Laws: July, 1997 - Number #16

 

Immigration and Farm Labor

• Mines, Richard, Susan Gabbard, and Anne Steirman. March, 1997. A Profile of US Farmworkers. Washington: US Department of Labor

  Stull, Donald D., Michael Broadway, and David Griffith. (Eds). 1995. Any Way You Cut It: meat processing and small-town America. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. November.

  Wells, Miriam J. 1996. Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class and Work in California Agriculture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

  There are three major farm labor issues at the end of the 20th century:

  *the Latinization of the farm and rural work forces, as rural poverty in Mexico and Central America is transferred to rural America via immigration,

  *farm labor law, or can enforcement agencies and unions maintain labor standards with an immigrant work force and a proliferation of middlemen such as labor contractors, custom harvesters, share croppers and raiteros

  *integration, or how will the settlement of immigrant farm workers and their families affect the economies and politics of the rural communities in which they settle, and will the first and second generation immigrants find upward socio-economic mobility in rural towns.

  These three books deal with various aspects of these questions. The DOL report documents the Latinization of the farm work force--two-thirds of the 2.5 million persons who work each year for wages on US farms are immigrants, and over 90 percent of those working less than five years on US farms are immigrants. Since the average farm worker career is 10 to 20 years, this means that the immigrant share of the farm work force will increase.

  Wells deals with the second issue, how to protect immigrant farm workers on the job, in an industry in which half of the growers are ex-farm workers themselves. Gouveia and Stull deal with the third issue: will immigrant workers and their children achieve upward mobility in the rural meat packing towns to which they are flocking, and how do immigrant workers affect the often small towns to which they move?

  The "central objective" of Wells's nine-chapter book is "to rethink the relationship between economy and society." (page 10) The book's thesis is that economic analyses of the labor market ignore the political dimensions of how work and jobs are organized in the US. Politics can have important implications for how labor markets are structured: "they significantly shape the relative advantage to each class." (page 14).

  Wells is an anthropologist who has studied the California strawberry industry for over two decades. The book includes an overview of the evolution of the California strawberry through the mid-1980s and reports on the results of worker and grower interviews conducted in the mid-1980s. The book's thesis that politics shape the work place is developed in Chapters 7 and 8, which discusses the dominant role of share croppers in strawberry production between the end of the Bracero program in the mid-1960s and court decisions in the early 1980s that found many share croppers to be wage workers.

  Several parts of the book are especially interesting. First, Wells traces strawberry share cropping to the California Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920 that prohibited non-US citizens from owning California farm land. (page 110-111) Although many Japanese farmers evaded this law by buying land in the names of their US born- and US-citizen children, some became share croppers to avoid restrictions on land ownership. Wells notes that, "although sharecropping was initiated by growers, workers valued it as well." (page 285)

  Second, the strawberry industry is unique because it is the only major California commodity in which the majority of growers are ex-farm worker Mexican immigrants. Wells devotes Chapter 4 to a discussion of the three major groups of growers: Hispanics, most born in Mexico, who were half of the growers in the mid-1980s, Japanese, most born in the US, who were one-third of the growers, and "Anglos," who comprised almost 20 percent of strawberry growers. Wells argues that the traits associated with each group--Mexicans do not listen to UC advice, the Japanese micro manage, and Anglos want to build their businesses--reflect the structural conditions each group of farmers faces.

  For example, after six Mexican growers listened to a UC presentation on the optimal number of plants per acre, one said, "who is he to tell us how to run our ranches...we're the ones in charge here." (page 134). Three planted fewer plants per acre than recommended and three planted more.

  The Latino growers are among the industry's largest and smallest--some have more than 300 acres and others have only two or three acres. Wells's grower survey agrees with local reports that Mexican growers pay the lowest hourly wages and offer the worst working conditions--about 25 percent per hour less in the mid-1980s (p123, 195). However, many of the Mexican-born growers are able to pay lower wages to Mexican immigrant workers because they know that the alternative to picking berries is working in Mexico for one-tenth US wages. In addition, Wells notes that some of the Mexican strawberry growers encourage their workers to believe that they are apprentice share croppers, so that they are both working and learning how to produce strawberries. (page 208).

  The personal relations between Mexican growers and Mexican workers that reduce "labor resistance" are discussed in the context of 300-acre grower Jose Ballin, who was charged with a series of housing and labor violations in 1985 after teen-aged workers were discovered living in caves on his farm and working for $3 per hour when the minimum wage was $3.35. Wells notes that, despite the obvious violations, "it took lengthy conversations [at the CRLA office] with these four workers and guarantees against retaliation to convince eight others to support the suit" against the 59-year old Ballin. (page 210).

  Newly-hired workers were given a shovel and told "to dig themselves a home" but Wells says that "neither the grower nor his workers found [these conditions] particularly unusual" (page 211-2). Indeed, Wells notes that Ballin himself lived in sub-standard conditions, and that he "saw himself as the workers' patron, and he offered many benefits in addition to wages" such as free dig-your-own housing and loans to repay coyotes.

  Ballin was a strawberry grower who hired workers directly. Wells devotes considerable attention to share cropping, covering the Real v. Driscoll Strawberry Associates suit filed in 1975. The suit was settled privately in March 1981 without a trial, after a federal judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence that share croppers who grew berries for Driscoll were "employees" that there should be a trial on the issue.

  The 11-chapter book edited by Stull, Broadway, and Griffith includes papers presented at a 1992 conference. The tone of the papers is summed up in the editors introduction: the papers "address the central paradox of rural community development based on routine victimization of workers and communities. (p13)...community planning is necessary to prepare for and temper firms' positions regarding labor control, political influence, and ...health." (page 2).

  Much of the book describes poor working conditions of workers employed in meat, poultry and seafood processing. Several authors argue that, despite the presence of government inspectors in plants, injuries are under reported, as workers work at a faster pace today on the "dis-assembly line" for lower wages than were paid in the 1970s. Most of the contributors argue that the meat processing industry manipulates the labor force in a manner that holds down wages, pitting ethnic groups against each other. As a result, the editors assert that "food-processing workers rarely earn a 'living wage'," defined as the federal poverty level, or $16,050 for a family of four in 1997 (page 4).

  Broadway's chapter, from city to countryside, tells the story of IBP, a company begun with a $300,000 Small Business Administration loan in 1960 which revolutionized the meat packing industry in several ways. First, IBP followed a rural industrialization strategy, locating its first plant in Denison, Iowa, near the cattle, and building new plants in smaller cities in the plains states. Second, IBP developed new ways to process and sell meat, introducing retail packages of boxed beef in 1967 and extending them to pork processing in 1982. Third, IBP aggressively recruited workers from outside rural communities when it needed additional workers.

  Meat processing is highly regulated but, according to the authors, not regulated correctly. USDA puts inspectors in plants to ensure that meat, poultry, and seafood is handled in a manner that minimizes chances for containing food-borne disease, but not to protect workers. The chapter by Stull and Broadway, "Killing Them Softly," describes injuries to workers and supervisor reluctance to permit workers to be treated. Meat packing (SIC 2011) workers have high injury rates. In 1994, about 36 of every 100 full-time equivalent workers had a reportable injury or illness, followed by motor vehicle manufacturing (SIC 3711) with 33 injuries and ship building with 32. Poultry slaughtering and processing (SIC 2015) had 23 injuries per 100 full-time workers.

  Gouveia and Stull describe the impacts of IBP plants in Garden City, Kansas and Lexington, Nebraska, and conclude that meat packing brings both more jobs and greater poverty, as the new workers brought into the area tend to be immigrants prone to injury and high turnover: companies hire "vulnerable workers who are in no position to demand better wages" (p103).

  Griffith covers poultry processing in Georgia and North Carolina, states that accounted for 14 and 10 percent of the 32 billion pounds of chicken processed in 1994 (Arkansas accounted for 15 percent of US chicken production in 1994, and Alabama 13 percent). The poultry plants paid workers, half of whom were women, about $1 per hour more than the minimum wage, currently $5.15 per hour. Griffith also tackles a little known industry, crab processing, in rural Pamlico county, North Carolina, a county with 12,000 residents, 75 percent white, and a dozen small, family-owned seafood processing plants.

  Griffith reports that crab pickers sit or stand next to piles of cooked crabs and, wearing gloves and using a cracking tool and a knife, they extract crab meat for $1.70 per pound, so that extracting 30 pounds of crab meat would earn a worker $51 daily, or $6.38 hourly (page 170). Most workers are employed from April through October.

  Seasonality and piece rate work have encouraged many crab processors to substitute H-2B workers from Mexico for local African-American workers. The first nonimmigrant foreign workers were Mexican women imported in 1988 and, when they proved eager to work at prevailing wages, reliance on them expanded, so that today, many of the workers in the crab industries of North Carolina and Virrginia are H-2B foreign workers. As the use of H-2B workers increases, so does the reliance on labor contractors, intermediaries, and local-foreign worker competition.

  There is little background information in the book on the industries that slaughtered 36 million cattle, 96 million hogs, and seven billion chickens in 1995. Meat and poultry processing, like other US industries, are being reshaped by globalization, deregulation, and computer technologies, all of which increase competition. US meat exports are rising: the US exported meat products worth $3.7 billion in 1994, and poultry products worth $1.9 billion, up from $2.6 and $1 billion in 1990.

  This book is a pioneering effort to understand the interactions of the changing meat and poultry processing industries and their work forces.

  Population Change

  Wardwell, John M. and James H. Copp (Eds). 1997. Population Change in the Rural West, 1975-1990. Lanham, MD. University Press of America.

  This 10-chapter book includes contributions from researchers associated with the W-118 regional research project, which was begun in 1971 to examine, for example, migration decision making, the benefits and costs of migration and the impacts of migration in the rural West. Wardwell's opening chapter provides a very useful summary of migration research in the western states in the 1980s, emphasizing that researchers made several unexpected findings, including the fact that many of the migrants who moved to rural areas in the western states did not stay there--there was high turnover, despite more or less steady population growth.

  Swanson, Linda L. (Ed). 1997. Racial/Ethnic Minorities in Rural Areas: Progress and Stagnation, 1980-90. USDA: ERS, AER-731, February.

  This report, based on 1980 and 1990 Census data, reports that in 1990 about 90 percent of the US population living outside metro areas is non-Hispanic white. About 75 percent of poor persons in rural areas are white, but the probability of being poor was much higher for minorities-- in 1989, half of rural Afican-American children, 43 percent of rural Native American children and 38 percent of rural Hispanic children were poor, compared with 16 percent of rural White children.

  Poverty increased for rural Hispanics in the 1980s, a trend partly related to the combined effects of continuing immigration, lack of English language proficiency, and the concentration of nonmetro Hispanics in seasonal and low-wage agricultural employment.

  Other

  Hahamovitch, Cindy. 1997. The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945. The University of North Carolina Press.

  This eight-chapter book tells the story of farmworkers who worked in the fields of New Jersey and Florida from the turn of the century until World War II. The leitmotiv of the book is that the East Coast farm labor market, which began so differently from the West, with proximity to immigrants in urban labor markets and African-American migrants, developed the "western" feature of waves of immigrants setting wages and working conditions in farm labor markets.

  This carefully documented book emphasizes that the supply of labor is the key variable in determining both farm labor wages and working conditions, and the success of farm worker unions. With immigrant competition, most farm workers found it was easier to move up the US job ladder by finding nonfarm jobs than to fight for change in farm labor markets, explaining the absence of persisting farm worker unions.

  The book opens and closes with stories of how changes in western agriculture affected the eastern farm labor market, from declining grain prices that forced eastern farmers to switch to labor intensive fruits and vegetables, to acceptance of immigrants as the "normal" reserve supply of seasonal farm workers. In between, Hahamovitch has several noteworthy chapters, including Chapter 2 on the use of Italian immigrant in turn of the century New Jersey farm fields, Chapter 5 on the rise of sugar and vegetable farming in southern Florida, and the emergence of day labor markets in cities such as Belle Glade, and Chapters 6 and 8 on efforts to unionize the workers employed on Seabrook Farms, an enterprise that employed in the mid-1930s about 150 year round and 300 seasonal workers and epitomized "large-scale, scientific farming in South New Jersey." (page 141).

  Hahamovitch does for the East Coast what Varden Fuller did for the West Coast--show that number and characteristics of farm workers were a key factor in determining the nature and structure of regional agriculture. Hahamovitch does not mention Fuller, whose 1939 Ph.D. thesis, "The Supply of Agricultural Labor as a Factor in the Evolution of Farm Organization in California," showed (1) that farm wages kept low by immigration increased land prices, giving land owners an incentive to keep immigrants arriving and (2) lowered the returns to farmers who did their own farm work--small farmers "worked like Chinamen for Chinamen pay," and so many of the midwestern farmers who arrived in California expecting to be small farmers so moved to the cities.

  In the East, farms were smaller, and the challenges were different. Eastern farmers did not have to organize irrigation districts, fight monopoly railroads and learn about micro climates, but they did have to deal with farm land made expensive by urbanization, workers who lived in cities and could shift between urban and farm jobs, and social reformers who could study farm labor conditions.

  One particularly fascinating section details how federal, state, and local governments during World War 1 used the draft and vagrancy laws to "scare up" a farm labor supply for farmers who planted more crops because wartime prices were higher. In the South, such "work or fight" laws often became means of getting African-American farm workers at low wages, as many southern states and cities passed ordinances that permitted police to sweep African-American sections of cities, round up persons without money, fine them for vagrancy and release them to local farmers to work off the fine. Unlike the story of successive waves of immigrants in the west, Hahamovitch's story revolves around eastern farm employers pitting various groups of farm workers against African-American migrants from the south.

  Hahamovitch concludes that too much of the reformers' efforts have been taken up with an futile attempt to regulate farm labor contractors, diverting attention from the key variable of the labor supply? She asks: "will there be a farm worker movement so long as the federal government shapes US immigration policy to growers' needs? Probably not." (page 204).

  Fuller, Varden. 1940. The Supply of Agricultural Labor as a Factor in the Evolution of Farm Organization in California. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, U.C. Berkeley, 1939. Reprinted in Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor Education and Labor Committee, [The LaFollette Committee]. Washington: Senate Education and Labor Committee. 19778-19894.

  Thrupp, Lori Ann. 1995. Bittersweet Harvests for Global Supermarkets. Washington: World Resources Institute. August.

  This book reviews the growth of non-traditional agroexports (NTAEs) such as flowers, fruits and vegetables in Central and South America, including winter fruits from Chile, flowers from Colombia, and winter and spring vegetables from Mexico. While the book notes that non-traditional exports generate large numbers of jobs--80,000 mostly women work in Colombian flower production (page 85)--it also emphasizes that the need for capital and management skills prevents poor and small farmers from reaping many of the benefits associated with high-value exports and that the production of NTAEs requires large amounts of capital and pesticides.

  The book, funded by US AID, is noteworthy for being a well-written introduction to a real development dilemma. Just as there are trade offs in traditional production systems for bananas, coffee and sugar, so there are trade offs in NTAE production. NTAE production can increase revenues per acre, but with higher risks that small producers may not be able to handle. Some can wind up worse off, as NTAE producers tend to hire women, not men displaced from traditional production systems.

  Davis, Shelley. 1997. Child Labor in Agriculture. Charleston, WV. ERIC-RC-96-10. February

  This fact sheet summarizes US laws and regulations on the employment of minors in agriculture, noting that the minimum age for farm work is younger than for nonfarm work, 14 versus 16.

  The report is available at http://www.ael.org/erichp.htm