Migratory Agricultural Labor

MIGRATORY AGRICULTURAL LABOR. Drawn from an international labor pool of unemployed and underemployed, migratory agricultural workers have confronted daunting prospects. Racially stigmatized and politically disfranchised, they also endured debilitating complications including chronic forced dislocation, job insecurity, low wages, and dangerous working conditions. All these factors mitigated long-term stable organizations and successful strikes. Yet, these workers also brought their experiences, their working cultures, and knowledge that helped shape their responses.

The migratory agricultural labor system developed to meet seasonal demands of large-scale capitalist agriculture that emerged after the Civil War. The rapidly disintegrating regional agriculture provided a workforce, as Black and white ex-tenants, slaves and sharecroppers from the South moved up and down the Atlantic Coast harvesting fruits and vegetables. White farm workers from the Middle South and Midwest formed another migrant stream into the North Central states. From Texas and across the border came Mexican workers to pick crops in Texas, California, and the Southwest. California, with the largest capitalist agriculture in the country by 1870, depended on a succession of migrant workers since the 1870s: Native Americans, Chinese, Hindustanis, Japanese, Filipinos, Mexicans, and poor Whites.

The extreme conditions of capitalist agriculture gave rise to organizing, primarily in California. Spontaneous strikes among Mexicans, Filipinos, Japanese, and other groups occurred with the harvest and acted as a de facto form of collective bargaining. Japanese workers used their work gangs as incipient labor organizations, as did Chinese and Mexicans. Bonds of family, commonality of origin, language and cultural links served to reinforce their internal organization. By the 1920s, ethnic based organizations, such as mutual aid societies, had grown into incipient unions. These workers crucially included Mexican veterans of the Mexican Revolution, many of them socialists, and Mexican members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the anarchist-inclined Partido Liberal Mexicano, based in Los Angeles. By the late 1920s, Mexican mutual-aid societies, long active in Mexico as de facto labor organizations, began to engage in collective bargaining. In 1927, the Confederación de Uniones Obreros Mexicanos, later renamed the Confederación de Uniones Campesinos y Obreros Mexicanos (CUCOM-The Confederation of Mexican Farmworker and Laborer’s Unions), formed in southern California, uniting Mexican unions and federations in an effort to encourage Mexican labor organization.

The American Federation of Labor, for its part, had generally shunned agricultural workers, except for brief exceptions, and organizing help necessarily came from the Left. The IWW worked with transient and migratory workers, many of whom also worked the crops. In California, Spanish-speaking Mexican and indigenous members of the IWW and the allied PLM organized Mexicans and indigenous workers, notably in San Diego, Los Angeles, and the agricultural hubs of the San Joaquin and Imperial Valley. In 1915, the IWW formed the Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO), becoming the AWIU in l917, to organize harvest workers in wheat in the Western and Midwestern wheat fields. In 1928, the Communist Party, following a shift in Party tactics, formed the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) and, in 1931, the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) to organize agricultural workers in California. Although the militant CAWIU remained small, financially limited, and unable to field more than a handful of organizers, it helped lead a series of agricultural strikes.

Non-English-speaking organizers with the IWW and the CAWIU, usually sharing the workers’s backgrounds and thus literally and figuratively speaking their language, often escaped the accounts of journalists and scholars. Mexican-American Spanish-speaking organizers in the IWW and the PLM had actually organized Mexican workers in the 1910s. During the Great Depression, growers slashed wages for agricultural workers, igniting more than 140 separate agricultural strikes in California from 1933 to 1939, with thousands of workers involved. CUCOM, active in strikes from the later 1920s, was led in the middle 1930s by Mexican veterans of the PLM and IWW, who worked closely with progressive Whites, Filipinos, and Japanese immigrants.

Veterans of CUCOM strikes around Los Angeles, together with CAWIU allies, became the grass roots base for the mass movements that erupted in California first in 1933, then l934. Farm workers went on strike in crop after crop, the strike moving with workers over hundreds of miles, creating what became de facto general strikes. Mexicans composed the largest group, along with Filipino, Japanese, and White workers. During the wave that crested in the October, 1933, some 18,000 workers over the 200 mile “cotton belt” in the Central Valley of California had struck for decent wages.

In 1937, veterans of the CAWIU and Filipino and Mexican organizers and unions led the formation of a national agricultural union, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), an affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). UCAPAWA was active in California, Texas, and other states. The strongest union to date, focusing increasingly on cannery and packinghouse workers, UCAPAWA made few substantial gains for field-workers.

New Deal labor legislation ironically proved major obstacles to organization. The passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, making unions possible across much of the United States, offered no benefits to farm workers. The power of the Southern Democrats specifically barred them from the benefits of the new laws and further excluded them from eligibility for social security, unemployment and related programs. The absence of federal support effectively institutionalized farm workers as low paid and unprotected labor. This reinforced the sharp racial hierarchy and depressed economic conditions of farm workers across the country, emphatically including migratory farm labor. In 1942, the federal government introduced a contract labor or “bracero” program that further depressed wages and undermined labor organizing until the program’s end in 1964. A modified contract labor program continued to recruit foreign workers for agricultural operations.

In 1965, Filipinos organized the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), institutional parent of the United Farm Workers (UFW). The UFW benefitted from the (temporary) end of the contract labor program but also from a favorable economy: a social justice movement garnering increasing public support; skilled strategic organizers; and a growing base of resident workers. Through hard fought strikes in California, buoyed by public support, the secondary boycott, and gradual political and AFL-CIO support, the UFW obtained contracts and successfully pressured for more favorable legislation in California. Yet by the 1990s, the UFW was no longer a social movement, had fewer contracts than before, and had greatly declined in strength. Despite Arthur Rodriguez’s attempt to revive organizing field workers, the UFW mostly turned away from labor action and more toward housing, social legislation, and preserving the legacy of Cesar Chavez. Attempts of other unions to organize the unauthorized workers, and to organize across international borders to support the rights for unauthorized workers, have met with limited success.

By 2020, only 5 percent of agricultural workers still followed the crops, working a series of farms and migrating more than seventy-five miles from home. By this time, many worked regularly at one or two farms, most of them US residents, authorized and not, commuting from “home” to work, whether in contractor buses or cars. More than half were unauthorized. Guest workers, meanwhile, performed 10 percent of seasonal jobs (down from the mid-1950s of 20 percent) as growers sought to place more workers under contract. California, Washington, Texas, and Florida employed over half of the farm labor force, primarily in fruit, vegetable, and berry farms. Most workers came from Mexican, Central American or Jamaican roots, an increasing number of Mexican-born workers of indigenous populations from southern Mexico.

Farmworkers’ organizations also changed in relation to shifts in agriculture and shifts among workers themselves. As more workers resided near their work, farm labor organizations focused not only on wages and conditions, but also on problems with education, housing, health and electoral politics. Increasingly, they formed alliances, often becoming part of larger social movements. In the Pacific Northwest, PCUN (Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste-the Northwest Tree-Planters and Farmworkers United) brought together pine and farmworkers. Migratory Tejanos, who had come as unauthorized Mexican immigrants and guest workers, evolved into resident workers. Since its 1985 beginning as a legal aid organization, PCUN combined tactics of direct action in the fields, extensive solidarity with other groups, and legislative advocacy at the state and national levels. They successfully helped increase the minimum wage, formed a housing project, organized a women’s organization, worked in education and youth leadership, and launched a political organization. PCUN was an important part of a broader social movement, with more than 5,000 dues paying members by 2007.

The Farmworker Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), founded in Ohio in 1967 by a migrant worker, Baldemar Velasquez, originated among Mexican field workers picking tomatoes, following migrant workers from Ohio south to Texas and Florida. In 1978, FLOC changed strategy and targeted large corporations that bought and processed the crops. They launched a strike and sixp-year boycott against Campbell’s Soup Company. Thanks to their creative and multipronged strategies, including public pressure, they obtained in 1986 a collective bargaining agreement, recognizing FLOC and providing for wage increases, grievances, health insurance, housing, health care and day care. This contract covered all growers who sold to Campbells and offered a model for fights in cucumbers among other crops, meanwhile waging a fourteen-year battle with the giant RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company.

FLOC also began to organize H2A contract workers from Mexico. Such workers, recruited by the US government, effectively made the US government a labor contractor. In North Carolina, growers hired contract workers through one mammoth organization, the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA) that provided most of the contract laborers. In 2003, FLOC won a collective agreement with the NCGA that covered the majority of H2A workers in the state and gave 10,000 workers the protection of a union contract, the right to appeal and other guarantees heretofore denied guest workers. FLOC also took on and won a suit against the Department of Labor, which managed the contract labor program, for failing to ensure increased wages for 30,000 guest workers. The settlement repaid guest workers and shifted visa and travel costs from workers to growers. FLOC H2A workers joined the union, some 8,500 by 2020. Still, contract workers whose visas need renewing remained hesitant to offend growers and jeopardize further work. FLOC therefore organized in Mexico as well, so as to contact workers, discuss conditions with them, and work to settle grievances. By exposing fraudulent recruiters FLOC faced violence, including assassination, in Mexico The Mexican government refused to give FLOC the police protection and facilitates relations with international and legal bodies.

Other changes occurred among migratory workers in the berry fields of the American and Mexican Pacific coast, Baja California to northern Washington. Working for some of the same employers in both countries, they formed unions and sometimes collaborated directly, aided by their common origins as indigenous Triquis and Mixtecs from southern Mexico. In 2015, they launched a strike in the huge agricultural area in San Quintin, Baja, California where berries and tomatoes grow for export, and some 70,000 workers toiled for fifteen agricultural corporations, 30,000 of the workers as migrants. The strike targeted Driscolls in a binational boycott and an eight-month strike. Mexican veterans of the UFW took part, joined by experienced organizers from the binational organization of indigenous Mexicans, the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones binacionales (The Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations). In Washington, formerly migrant Triquis and Mixtecas became residents. They organized a Familias Unidas para la Justicia and joined the berry strikers and the boycott on the giant Sakuma Farm. They gained union recognition and improvements in wages and conditions. The contract insisted they drop the boycott, thus leaving the binational effort, yet gaining a stable union and contract for these farm workers.

Despite their struggles, American farmworkers did not escape brutal, race-based repression. As farmworker/scholar Ernesto Galarza predicted in the 1970s, the precarity of work, once considered the gloomy hallmark of agricultural labor, became an increasingly normal part of workers’ experience across the United States.

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