Migrant Labor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

During the Dust Bowl migration, more than half a million people left the American Plains and migrated to the western United States. John Steinbeck’s (1902–1968) novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) describes vividly the large migration of poor whites from Oklahoma to California during the 1930s. His book captures how individuals were affected by dramatic changes in agriculture. “Now farming was an industry.... They imported slaves although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and Filipinos” (Steinbeck 1939, p. 298). This quotation from Steinbeck’s novel points out that farming had changed. Industrialization in the United States in the late nineteenth century set the stage for changes in agriculture during the early twentieth century. Farm sizes grew across the United States, and farming became mechanized. Crops that previously required hand labor for harvesting, like cotton and beans, were being harvested by machines, which resulted in fewer jobs. These new mechanized farms were described as “factories in the fields.” At the same time, the need for hand labor became increasingly seasonal, creating a high demand for migrant labor that could follow specialty crops, like berries and grapes.

Steinbeck’s quotation also captures the racial and ethnic changes that farming in the United States experienced. Unlike the racial and ethnic composition of farm labor at the beginning of the twenty-first century, during the early twentieth century, farm labor was racially and ethnically diverse, and included whites and African Americans, as well as Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, Italian, and West Indian immigrants. Changes in U.S. laws regarding immigration and the impact of two world wars greatly affected the racial and ethnic composition of American farm labor. For instance, as World War I began in 1914 and as the United States attempted to halt immigration in the 1920s, the demand for farm laborers increased, and African American workers filled the need. Similarly, when the United States entered World War II in 1941, workers entered defense jobs and shipyards, which created a labor shortage in the fields. To fill this shortage, the United States created the Bracero Program, a temporary guest-worker program to recruit Mexican workers to the fields. The Bracero Program, instituted in the 1940s and ending in the 1960s, ensured that a large number of Mexican-origin people entered the agriculture industry in California as laborers. It is estimated that four million Mexican farm laborers began working in the United States during the program’s twenty-two-year tenure. Even though the Bracero Program was meant to supply temporary employment, many braceros settled permanently in the United States.

In 2007 the majority of migrant laborers in the United States are of Mexican descent. Their poor treatment is compounded by racial/ethnic discrimination and xenophobic attitudes. Migrant workers are viewed by some as a drain on social services, even though they often do not use these services. At the same time, the demand for low-skilled labor has legislators ready to implement another guest-worker program. In March 2007,

Representatives Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) introduced an immigrant worker visa bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, which allows foreigners to enter the United States legally to temporarily fill low-skill jobs, including agriculture and seasonal jobs. Guest-worker programs provide temporary labor without offering citizenship rights to workers. In essence, workers are expected to work and not create families or settle in the United States, but return home when their work visa ends. However, service workers, who work in hotels and restaurants, are not included in this provision, leaving them no way to work legally in the United States. The fear of another wave of settlement leaves undocumented immigration as the main alternative for workers, which ensures the denial of citizenship rights and makes them more vulnerable to exploitation.

Migrant farmworkers and their families are among the most vulnerable groups in society. Migrant workers face dangerous and poor working conditions. Basic necessities, like adequate drinking water, are not provided by employers, even though laborers may work in extreme heat. Many are forced to work without access to toilet or hand-washing facilities, even though washing hands regularly is important to avoid pesticide poisoning. Living conditions are also difficult for migrant farmworkers. Wages for farmwork have not kept up with inflation; consequently, it is difficult for families to afford basic necessities like housing, food, health care, and education for their children. In 2006 the United States Department of Labor findings from the National Farmworker Survey (collected in 1994 and 1995) reported that farmworkers have low individual earnings; the median annual income is between $2,500 and $5,000, and about three-fourths of all workers earn less than $10,000 annually.

The children of farmworkers are often found working with family members, despite laws outlawing child labor. Human Rights Watch (a nonprofit civil rights organization) estimates that there are between 300,000 and 800,000 child farmworkers in the United States. Children work an average of twelve hours a day, and during peak seasons as much as fourteen hours a day. Children report having difficulty getting paid minimum wages; some earn as little as $2 an hour. Children are routinely exposed to harmful pesticides, and report experiencing rashes, headaches, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. In addition to the demanding physical conditions, the children of migrant laborers lack access to education. When children work in the fields, it is nearly impossible for them to attend school. Children who do not work but migrate with their families have their education disrupted because of the constant need to relocate.

For many years, farmworkers sought to form a union. The creation of United Farm Workers by César Chávez (1927–1993) and Dolores Huerta was the result of a long struggle to unionize farmworkers. The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), founded by Huerta, and the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), founded by Chávez, were the first groups that attempted to organize farmworkers. By 1965 both were successful in obtaining wage increases after staging strikes and walkouts, but the organizations had not received union recognition from growers. In the summer of 1965, AWOC led Filipino farmworkers on a strike in Delano, California. They approached the NFWA and asked the mainly Chicano workers to join the strike. The NFWA agreed, and with the new strength in membership they launched a strike, with several thousand workers leaving the field. The growers offered to raise wages, but the organizations also wanted a union. To aid the effort, Chávez called on the American public to boycott grapes without union labels. Millions of Americans responded and stopped buying grapes. The workers won the long strike and established a union-run hiring hall, a health clinic and health plan, a credit union, a community center, and a cooperative gas station, as well as higher wages. The two unions merged into the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee in 1966.

In 2004, the International Labor Office (ILO) estimated that eighty-six million migrant and refugee adults work across the globe. Migration affects countries around the world because nearly every country serves as either a place of origin, destination, transit, or sometimes all of these at once. Each country struggles with the government’s role in regulating migrant workers and with the social and economic incorporation of such workers. Guest-worker programs are often used to attract and regulate low-skilled and high-skilled workers. But there are concerns about the social and economic consequences of migrant labor. Migrant laborers leave families behind in their home countries, creating fragmented families and communities. In addition, men and women face differing labor opportunities, with women sometimes limited to factory or domestic labor. The economic consequences of migration are severe in developing countries. Nearly 400,000 scientists and engineers from developing countries are employed in research and development jobs in industrial countries. This migration of highly skilled workers creates a “brain drain,” leaving developing countries without highly skilled workers. Migrant workers face a risk to their human rights and fundamental freedoms, but this does not deter their migration; the hope of a better life ensures a steady flow of migrant laborers.

SEE ALSO Agricultural Industry; Bracero Program; Brain Drain; Chávez, César; Citizenship; Labor; Migration

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Akers Chacón, Justin, and Mike Davis. 2006. No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Chicago: Haymarket.

Castles, Stephen. 2006. Guestworkers in Europe: A Resurrection? International Migration Review 40: 741–766.

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

Lan, Pei-Chia. 2003. Maid or Madam? Filipina Migrant Workers and the Continuity of Domestic Labor. Gender & Society 17:187–208.

Liow, Joseph. 2003. Malaysia’s Illegal Indonesian Migrant

Labour Problem: In Search of Solutions. Contemporary Southeast Asia 25: 44–64.

Martin, Philip. 1997. Guest Worker Policies for the Twenty-first Century: Lessons from U.S. and German Foreign Worker Programs. New Community 23: 483–495.

McWilliams, Carey. 1939. Factories in the Field. Boston: Little, Brown.

Pun, Ngai. 2005. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Roberts, Kenneth D. 1997. China’s “Tidal Wave” of Migrant Labor: What Can We Learn from Mexican Undocumented Migration to the United States? International Migration Review 31: 249–293.

Steinbeck, John. 1939. The Grapes of Wrath. London: Heinemann.

Weinstein, Eric. 2002. Migration for the Benefit of All: Towards a New Paradigm for Economic Immigration. International Labour Review 141: 225–252.

Katy M. Pinto

Immigrant Labor. At least since the 1840s, when Irish American workers replaced the native‐born “factory girls” of Lowell, Massachusetts, immigrants have loomed large in the American working classes. This was especially true between 1880 and 1924, when 25 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Soon Europeans and their children outnumbered native‐born Americans in factories, mines, steel mills, and automobile plants, while Mexicans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans predominated in the agricultural fields of the West. Foreign‐born women staffed canneries, textile mills, and garment factories and worked as cooks and child‐care providers for middle‐class Americans. The history of American labor movements during these years is a tale of both immigrant activism and ethnocultural struggle.

With emancipated slaves relegated to the declining agriculture of the South, immigration made possible the “Second Industrial Revolution” of the late nineteenth century. Irish, Chinese, Italian, Slavic, and Mexican migrants built the transportation network (first canals, then railroads) essential to a national mass market. As immigrants became “machine‐tenders” for the new mass‐production industries, native‐born skilled workers sought to protect their standard of living against low‐wage, unskilled competitors. Legislation restricting immigration—from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the discriminatory Immigration Act of 1924—invariably won organized labor's support.

Ironically, first‐ and second‐generation immigrants dominated the American labor movement of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Abandoning reformist strategies that tied the interests of wage earners to independent small producers, second‐generation Irish Americans and German Americans contributed to the rapid growth of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). After 1900, immigrant women—mostly Irish, Italians, and eastern European Jews—joined with middle‐class American feminists in the Women's Trade Union League to launch a women's movement that created female strongholds in the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union, an industrial union founded (and dominated) by immigrant men.

Immigrants were even more visible as radical activists. Germans dominated the Socialist Labor party and remained prominent in the multiethnic Socialist Party of America. The Industrial Workers of the World, with its ideology of revolutionary syndicalism and “one big union,” particularly attracted unskilled immigrant workers, many of them women, as it led huge strikes in the textile and mining industries just prior to World War I. Into the 1930s, Finnish, Slavic, and eastern European Jewish immigrants figured prominently in the Communist Party—USA.

Overall, however, World War I, with its demands for “100 percent Americanism,” ended this era of immigrant labor activism. Deportations of radicals accompanied the postwar Red Scare, and nativist fears ended unrestrained immigration. By the 1930s, older immigrants in the AFL, along with second‐generation immigrants in the steel and automotive industries created the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Although radicals remained active in some of its unions, the CIO promised Americanized children of immigrants incorporation into the American mainstream through the New Deal Era welfare state and the Democratic party.

The number of immigrants began to rise again in the mid‐1960s, but even so, unskilled workers constituted a much lower proportion among immigrants than a century earlier. Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers publicized the plight of low‐wage, seasonal, immigrant (and largely Mexican) workers in southwestern agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s. New garment‐industry sweatshops employing Latina and Asian women in Miami, New York, and Los Angeles recalled the travails and organizing campaigns of past generations. However, with industry and agriculture dropping in importance as employers of labor, and with American labor unions only slowly emerging from a long period of decline in membership and political influence, immigrant workers seemed more marginalized than ever as the twentieth century ended.
See also Agriculture: Since 1920; Anticommunism; Canals and Waterways; Domestic Labor; Homework; Immigration Law; Industrialization; Iron and Steel Industry; Labor Markets; Migratory Agricultural Workers; Nativist Movement; Socialism; Twenties, The; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Dirk Hoerder, ed., “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working‐Class Immigrants, 1986.
Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson, eds., Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor Struggles, 1835–1960, 1990.

Donna R. Gabaccia

MIGRANT WORKERS

Migrant workers are simply persons whose work routine includes relocation across or within national boundaries on a fairly frequent basis. They usually work at temporary jobs. Often they are seasonal workers employed in the agricultural sector of the economy. In that case the demand for their labor is determined by the growing cycles, as in the case of Mexican farm workers. For decades these workers—called braceros — moved across national borders in routine violation of laws that authorities largely overlooked because of the need for their labor. Migrant workers may also be non-seasonal, highly paid workers called upon to do highly skilled or particularly dangerous work like putting out oil derrick fires. They may be the combine crews in the Great Plains, moving south to north, harvesting the wheat as it ripens. Or they may be the thousands of tradesmen of various descriptions who follow the building boom from one part of the country to another.

On the other hand, "Okies," people from Oklahoma who left their farms in the dust storms of the 1920s and 1930s and made the trek to California, were workers who were migrating, rather than migrant workers. Immigrant Turkish workers in Germany—living and working for years in the host country without ever breaking from the Turkish culture—are also not migrant workers. Nor are workers in the transportation industry. Airline stewardesses and truck drivers are not migrant workers even though moving about defines the job that they do.

The United States experienced the largest influx of immigrant workers between 1890 and 1914 when 15 million foreign citizens entered the country, mostly from eastern and southern Europe. In the history of American immigration, approximately one-third of these immigrant workers moved back to their home or on to other countries—"birds of passage," in the colorful words of one immigration historian. If these workers were seeking permanent employment they were immigrant workers, rather than migrant workers.

Migrant workers, like other workers, stimulate the economy in two ways. First, they take hard, undesirable, low wage jobs, thereby minimizing the employers' costs. Second, they buy things and increase the size of the consumer population, thereby increasing demand. At the same time, jealousy and fear sometimes separates migrant workers from other Americans who objected that jobs were being lost to the newly available cheap labor.

See also: Cesar Chavez, Anti-Immigration Laws, Immigration, United Farm Workers

FURTHER READING

Bailyn, Bernard et al. The Great Republic: A History of the American People. Lexington, Massachusetts & Toronto: D.C. Heath and Company, 1981.

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.

Ketchum, Richard M. The Borrowed Years 1938– 1941: America on the Way to War. New York: Random House, 1989.

Manchester, William. The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America 1932–1972. New York: Bantam Books, 1974.

The Oxford Companion to World War II. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.