About 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, author Pete Daniel wrote that African-American sharecroppers in the South were still ensnared in a grossly an exploitative system that smacked of unfree labor. Blacks who worked the land were essentially tied to it because they had no viable alternative. “The shadow of slavery,” he called it.
But more than 30 years later, the shadow of slavery is being cast most dramatically in the distant West. Today, it is the country’s fruit and vegetable pickers–mainly Hispanic, mainly in California–who find themselves experiencing the lowest wages and working conditions among field workers in rural America.
The front page of The New York Times recently highlighted surveys by agricultural economists that found farm workers’ wages in California to have declined 20 percent or more over the past two decades. And California farmworkers are faring more poorly than field workers in other parts of the country.
In Salinas, field workers earn 20 percent less for picking broccoli than they did a decade ago. In Watsonville, strawberry pickers earn 30 cents an hour less than they did 12 years ago–down to $6.25 from $6.55. To add to the pressure, notes The Times, these laborers are working fewer hours. Because fruit and vegetable growers can fall back on an expanded pool of workers to pick crops as rapidly as possible, some workers maintain that because they are being used less, they are earning $8,000 a year where they used to earn $9,000.
The latest evidence of downward mobility among such workers is as alarming as it is appalling. It is a classic case of history repeating itself. During the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the stoop labor of the California agricultural fields was performed in turn by Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos. Today, this sector is dominated by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
But how to explain the deteriorating plight of migrant farmworkers at the end of the 20th Century? According to the experts, traditional liberal explanations no longer wash: Racism may be present against Hispanic migrant farmworkers today as it was against Asian field workers in the past, but the best of recent scholarship finds that exploitation does not thrive on racial and ethnic discrimination alone.
Instead, labor economists are saying today that the plunge in California farmworker earnings over the last two decades is tied directly to an enormous oversupply of labor fed by chronic mass immigration–legal and illegal. In just one immigration program designed to placate grower demands for more cheap foreign labor, the Special Agricultural Workers provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, over 1 million persons claiming to be farmworkers were subsequently granted legal status.
It was partly out of concern for the impact of additional labor on current agricultural workers that the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform successfully recommended last year against reviving an agricultural guest worker program. I serve as an appointed member on that panel.
The link between a labor oversupply and declining wages is grounded in basic economic theory. The greater the number of workers vying for a single job opening, the lower the wages and working conditions the employer is obliged to offer. It’s the extension to labor economics of the old law of supply and demand.
The way in which the laws of economics are playing out in California does not bode well for that state’s future. Consider that job requirements for well-paying positions are continuing to rise. And keep in mind that the majority of jobs being created today require higher skills and educational levels than in the past. Under the circumstances, the likelihood that growing numbers of migrant farmworker families will experience intergenerational poverty is great.
Still, as bad as these conditions are, it is true that the agricultural workers of California today are not obliged to work in shackles. They can accept the terms of employment offered to them, or they can reject them. And once hired, they can leave whenever they want. No county sheriff with a shotgun will hunt them down, and no judge will jail them for walking off the job.
But in a day and age when finding more remunerative work requires skills and education that cost much more than California farmworkers can afford, the distinction between free and unfree labor has begun to be eroded. Indeed, for many agricultural workers the issue is one of finding any work at all. And faced with the choice of starving or taking the worst jobs in America, where, exactly, does freedom come into play?
