The Farm Labor Problem
The Farm Labor Problem

Author: J. Edward Taylor

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2018-11-29

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0128172681

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The Farm Labor Problem: A Global Perspective explores the unique character of agricultural labor markets and the implications for food production, farm worker welfare and advocacy, and immigration policy. Agricultural labor markets differ from other labor markets in fundamental ways related to seasonality and uncertainty, and they evolve differently than other labor markets as economies develop. We weave economic analysis with the history of agricultural labor markets using data and real-world events. The farm labor history of California and the United States is particularly rich, so it plays a central role in the book, but the book has a global perspective ensuring its relevance to Europe and high-income Asian countries. The chapters in this book provide readers with the basics for understanding how farm labor markets work (labor in agricultural household models, farm labor supply and demand, spatial market equilibria); farm labor and immigration policy; farm labor organizing; farm employment and rural poverty; unionization and the United Farm Workers movement; the Fair Food Program as a new approach to collective bargaining; the declining immigrant farm labor supply; and what economic development in relatively low-income countries portends for the future of agriculture in the United States and other high-income countries. The book concludes with a chapter called "Robots in the Fields," which extrapolates current trends to a perhaps not-so-distant future. The Farm Labor Problem serves as both a guide to policy makers, farmworker advocates and international development organizations and as a textbook for students of agricultural economics and economics. - Describes the unique character of agricultural labor markets providing consequential insights - Contextualizes the economics of agricultural labor with a global perspective - Examines the history of farm labor, immigration, policy and collective bargaining with a view to the future

Factories in the Field
Factories in the Field

Author: Carey McWilliams

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2000-04-15

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0520925181

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This book was the first broad exposé of the social and environmental damage inflicted by the growth of corporate agriculture in California. Factories in the Field—together with the work of Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and John Steinbeck—dramatizes the misery of the dust bowl migrants hoping to find work in California agriculture. McWilliams starts with the scandals of the Spanish land grant purchases, and continues on to examine the experience of the various ethnic groups that have provided labor for California's agricultural industry—Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Armenians—the strikes, and the efforts to organize labor unions

Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State
Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State

Author: Linda C. Majka

Publisher:

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13:

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Historical account of the social conflict between agricultural workers and agribusiness, and the role of state intervention in California, USA - analyses agricultural trade unionism since 1870, immigration of Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans and Filipinos, and its regulation; examines the economic recession of the 1930s, rise of rural worker organizations, internal migration, and state-enrolled contract labour; reports on the formation of the United Farm Workers and its struggle for trade union recognition, opposition, and state mediation. Bibliography.

Fruitful Labor
Fruitful Labor

Author: Mike Madison

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2018-02-09

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1603587950

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"Instead of taking us through his work, season by season, crop by crop--the narrative approach--Madison explores his farm and its methods analytically, from many overlapping angles. The result is profoundly interesting." -- The New York Review of Books As the average age of America’s farmers continues to rise, we face serious questions about what farming will look like in the near future, and who will be growing our food. Many younger people are interested in going into agriculture, especially organic farming, but cannot find affordable land, or lack the conceptual framework and practical information they need to succeed in a job that can be both difficult and deeply fulfilling. In Fruitful Labor, Mike Madison meticulously describes the ecology of his own small family farm in the Sacramento Valley of California. He covers issues of crop ecology such as soil fertility, irrigation needs, and species interactions, as well as the broader agroecological issues of the social, economic, regulatory, and technological environments in which the farm operates. The final section includes an extensive analysis of sustainability on every level. Pithy, readable, and highly relevant, this book covers both the ecology and the economy of a truly sustainable agriculture. Although Madison’s farm is unique, the broad lessons he has gleaned from his more than three decades as an organic farmer will resonate strongly with the new generation of farmers who work the land, wherever they might live. *This book is part of Chelsea Green Publishing’s NEW FARMER LIBRARY series, where we collect innovative ideas, hard-earned wisdom, and practical advice from pioneers of the ecological farming movement—for the next generation. The series is a collection of proven techniques and philosophies from experienced voices committed to deep organic, small-scale, regenerative farming. Each book in the series offers the new farmer essential tips, inspiration, and first-hand knowledge of what it takes to grow food close to the land.

Migrant Citizenship
Migrant Citizenship

Author: Verónica Martínez-Matsuda

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2020-06-26

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0812252292

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An examination of the Farm Security Administration's migrant camp system and the people it served Today's concern for the quality of the produce on our plates has done little to guarantee U.S. farmworkers the necessary protections of sanitary housing, medical attention, and fair labor standards. The political discourse on farmworkers' rights is dominated by the view that migrant workers are not entitled to better protections because they are "noncitizens," as either immigrants or transients. Between 1935 and 1946, however, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) intervened dramatically on behalf of migrant families to expand the principles of American democracy, advance migrants' civil rights, and make farmworkers visible beyond their economic role as temporary laborers. In more than one hundred labor camps across the country, migrant families successfully worked with FSA officials to challenge their exclusion from the basic rights afforded by the New Deal. In Migrant Citizenship, Verónica Martínez-Matsuda examines the history of the FSA's Migratory Labor Camp Program and its role in the lives of diverse farmworker families across the United States, describing how the camps provided migrants sanitary housing, full on-site medical service, a nursery school program, primary education, home-demonstration instruction, food for a healthy diet, recreational programing, and lessons in participatory democracy through self-governing councils. In these ways, she argues, the camps functioned as more than just labor centers aimed at improving agribusiness efficiency. Instead, they represented a profound "experiment in democracy" seeking to secure migrant farmworkers' full political and social participation in the United States. In recounting this chapter in the FSA's history, Migrant Citizenship provides insights into public policy concerning migrant workers, federal intervention in poor people's lives, and workers' cross-racial movements for social justice and offers a precedent for those seeking to combat the precarity in farm labor relations today.

Gordo
Gordo

Author: Jaime Cortez

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2021-08-10

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0802158099

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This debut story collection “masterfully navigates adverse conditions of migrant life while . . . managing to find joy and amusement, love and triumph” (San Francisco Chronicle). Gordo brings readers inside a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. At the heart of these interrelated stories is a young, probably gay, boy named Gordo, who must find a way to contend with the notions of manhood imposed on him by his father. As he comes of age, Gordo learns about sex, watches his father’s drunken fights, and discovers even his own documented Mexican-American parents are wary of illegal migrants. We also meet Fat Cookie, high schooler and resident artist who runs away from home one day with her mother’s boyfriend, Manny. And then there are Los Tigres, the twins who show up every season and whose drunken brawl ends with one of them rushed to the emergency room in an upholstered chair tied to the back of a pick-up truck. These scenes from Steinbeck Country are full of humor, family drama, and a sweet frankness about serious questions: Who belongs to America and how are they treated? How does one learn decency when grown adults must fear for their lives and livelihoods? Gordo “announces a vibrant new voice on the literary scene, at once wise and authentic and supremely gifted” (Booklist, starred review). Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Labor and the Locavore
Labor and the Locavore

Author: Margaret Gray

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0520276698

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Labor and the Locavore focuses on one of the most vibrant local food economies in the country, the Hudson Valley that supplies New York restaurants and farmers markets. Based on more than a decade's in-depth interviews with workers, farmers, and others, Gray clearly documents how the romance of small family farms serves to mask the predicament of their migrant workforce. She also explores the historical roots of farmworkers' substandard conditions and examines the region's shift from black to Latino workers.--Publisher description.

Harvest Wobblies
Harvest Wobblies

Author: Greg Hall

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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Increased Mechanization and the expansion of new markets transformed the face of American farming in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially in the American West. These changes demanded a new kind of agricultural worker--gone was the local farmhand, replaced by a cheap and temporary labor force of migrant and seasonal workers. Greg Hall's fascinating book analyzes how "harvest Wobblies," members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), organized these men, women, and sometimes children who had become so essential and yet so exploited on the farms of the West. Although harvest Wobblies worked in nearly all the western states, their stongholds were the Great Plains, California, and the Pacific Northwest, regions where harmers developed monocrop agriculture and where seasonal labor was indispensable come harvest time. Like their IWW brethren in logging camps and mines, the harvest Wobblies combined an effort to improve the lives of workers with harger revolutionary goals. Harvest Wobblies personified most of the indelible features of IWW membership: they were the militant casual laborers of the American West, riding the rails, living in hobo jungles, preaching revolution, and facing repression with innovative strategies, impassioned speech, humor, and song. Through trial and error, Wobbly organizers eventually implemented the idea of an industrial union in agriculture and helped the IWW to establish itself as a powerful force to be reckoned with by employers in the West. In tracing the rise and the eventual fall of the harvest Wobblies, Greg Hall examines the diverse and changing nature of the agricultural work force. He offers a social and cultural history of a union uniquely suited to organizing tens of thousands of migrant and seasonal workers. Harvest Wobblies will appeal to a broad audience of readers interested in labor history, the American West, U.S. agricultural history, and the history of the IWW.

Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire
Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire

Author: Ismael García-Colón

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-02-18

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0520325796

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Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire is the first in-depth look at the experiences of Puerto Rican migrant workers in continental U.S. agriculture in the twentieth century. The Farm Labor Program, established by the government of Puerto Rico in 1947, placed hundreds of thousands of migrant workers on U.S. farms and fostered the emergence of many stateside Puerto Rican communities. Ismael García-Colón investigates the origins and development of this program and uncovers the unique challenges faced by its participants. A labor history and an ethnography, Colonial Migrants evokes the violence, fieldwork, food, lodging, surveillance, and coercion that these workers experienced on farms and conveys their hopes and struggles to overcome poverty. Island farmworkers encountered a unique form of prejudice and racism arising from their dual status as both U.S. citizens and as “foreign others,” and their experiences were further shaped by evolving immigration policies. Despite these challenges, many Puerto Rican farmworkers ultimately chose to settle in rural U.S. communities, contributing to the production of food and the Latinization of the U.S. farm labor force.