Agriculture is one of humanity’s oldest and most
important technologies. For most of our
history crop production was characterized by a high concentration of labor. It has been said that when we first began to organize into collective entities
with industrial-scale grain production, the labor was so intense that workers
essentially had to be enslaved by those in power to keep them from running
away. Humans, like plants and animals,
had to be domesticated to accommodate the demands of agriculture. Technology would improve over time and lessen
the burden, but it would require the twentieth century inventions of fossil-fuel-driven
machines to virtually eliminate manual labor.
Crops like corn can be planted and harvested with machines doing almost
all the work. However, there still exist
crops that have resisted full automation and continue to require difficult and
unpleasant labor. Consider the humble
tomato plant. It produces numerous fruit
over a period of several months, so it must be harvested continuously as the
individual tomato reaches the right stage for picking. This involves a lot of unskilled labor.
If owners of agricultural land had to pay a market price
for labor, the cost of the produce might become too high to find buyers. The traditional response of landowners was to
resort to some form of servitude such as slavery, serfdom, or sharecropping. Wealthy countries such as the OECD nations
have high labor costs making labor-intensive agriculture relatively inefficient. Since forms of servitude are generally highly
restricted now, the only option is to seek guest workers willing to work at the
lowest rate. Often, this still does not
provide cost-effectiveness and nations must decide if they wish to subsidize some
of their agricultural products (or place tariffs on foreign produce) to allow
them to compete in the marketplace. No country
wishes to be totally dependent on imported food from low-wage nations. Consequently, some form of accommodation must
be made to keep the price of desirable products tolerable.
Although, some of the founding fathers of the United
States liked to think of it as a nation of small farmers, the most efficient
early agricultural model involved large tracts of land worked by slaves. After a huge amount of new fertile land
became available after the Louisiana Purchase, the only people who could clear
that land and put it into productive service were the large slaveholders. This further entrenched the plantation model
for agriculture in the southern regions.
The plantation system in the South produced cotton for
the international market and provided the United States with the funds it could
use to develop its other industries. Not
all the wealth became available to the plantation owners. The North controlled credit and international
transportation which siphoned off a considerable fraction of the profit. The North also imposed high tariffs on
imported goods to protect its fledgling industries. Since the South devoted nearly all of its resources
to producing cotton, the majority of its other needs had to be purchased from
the North at above international market prices, further enriching the North at
its expense. The South has been
instinctively in favor of free-market trade and has been mad at the North ever
since.
After the end of slavery, large landowners tried to
maintain the plantation model by various schemes to create indentured
labor. The South could resort to cheap black
labor purchased from prisons, or they could reinvent the serf model and call it
sharecropping. Technology and
mechanization would eventually change even that region.
There remain agricultural pursuits that still require
difficult and intense labor. These generally
involve crops that must be picked by hand.
Michael Greenberg produced an interesting and revealing article on the
state of agriculture in the Central Valley of California. It was titled In the Valley of Fear and appeared in the New York Review of Books.
What is clear from Greenberg’s presentation is that the plantation model
is still alive and well with undocumented immigrant labor taking the place of
slaves.
“The revenue from all the crops
harvested here and elsewhere in California is $47 billion a year, more than
double that of Iowa, the next-biggest agricultural state. Most of this revenue
benefits a few hundred families, some with as many as 20,000 or even 40,000
acres of land.”
“Plantations on the west side of the Valley are so huge that managers keep
track of workers by flying over the fields in planes. Computers monitor the
release of water, which is delivered to the plants with an intricate system of
pipes and valves. ‘It’s prisons and plantations, nothing else,’ Paul Chavez,
the son of Cesar Chavez, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union (UFW),
told me. ‘You can’t even get an education in these places. According to the
state of California’s own survey, in farmworker towns barely 30 percent of
school teachers are accredited’.”
In the 1950s one could still find 10-15% of whites
working the fields with the remainder being a mixture of minorities. However, the nature of the work is such that now
only the most desperate for employment will perform it.
“Today, at least 80 percent of
farmworkers are undocumented Mexicans, the majority of them Mixteco and Trique,
indigenous people from the states of Oaxaca, Sinaloa, and Guerrero—the poorest
regions in Mexico—who speak no or very little Spanish, much less English. Most
of them have been working the fields for at least a decade, have established
families here, and live in terror of la migra, as Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) is called, and instant deportation or imprisonment that would
wrench them from their children.”
It has often been claimed that undocumented migrants take
jobs away from citizens. Greenberg
provides this perspective on that issue.
“In response to the argument
that immigrants steal jobs from Americans by undercutting their wages,
the UFW set up a website offering citizens and legal residents
agricultural jobs anywhere in the country through state employment services.
This was in 2010, during the Great Recession. The website received about four
million hits, out of which around 12,000 people filled out employment forms. Of
these, a total of twelve citizens or legal residents actually showed up for
work. Not one of them lasted longer than a day. According to a Los Angeles
Times report, Silverado, a farm labor contractor in Napa, ‘has never had a
white, American-born person take an entry-level gig, even after the company
increased hourly wages to $4 above the minimum.’ A wine grower in Stockton
couldn’t lure unemployed citizens for $20 an hour.”
There are reasons besides money that make agricultural
labor uninviting for those who might have other options. Greenberg visited a tomato field and observed
the picking.
“Because of the heat, the
workday lasted from 5 to 10 AM, when temperatures rose to 113 degrees. The
sun beat down, but everyone was covered from head to foot in several layers of
clothes: cracked baseball caps anchored in place by hoodies and homemade
scarves, sweatshirts over sweatshirts, two pairs of pants, heavy socks and
boots; only eyes and cheeks and fingers were exposed. This was to protect
against pesticides. Cancer rates among pickers throughout the Valley are high.
The soil is so hardened by chemicals that it comes up in the hand in dry, pale
stone-like clumps. In the heat the chemicals rise potently from the earth;
within an hour I tasted them burning in my mouth.”
However, there are limits to what such workers will
endure. They do not allow their children
to be caught up in the same system.
“Fruit and vegetable picking is
a one-generation job—farmworkers I spoke to neither wanted nor would allow
their children to follow them into the fields. The heat and physical toll,
combined with the feudal power of the growers, make it preferable to work in an
air-conditioned hotel or packing house, where you can stand upright and be free
of pesticides for the same low wages.”
In order for owners to maintain a dependable supply of
pickers there is a need for new illegal immigrants to replace those who are
deported or are no longer able to do the job.
“Since 2005 more Mexicans have
been leaving the US than arriving. And this isn’t only because of a crackdown
at the border. In 2000, when the border was far more porous than it is now, 1.6
million Mexicans were apprehended trying to cross into the US. In 2016 the
number was 192,969.2 Ed
Taylor, an economist at UC Davis, estimates that the number of
potential immigrants from rural Mexico shrinks every year by 150,000. This can
be partly explained by improved economic conditions in northern and central
Mexico, which have dimmed the allure of minimum-wage labor in the US, and
partly by the cost and danger of venturing across the border. If you do make it
into the US, payments to a smuggler can keep a minimum-wage laborer in debt for
life.”
The supply of pickers has not been keeping up with
demand.
“As things stand, there is a
labor shortage the magnitude of which hasn’t been seen in at least ninety
years. It has prompted growers to rip out labor-intensive fruits like table
grapes and plant almond trees, which require relatively few workers. Housing
costs, especially in the Coastal Valley, have made it even harder to attract
and keep workers. In recent years, millions of dollars’ of unpicked crops have
been plowed under or left to rot in the fields.”
The growers would prefer that traditional system of
employing migrants—legal or not—could continue.
But in the current environment where the Trump administration is
attempting to deport everyone it legally can and make life so miserable for the
rest that they will choose to leave on their own, that is highly unlikely. This system could be replaced by a viable
guest worker program, but that is complicated by the existence of the current,
largely undocumented, workforce. Could
such a program recognize their need to maintain their jobs, income and
families, or would it require that they all be deported to make way for the new
system? There is an existing program
designed for “emergency” needs, but growers do not see it as a viable solution.
“Under the current guest-worker
law, which is intended to address emergency labor shortages, guest workers are
expensive: employers must pay for their travel from and back to their country
of origin and provide housing during the term of their contract, which cannot
exceed one year. The law is designed to discourage businesses from engineering
a labor surplus by importing unlimited numbers of Mexicans and undercutting
workers who already live in the US, as growers did under the Bracero Program
(whose name comes from the Spanish word for manual laborer) from 1942 to 1964,
in response to the agricultural labor shortage during World War II.”
That law seems to recognize the replacement and
deportation of all current undocumented workers as an unacceptable
solution. There is a bill before Congress,
that has not yet gained the number of supporters needed to pass, that
illustrates the current administration’s approach to these issues.
“A bill sponsored by
Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia seeks to weaken—and in some instances
abolish—employer requirements, such as mandatory housing and transportation, in
order to create a vast pool of two million or more regulated guest workers. Passage
of the bill, its sponsors believe, will make it economically feasible to do
away with hiring undocumented workers from Mexico and to deport virtually every
one of them already living in the US.”
This passage describes the conditions of employment
envisaged under the Goodlatte bill.
“Under the Goodlatte bill, guest
workers could be hired for up to three years and would be paid the minimum wage
in the state they are brought to—$7.25 in Texas, $8.25 in Florida, $10 in
Arizona, $11 in California, all states that use a substantial number of
farmworkers. Crucially, they would not be allowed to bring their spouses or
children. And they could only work for the contractor who hired them. If they
experienced wage theft or maltreatment on the job, they would have no recourse
to seek justice or find work elsewhere. If fired, they would be immediately
deported, at their own expense. If they fled, they would be hunted as outlaws.
At least 10 percent of their wages would be withheld until the contract
expired, to make sure that they left the country.”
Technically, such conditions would qualify as indentured
servitude, but it should more properly be recognized for what it is—a modern
form of slavery. It is disturbing to
consider that this nation was born accepting slavery as a viable social option,
and now, after about 250 years of supposed social progress, there are those who
would choose to return to such a system.
We were once a better nation than that.
The undocumented immigrants who have been working our
fields were essentially invited here by the growers willing to hire them. Any solution should allow those who have been
good residents, paid taxes, and raised families to stay on. Any guest-worker program should protect the
rights of both existing workers and guests to tolerable conditions and provide recourse
to legal means for redressing grievances.
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