Migratory Agricultural Workers

Migratory Agricultural Workers. Following the Civil War, a migratory labor system of mobile, low‐paid workers emerged in the United States to meet the seasonal demands of expanding capitalist agriculture. Growers recruited an international pool of workers whose poverty, racial stigmatization, and political disfranchisement made them willing to migrate. Dispossessed tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and small farmers, both native‐born and immigrants, also joined the migrant pool. The 1924 immigration law created a vulnerable group of “illegal” immigrant workers, excluded from protective labor legislation. Government‐sponsored contract‐labor programs during both world wars and after 1945, developed in collaboration with agricultural interests, enlarged and diminished the migrant labor force as needed.

Resisting exploitation, migrant workers organized spontaneous strikes, ad hoc collective bargaining, temporary labor organizations, and eventually more permanent unions. Ignored by the American Federation of Labor, they turned to left‐wing and ethnic associations for collective bargaining. By 1910 the radical Industrial Workers of the World, allied with the Partido Liberal Mexicano, organized migrants on both sides of the border. Ethnic labor organizations arose in California in the 1920s, including the Mexican‐based Confederación de Uniónes de Campesinos y Obreros Mexicanos (CUCOM). In 1928 the Communist Party–USA's Trade Union Unity League, followed in 1931 by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU), organized migrant workers. In the 1930s, 140 strikes erupted in California, including one by 18,000 cotton workers. The CAWIU was broken by 1935, but in 1937 organizers formed the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA–CIO). The federal, state, and local governments usually backed the interests of the large farmers, however, while workers’ exclusion from New Deal–Era labor legislation weakened their position. The federally sponsored contract labor program undermined unionization efforts from 1942 until the program's demise in 1964. In 1965 Filipino and Mexican workers, led by farm worker and organizer Cesar Chavez, formed the United Farm Workers, which led a protracted fight to improve conditions. Other unions followed, such as the Ohio‐based Farmworker Labor Organizing Committee.

As the twentieth century ended, U.S. agriculture still depended heavily on migratory labor. Mixtec and Zapotec Indians from Mexico were the newest migrants, augmented by Jamaicans, Yemenites, and others. In response to economic globalization, binational organizations worked with domestic unions to organize these migrants.
See also Agriculture: The “Golden Age” (1890s–1920); Agriculture: Since 1920; Hispanic Americans; Immigrant Labor; Immigration Law; Labor Movements; Sharecropping and Tenantry; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

Dennis Nodin Valdes , Al Norte: Agricultural Workers in the Great Lakes Region, 1917 to 1970, 1991.
Devra Weber , Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton and the New Deal, 1994.

Devra Weber