burden" of blame for employment of undocumented workers, such as that proposed by recent legislation (the Simpson-Mazzoli bill), do little more than push Hispanic groups into an uneasy alliance with employers. The approach suggested by the Simpson-Mazzoli bill would impose financial penalties for employers who hire undocumented workers—a goal long advocated by organized labor in the United States. Enforcement of such provisions, however, would require an effective means for employers to screen potential employees, something less easily counterfeited than a Social Security card, driver's license, or green card. Job applicants of Hispanic descent or appearance would be immediately suspect unless they provided adequate proof of their legal immigrant status or citizenship. To avoid overt discrimination against Hispanics, the only workable solution would be to require some universal form of identification for all citizens. Since civil rights advocates have long argued against universal identification papers for U.S. citizens and Hispanics have argued vehemently against a restricted version, civil rights activists, liberal politicians, and Hispanic leaders find themselves temporarily standing alongside employers in the fight to quash such programs. Even with the creation of a somewhat less objectionable identification system, the current legislation provides few concrete clues as to how efforts to police employers (and the border) will prove any more effective than past attempts to regulate illegal border entry.
The other major direction for immigration policy has been
one of total exclusion of noncitizen labor. This approach would be tantamount to the creation of a Berlin Wall at the border—or, alternatively viewed, a Great Wall of Mexico—sufficiently well protected to deny access to any but the most qualified immigrants. While the content of those qualifications themselves are the topic of important debate, the past experience of efforts to seal off the border only alert us to the fact that restrictions increase the utility of undocumented labor to employers and the vulnerability of undocumented labor to political manipulation. The refusal to sanction employers for hiring undocumented workers or to provide sufficient funding to make such sanctions enforceable reinforces the representation of the issue as one in which indocumentados "steal" jobs. The circulation of labor across the border (whether as a category or as individuals) effectively reproduces the distinctive political inequalities associated with noncitizenship. The insistence on the integrity of the border and national economic health (i.e., the representation of noncitizens as a threat to citizens) increases the utility of undocumented labor to employers. As long as enforcement of immigration laws is located at the level where it cannot work, at the level of the individual, then the rhetoric of an "invasion" of illegal aliens sustains employer advantage while appearing to be a threat to the entire community.
Citizenship, Gender, And Class
To this point, I have argued that the maintenance and reproduction of the nonmarket statuses attached to indocumentados and women have granted to employers significant advantages. Undocumented workers and women in the lettuce industry are paid less than equally skilled workers in other sectors and can be employed in physically destructive and arbitrary ways. Yet employers do not create those statuses; they purchase labor power and seek to transform workers' activity into products and profits. How, then, do we account for the production of those debilitating statuses?
At the outset I argued that neo-Marxian analysts of labor markets and labor processes generally explained citizenship
status and gender as either functional aspects or ideological distortions of underlying class relations. In this, the concluding section, I will argue that citizenship and gender must be understood as systems of inequality which are parallel to and interactive with class inequality.
Citizenship Broadened
Serious consideration of the role played by undocumented labor in agriculture and other sectors of the economy necessarily leads to questions about how citizenship is to be understood both as an analytic category and as a feature of social organization in capitalist society. In this study, the abridgment or denial of citizenship has served as a central feature conditioning the use and the compensation of labor. But, as I pointed out in chapter 4, noncitizenship has nothing to do with the quality of indocumentado laborers or their capacity to work. Rather, it applies to their position in the national polity, to the kinds of claims they can make on the state and/or the economic organizations in which they are employed. If undocumented workers are active economically (indeed, they have to be in order to remain in the country) but can make no political claims on the basis of that activity, how then are we to characterize the political and economic claims of citizens? Are they homogeneous or are there different claims or levels of qualification for citizenship among those acknowledged to be members of the national polity?
What makes citizenship something of a peculiar concept is that it is often viewed as nonproblematic. For some sociologists (especially those concerned with the formation of nation-states, Weber, 1954; Bendix, 1969; Skocpol, 1979; Tilly, 1975; Moore, 1966) citizenship has been used as an important indicator of social development—particularly as regards the creation and generalization of certain kinds of reciprocal rights and obligations that tie individuals to a national community. However, in the study of social inequality and social organization, citizenship is not often considered a crucial defining characteristic distinguishing one set of actors from another. This is particularly true when individual nations are taken as
the unit of analysis. In that sense, national boundaries are taken for granted and are only considered of central importance when exchanges or relations between states affect the object of study. In much political economy, the focus is on the movement of capital, commodities, or organizations (e.g., transnational corporations) across national boundaries, even in the case of migrant flows of highly skilled technical and managerial labor. Most demographers who study population flows do pay more attention to issues of national origin and destination but fail to develop a rigorous conceptualization of citizenship and, thus, often underemphasize the political and economic consequences of differences in citizenship status among those migrants. In some cases, the issue of workers or immigrants with different citizenship statuses is taken into account; however, those studies have more often focused on the isolated or regional significance of those differences, for example, the general argument that undocumented workers or noncitizens show up in southwestern agriculture because agriculture needs certain kinds of labor and Mexicans happen to be nearby in search of jobs.
With the discovery of large numbers of undocumented immigrants working in the United States, however, the meaning of citizenship both as a symbol and as a concrete practice has become much more a problem for sociological analysis. At the most general level, I would argue, citizenship refers to a relationship between the individual and the collectivity. National citizenship, by extension, refers to membership in a national collectivity. Though individuals may claim or be granted a number of citizenships—municipal, regional, and state—I am most concerned with national citizenship. National citizenship represents a form of membership unmediated by intervening levels of organization or allegiance in its most extreme form: a higher order of responsibility or obligation between the individual and the state. While an individual may claim a variety of citizenships, the defining characteristic of national citizenship is its use as a status that transcends all other, intervening memberships in particular areas. Thus, to be a citizen of the United States entails a more general set of rights or obligations than, for example, to be a
citizen of Michigan, Detroit, or the Poletown neighborhood.
Beyond the ascriptive sense, citizenship also represents a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the collectivity—in this case, the nation-state. To be a citizen is to (consciously or unconsciously) undertake certain responsibilities or obligations to the collective. The nature of these obligations may vary; from the payment of taxes as a rent on membership to some further and more directly continuous participation in state-directed activities, such as military service. At the same time, citizenship entails certain rights or entitlements that individuals may claim against the collectivity and collective resources; again, these may vary, but usually include some claims against state activity such as military protection and state services (e.g., education, welfare, etc.). Most often, the nature of these resources or services will be described as social goods—goods that represent the benefits of participation in the national collectivity. They may also be represented as symbols of participation: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to cite one common reference.
Citizenship, in its most universal form, represents a symbol of equality among members of a given collectivity, a symbol that represents equality of obligation and equality of entitlement. In the United States and other Western democracies, citizenship represents a category of claims for formal equality in the political life of the community. This goes beyond the more popular notion of citizenship—or, perhaps more correctly, generalizes that notion—in that it includes more than what are conceived to be the "obligations" of citizens to be politically active—to vote, to take an interest in national affairs, to write to Congressional representatives—or the "rights" of citizens to run for public office, to publicly address or seek redress of grievances, and so on. Citizenship in the United States stands opposed to a system in which status or class differences are associated with unequal claims on the polity. In particular, I refer to differential access to political power based on criteria such as land ownership, sex, race, or occupation. In the formal sense at least, citizenship is available to all who meet certain criteria. In the United States the major criteria for acquisition and exercise of citizenship are age,
mental competence, residence and, for immigrants, some visible means of support. Though these criteria can be manipulated to serve certain purposes for certain groups, at the most general level citizenship is at least identified with political equality.
Citizenship is also an important status with respect to economic activity, though it is generally not associated with the operations of a market economy. In the United States, citizenship represents a guarantee of formal market freedom, that is, the freedom to enter into the economic arena (market) and economic relations (economic exchange) and to do so on an equal footing with fellow participants. The polity acts to guarantee that formal equality through legal enforcement of contracts and regulation of market exchanges such that contract partners are held accountable for performance of their respective obligations. But, in contrast to the political dimension of citizenship, where equality of claims and outcomes are supposed to be guaranteed, freedom to enter into the market does not bring with it an assurance or guarantee of equality of outcome in market transactions or economic activity. In other words, the political features of membership in the collectivity (citizenship) are detached from, or only effective within limits on economic activity and economic outcome.
These two aspects or dimensions of membership in the collectivity come to confront one another as opposing principles in capitalist society: political and economic citizenship clash as competing symbols of participation in the collectivity. Political citizenship represents political equality and equality of access to the marketplace while economic citizenship represents formal market freedom and inequality of outcome. In other words, political equality is confronted by a division of labor between social groups (workers and capitalists) and between economic organizations that are built around unequal access to the means of production.
This conflict has been dealt with by T. H. Marshall in his essays on social class and citizenship. Marshall (1977) argues that the conflict between these two principles of social organization—of political equality and economic inequality—gives rise to citizenship as an important social category and to the
welfare state as an effort to overcome the contradictory features of citizenship and class. The welfare state operates, according to Marshall, in two ways: first, it operates to facilitate the "fair fight," that is, to ensure that contestants in the marketplace (the fighters in this analogy) are properly prepared to contest. Such action is carried out through educational activities and through regulation and enforcement of contracts. However, the welfare-state acts ameliorate the negative outcomes of the "fair fight." It offers ice packs in the form of state-mediated support and transfer payments to those who lose in the market. The welfare state may be either reactive—reacting to the conditions of the economy—or it may be proactive—responding to the demands made upon political citizenship in the area of equality of access (responding to historical inequalities in access by such measures as Affirmative Action or the Equal Rights Amendment).
But because the welfare state notion (as espoused by Marshall, in particular) does not coincide with total state intervention in the economy, it does not pose a direct challenge to the principles of private property or economic (class) inequality. Thus the exercise of citizenship is conditioned by individual and group position in the economy and economic organizations. That is to suggest that citizenship ought to be conceived of as something of a continuum: a variable instead of an invariant characteristic . Political citizenship constitutes rights and entitlements associated with the welfare functions of the state and the criteria for exercise of that status is intermittent, unstable participation or nonparticipation in economic organizations or value-producing labor processes. In particular, the exercise of political citizenship is conceived of as the making of claims on state-mediated transfers and services such as welfare aid, aid to dependent children, disability payments, old age aid, and state-supported food allocation programs. These claims are based on membership in the collectivity and are claims against collective resources.
Economic citizenship, by contrast, constitutes rights and entitlements associated with economic activity and rewards for participation in the economy and economic organizations. The exercise of economic citizenship is conceived of as the
making of claims on transfers mediated by economic organizations (health and medical benefits, pensions, and low-interest loans) and state-mediated transfers based on past participation in the economy (Social Security, federally guaranteed loans, tax benefits, and incentives). These kinds of transfer payments are sometimes referred to as welfare to the middle and upper classes, though broadly conceived they are also to be found in the wage and benefit packages that form the core of many union contracts.
To summarize to this point, the exercise of political citizenship is the exercise of rights associated with membership and participation in the community. It is associated with claims that form a "floor" level of existence in the society. In Marxian terms, this can be roughly equated to the social determination of the floor cost for reproducing labor at the lowest level of skill. The exercise of economic citizenship is the exercise of rights associated with both membership in the community and participation in the economy: where membership in the community facilitates a set of rights and entitlements in economic organizations and where participation in economic organizations facilitates a distinctive set of claims on the state. Most important, within a class analysis of economic organizations, citizenship for those who are economically active provides the potential for negotiation over the price of their labor, the ability to push the price of labor above the cost necessary to reproduce it at a given level of skill by means of enforcement of market position.
The thrust of this theoretical discussion can now be stated in much simpler terms. The rise of citizenship and the welfare state are related directly to conflict between the nation-state as a collection of politically equal individuals and the capitalist organization of the economy as the locus of inequality. The extension of the political rights of citizenship (especially into the area of welfare aid to those who are not economically active) has simultaneously created a floor level of existence (a guarantee against starvation) and has bolstered the market position of those who are economically active.
This conceptualization of citizenship in capitalist society incorporates the basic assumption of Marxian theory of the
formal market freedom of labor but questions its applicability to all members of society. By drawing attention to the distinctions between participation in economic organizations and participation in political organizations (in a broad sense, the welfare state), I seek to highlight the material base and the ideological consequences of differences in citizenship status. Marxian theory focuses our attention on the ways in which the capitalist labor process and the drive to accumulate capital construct a social structure appropriate to the reproduction of surplus value (what Gordon et al. refer to as a "social structure of accumulation," 1982:22–25). Yet, as I have attempted to illustrate here, political citizenship is rooted in a labor process in which no new value is produced; it is transferred . Thus, the welfare recipient makes nothing; but, through the exercise on claims associated with political citizenship, he or she participates in a labor process in which the physical activity of living in a tenement "unlocks" values stored in that building, values that, logically, would not be realized if the exchange were market-mediated, and transfers them to its owner—in the form of rent paid by the state. Similarly, a visit to the hospital by the same welfare recipient produces nothing; but the fact that he/she is acted upon by a doctor or technician results in a transfer of value to the medical care industry. Equally important, participation in this peculiar labor process confers a specific status on those who exercise political citizenship: that of "deadbeat" or parasite (for a similar argument, see Piven and Cloward, 1971). And, to the extent that an identifiable category of citizens (disproportionately black, minority, and female) participate in that labor process, the status is generalized to all members of that category.
The point here is not to suggest that the assumption of formal market freedom of labor is entirely inapplicable; it is instead to argue that the assumption does not apply to all members of society. This does not constitute a reversion to the Marxian concept of an industrial reserve army of labor because at least some portion of that army of labor will remain outside participation in economic organizations. They remain
outside participation in economic organizations for two reasons: first, because a growing segment of the economy—most notably medical care and urban real estate—has developed on the basis of transfers of resources through the welfare system; and, second, because the advantages accruing to economic citizens—particularly unionized labor in core industries—have been built on the bedrock of a welfare system that serves as their lever for claims for a larger portion of the surplus they produce.
Thus citizenship in capitalist society stands apart from but necessarily interacts with economic class inequality. It is offered here as part of a theory of political inequality which seeks to account for the three phenomena surfaced in this study: (1) the integrative functions of membership in a national polity, that is, the ideology of a community of equals which acts to obscure differential access to wealth and property; (2) the manner in which political rights and entitlements associated with membership are themselves products of efforts by different class fractions to create relatively privileged positions in the polity and the economy, that is, different citizenships; and (3) how these different citizenships have altered the operations of the capitalist economy, that is, between those engaged in value-producing and value-transferring labor processes.
Gender And Class
If citizenship conditions the expenditure and the compensation of labor and exists as a status external to the labor process, gender shares many of those qualities. As was demonstrated in chapter 6, the unique disadvantages associated with being a woman provide distinct advantages to employers seeking to rationalize production. But, if gender is not the product of the organization of the labor process, then where do we find its source?
This problem has been posed in recent years by a number of feminist scholars seeking to remove the study of gender
from the shadows of both Marxian and bourgeois theory. Heidi Hartmann (1979:3), in particular, has suggested that
Most Marxist analyses of women's position take as their question relationship of women to the economic system, rather than that of women to men, apparently assuming the latter will be explained in their discussion of the former.
Beyond simply raising a question of relations among men and women, however, she is correctly concerned that the explanations for gender inequality not be reduced to an analysis of the functions of gender for class:
The categories of Marxist analysis, class, reserve army of labor, wage labor, do not explain why particular people fill particular places (in the structure of production). They give no clues about why women are subordinate to men inside and outside the family and why it is not the other way around. Marxist categories, like capital itself, are sex blind [emphasis added]. (1979: 10–11)
The clues for the subordination of women to men, Hartmann argues, reside in the interaction between capitalism and patriarchy (1976:208). Under capitalism, employers purchase labor power and, through the labor process, arrange its transformation into commodities and profit. Where possible, they will endeavor to increase their control over the labor process and often do so by recruiting workers whose social position affords them less protection from direct exploitation or forced competition in the market for jobs. Women, like undocumented workers, have been viewed historically as a source of labor vulnerable enough to be used to undercut the established positions of male laborers. But, as Hartmann and others point out, arguing that women are capable of being used in this fashion does not explain the source of their disadvantaged status. Thus, patriarchy, as a system of hierarchical relations between men and women, is employed as a structure parallel to capitalist social relations to explain the coincidence of class and gender as organizing
principles of stratification. Patriarchy, according to Hartmann (1979:18), is
a set of social relations which has a material base and in which there are hierarchical relations between men and solidarity among them which enable them in turn to dominate women. The material base of patriarchy is men's control over women's labor power.
Patriarchal stratification, according to this argument, predates the development of capitalism but the two have come to structure one another over time. Capitalism strips from patriarchy the all-encompassing control of men over women through the creation of a "free" market for labor. Yet patriarchy persists (albeit in altered form) in its effect on capitalism: capitalists, managers, and organized labor are overwhelmingly composed of men, and women's disadvantaged labor market positions are very much a product of men as men attempting to protect their privileged positions in the economy and society. Capitalism acts to reduce the capacity of families to sustain themselves independent from the market or wage labor (Braverman, 1975:271–283), but patriarchy and patriarchal ideologies of male superiority sustain men's control over their wives' labor in the family. This latter point is attested to quite strongly in the discussion of decisions about wives' working and women's double day in farm worker families (see chap. 6). The persistence of men's dominance in the family and in labor market positions enforces the dependence of women on men through the combined activities of gender-role socialization and job segregation. Thus capitalism and patriarchy, through their interaction, create the basis for an alliance among men as men, despite their hierarchical arrangement as capitalists, managers, and workers.
In conclusion, this study of citizenship, gender, and work has shown that the capacity of workers to organize to make claims for higher wages or to gain closure over entry into their occupations (in order to accomplish the same end) can
be undermined by the vulnerability attendant on them as unenfranchised labor. While the cost of producing skill is equivalent across categories of citizenship and gender, I have tried to demonstrate that the ability of workers to force up the price of labor is affected by their political status. The elements of labor cost—the factors associated with producing and reproducing labor of a particular intensity—are not reduced but the potential price of labor is. Therefore, the utility of a migrant labor system, particularly one dominated by undocumented immigrants, is evident. Undocumented labor, and the labor that must compete with it, can be employed effectively in a highly skilled production process because first, it cannot translate into an organizational basis for bargaining over price, and second, its vulnerable political position makes high wages only attainable through higher levels of productivity.
The construction of this type of labor system depends heavily on the ability of employers to exert leverage in the market for labor. To the extent that domestic workers can exert and enforce claims to some level of closure over entry into the market, then the appearance of this form of labor system is unlikely. However, where political and organizational forces can be mobilized to counter that closure, the recruitment and utilization of undocumented labor becomes increasingly likely.
This study has sought to provide an explanation for the organization of work and wages in industrial agriculture. In it, I have attempted to show how nonmarket statuses are used to influence labor market and wage determination processes. Rather than argue that the disadvantaged status of Mexicans or women is a product of ethnic, national, or biological differences (characteristics inherent in the workers themselves), I have argued that the division of labor in production, the political intervention of employers, and the system of stratification external to the workplace together produce and maintain that status. Thus the organization of the labor process, while distinctly capitalist, is nonetheless intimately linked to the form the labor market takes. In the case of the lettuce industry, the communal organization of work in skilled crews
is linked to the perpetuation of a labor system built around noncitizen and undocumented workers. In the case of' the wrap crews, the capacity of firms to successfully reorganize production and avail themselves of abundant and stable labor is linked to the disadvantaged status and labor market restrictions upon women and noncitizens.
This is not to argue that people who harvest lettuce are any less engaged in a capitalist system of production than are, for example, carpenters or machinists. Nor is it to suggest that the study of capitalist relations of production should forsake analysis of the labor process. It is to argue, however, that the status of labor external to the labor process has a direct effect on how that work is organized. To understand how lettuce firms are able to acquire skilled labor at a low price, one must also account for the practices that attach a particular status to labor. The analysis of industrial organization, agricultural and nonagricultural, must take into account the construction of labor supply as well as demand.