14 Labor and Agriculture

 

Introduction: What “Counts” as Farm Labor?

This chapter discusses agricultural labor with a focus on hired farmworkers. Unlike farmers, farmworkers do not own, lease, or manage the land upon which they are working and are not agricultural employers. In some contexts, however, the distinction between farmworker and farmer is not clear-cut. This is because farmers sometimes labor on other farmers’ farms in addition to their own (Gyapong, 2021; Teye et al., 2021). Women make significant contributions to agricultural production but are often not granted land ownership or other rights that would make their contributions more visible and acknowledged (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2011). In order to understand agricultural labor, we must consider not only what work is being done but also who is doing this work and where, when, how, and why they are doing it.

 

Agricultural Labor in the United States

 

Almost 50% of hired crop farmworkers in the United States are undocumented and only 25% were born in the United States, according to 2015–2016 data (Economic Research Service [ERS], 2020). Seventy-five percent are people of color (ERS, 2020). This statistic is reflective of the history of the U.S. agricultural workforce and directly connected to the lack of labor protections afforded farmworkers in legislation. When the U.S. Congress introduced labor legislation during the New Deal era of the 1930s, jobs primarily occupied by people of color, including farm work, were exempt (Asbed & Hitov, 2017; Rodman et al., 2016). In order to ensure passage of the legislation that today affords workers in most industries basic labor protections, Congress needed the votes of white congressmen representing Southern landholders who did not support paying minimum wage to their Black workers (Rodman et al., 2016). Although a few of these exemptions were removed in subsequent legislation (Rodman et al., 2016), many still exist today.

 

The employment of hired laborers on U.S. farms has long shown a reliance on workers of color, primarily foreign immigrant workers but at times domestic migrant workers as well (Taylor, 2010). Different immigrant groups have comprised the bulk of the U.S. farm workforce at various times in history in relationship with U.S. immigration policy. For instance, by the 1880s, 75% of California’s seasonal farmworkers were from China, but this changed with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (Taylor, 2010). Chinese laborers were replaced by immigrants from Japan, India and Pakistan, and Mexico; Dust Bowl migrants; and then Mexicans again (Martin, 2002). Over the course of 22 years (1942–1964) and multiple bracero programs (i.e., guest worker programs), about 4.6 million Mexicans came to the United States as temporary agricultural workers (Martin, 2002). What these successive immigration waves have in common is that landowning farm employers directly benefitted from decreased farm production costs and increased land prices that were the result of hiring seasonal, low-wage workers with very limited employment options (Martin, 2002). Mexicans still make up the majority of U.S. agricultural workers, with research indicating that the part of Mexico that workers tend to call home is shifting in part due to the employment conditions in their communities (Figure 1; Taylor, 2010). One mechanism through which workers legally enter the U.S. agricultural labor force is the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program, or H-2A visa program for short (ERS, 2020). From 2005–2019, the number of temporary workers in this program increased fivefold (Figure 2; ERS, 2020).

 

Figure 1. “Shifting sources of Mexican farmworkers, 1980–2007. Calculated using data from Rounds I (2003) and II (2008) of the Mexico National Rural Household Survey [Encuesta Nacional a Hogares Rurales de México (ENHRUM)]” (Taylor, 2010, pp. C–8).

 

Figure 2. Rise of agricultural workers in H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program in U.S. states (ERS, 2020).

 

An increasing proportion of U.S. farmworkers are women; in 2018, this proportion stood at 25.5% (ERS, 2020). Sexsmith and Griffin (2020) find that sexual violence is built into the fabric of agricultural industries in the United States. Women farmworkers who experience sexual harassment on the job are often unable to leave said job due to a lack of other opportunities and their dependence on these low-paying positions to make ends meet (Sexsmith & Griffin, 2020). In this way, sexual violence reinforces labor exploitation at the same time that labor exploitation supports sexual violence. Undocumented women and men farmworkers also face increased vulnerability. For instance, California farmworkers as a population are at increased risk of food insecurity and hunger, but undocumented California farmworkers are at even higher risk since they are ineligible for public assistance programs that could help alleviate their food insecurity (Brown & Getz, 2011). In another example, among undocumented farmworkers on New York dairies, access to healthcare services via the government or marketplace is very limited (Sexsmith, 2017). These are some of the challenges facing farmworkers in the United States. The next section considers agricultural labor in an international context, beyond that of the U.S. farm.

 

Agricultural Labor Around the World

 

In the United States, as the percentage of the total population involved in agriculture has decreased, hired farmworkers have come to make up a greater proportion of the country’s agricultural workforce (ERS, 2020). Simultaneously, the proportion of workers on U.S. farms who are family members of self-employed farm operators has declined (ERS, 2020). This is a trend seen in many parts of the world where agriculture is becoming commercialized; that is, “the importance of hired labor tends to expand as commercial production displaces family production” (Taylor, 2010, p. 379). For this reason, it is crucial to understand how international agricultural development changes agricultural labor patterns, while also recognizing that the specific ways in which agricultural laborers are affected by agricultural development depend on local, regional, and national contexts.

 

Agriculture is unique from other economic sectors in several ways: agricultural production occurs across a wide range of scales, from small family farmers to large agribusinesses; it relies on biological processes and is seasonal; there are time lags between planting and harvesting; agriculture is geographically dispersed due to its land requirements; and it involves a high degree of risk in both production and marketing (Taylor, 2010). Some of these unique attributes, including the seasonality of farming and the inherent risks tied to natural processes, contribute to farmers’ desire for the flexible agricultural labor supply that migration helps to ensure (Taylor, 2010). In turn, farmers often engage in the political process to ensure a steady supply of seasonal migrants, who typically accept lower wages than domestic workers (Taylor, 2010). Taylor (2010) describes the situation facing farmers and farm workers across the globe:

 

Cross-country analysis of migration policies and anecdotal evidence on farm labor and immigration trends underline the universality of the farm labor problem. It is difficult to find farm labor migration policies or conditions in other countries that do not mirror aspects of the U.S. experience. Almost without exception, high-income countries depend heavily on immigrant agricultural workers. Many middle-income countries appear to be in the process of transitioning from a domestic to a foreign farm workforce, especially when they share a border with a poorer country. The range of international farm labor migration policies runs the gambit from tight government regulation of foreign recruitment and labor management, to not-so-benign neglect of unauthorized immigration, to regimes of limited enforcement punctuated by an occasional amnesty program. (p. 384)

 

Unfortunately, as our examination of farmworkers’ experiences have shown, while migration may solve a labor problem for farmers, it does not usually meet farmworkers’ need for a satisfactory living standard.

 

One way in which countries help control the national agricultural labor supply is through guestworker programs such as the H-2A program that is currently in use in the United States. It is estimated that by the year 2000, there were around 200 bilateral agreements negotiating labor supply between labor-exporting and labor-importing nations (Mannon et al., 2011). These guestworker programs are not only meant to fill agricultural labor shortages but also to encourage development in those countries sending migrant workers (Mannon et al., 2011). Weiler et al. (2020) find that both the H-2A program and its Canadian counterpart, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), create precarious conditions for migrant workers—who are primarily from Mexico, followed by Jamaica—while accruing benefits mostly to large-scale agribusiness but also to some small-scale farms. These conditions include a very limited ability to change employers and low likelihood of obtaining legal permanent residence, both of which can contribute to farmworkers’ acceptance of challenging work conditions (Weiler et al., 2020).

 

Guestworker programs can also alleviate pressure on labor-exporting nations that are situated in a complex past and present involving “slavery, colonialism, trade liberalization, and structural adjustment programs, which often dispossessed migrant communities of their own farming livelihoods” (Weiler et al., 2020, p. 147). This suggests that farmworkers in one country may be farmers in another, or former farmers who have lost access to their land and/or their livelihood. For example, a Spanish guestworker program explicitly recruits mothers to work in southern Spain’s strawberry industry (Mannon et al., 2011). The presumed reason for recruiting mothers, principally from Morocco, is that doing so will satisfy the industry’s need for labor while lowering the likelihood that migrants will stay in Spain permanently. The program makes future employment dependent on migrant workers’ return to their home countries (Mannon et al., 2011).

 

In both the U.S. and international contexts, small-scale farms are not immune from hiring workers, including immigrant and migrant workers, or from engaging in labor exploitation (Gray, 2014; Tsikata, 2015). Because smallholder farms often rely on family labor, which changes as farms become more commercialized, further research is needed to more fully elucidate how agricultural development affects farmers’ use of family labor, hired labor, or some combination of the two (Tsikata, 2015). In their review of four books about agricultural workers published between 2013 and 2014, McLaughlin and Weiler (2017) draw attention to the strikingly similar structural constraints faced by agricultural workers who labor in the United States, Canada, Mexico, France, Spain, and Morocco. They note that “all of these countries undervalue, fail to properly support and even overtly discriminate against these needed workers. In all circumstances, labour protections and access to social services are inadequate, and workers are vulnerable to abuse, poor living and dangerous working conditions” (McLaughlin & Weiler, 2017, p. 635). These authors call for future research on the global connections characterizing the ubiquitous ill treatment of migrant farmworkers and their families.

 

 

 

Farmworker Movements

 

Unlike farmer movements, farmworker movements in the United States have objectives that align with those of the labor movement (Mooney & Majka, 1995). Their main objective is to obtain a better seat at the table “in negotiating more stable and productive employment arrangements” (Mooney & Majka, 1995, p. xviii). The current state of farmworkers’ employment arrangements, often predicated on farmworkers’ limited power and resources, has tended to limit their social movement success to short-term concessions rather than long-term structural change. For instance, low-income farmworkers typically do not have the ability to go on strike for a sustained period of time and may fear advocating for their rights, recognizing that doing so could compromise their immigration status and job. Various aspects of their work—such as its seasonality, the fact that laborers may not work on the same farm from one season to the next, and laborers’ migration across geographic areas—pose barriers to organizing in the first place. Nevertheless, farmworkers have found ways to achieve greater political power and accomplish their goals, including partnering with allies outside of agriculture (Mooney & Majka, 1995).

 

Minkoff-Zern (2017) argues that agricultural laborers and consumers can form alliances that are worker-centered and create meaningful change for workers. Accomplishing this requires not only consumers making changes in purchasing “but also applying their influence in boycotts, protests, and media campaigns” (Minkoff-Zern, 2017, p. 158). The largest food boycott in U.S. history was a boycott of grapes in the late 1960s, supporting worker strikes and marches led by the United Farm Workers (UFW) in response to low wages and miserable living and working conditions. UFW efforts, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, connected workers and consumers by drawing attention to shared health concerns over pesticide exposure and gained support and publicity from civil rights and antiwar groups. Grape growers eventually gave in to farmworkers’ demands for union contracts (and the higher wages and better conditions accompanying them) due in large part to the consumer boycotts that affected farmers’ profits (Minkoff-Zern, 2017). Although not union-based, in part because not all farmworkers have the right to unionize as California farmworkers do, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is leading a contemporary Fair Food Program that engages consumers in farmworkers’ struggle for dignity in the fields.

 

 

The largest social movement in the world is the movement for food sovereignty, or “community self-determination in producing and consuming food equitably and sustainably” (McMichael, 2017, p. 204). Yet while this movement has successfully advocated for peasant farmers’ right to produce their own food, often using low-input methods that are better for the planet (McMichael, 2017), it has been less successful at acknowledging differentiation among peasant farmers or between farmers and farmworkers—not to mention the fact that some people may be both farmers and workers (Bernstein, 2014; Gyapong, 2021). In other words, some scholars argue that the food sovereignty movement will ultimately be unsuccessful if it fails to recognize the differences between and among farmers and farmworkers. While counterintuitive on its surface, acknowledging these differences could actually lead to greater solidarity.

 

The Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement—in Portugese, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST)—is an agrarian reform movement (Tarlau, 2015) that illustrates the ways in which farmworker and farmer movements can at times overlap. For almost 40 years, this movement has sought to redistribute agricultural land to landless Brazilians. Brazilians’ landlessness can be traced back to a 500-year history of land concentration initiated and facilitated by Portuguese colonizers (Tarlau, 2015). Brazil was also home to the largest and most recent slave trade in the Americas, and the descendants of the Black slaves who labored on plantations are today still mostly landless. The movement’s main strategy of occupying unused land has been very successful in securing land rights recognized by the Brazilian government for formerly landless rural workers. The movement has won land rights for 370,000 families, with about 900 land occupations currently underway by 150,000 still-landless Brazilian families (Friends of the MST, 2021). In tandem with these successes, however, “1,742 people have been killed due to agrarian conflicts, mostly peasant activists” (Tarlau, 2015, p. 3). Today, approximately 1% of the population owns 45% of the country’s land, while five million families remain without as landless rural workers (USAID, 2011).

 

Farmworkers and COVID-19

During the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that began in 2020, farmworkers were deemed “essential workers” who must report to work as usual (Handal et al., 2020). This recognition of the critical necessity of farmworkers in producing the United States’ food supply has not, however, been accompanied by adequate measures to ensure their safety from contracting COVID-19 or real improvements to their living and working conditions (Asbed, 2020; Handal et al., 2020). Many of these conditions have increased the likelihood that workers will contract the virus. These conditions include shared, crowded housing with non-family members; transportation to and from the farm that similarly does not accommodate social distancing; poor sanitation; inadequate ventilation; and workplace power differentials that discourage workers from speaking out to ask for better protections against COVID-19 or from reporting illness or symptoms. As one of the founders of the CIW puts it, “The message to our country’s farmworkers is unmistakable: While your labor is essential, you are expendable. That is wrong, both morally and for our nation’s food security” (Asbed, 2020).

 

Conclusion

Farmworkers across the world are vulnerable to low wages, temporary employment, and in too many cases, poor working and living conditions. As farms develop and employ hired workers in greater numbers, the experiences of farmworkers in their individual contexts need to be studied. Farmworkers’ precarious conditions are often linked to legislation, international agreements, and other policies that tie immigrant and migrant workers to agricultural labor. Yet across the world, agricultural laborers have also been leaders fighting for change, showing that social movements driven by farmworkers themselves lead to outcomes that are not only better for workers but for employers, consumers, and communities as well. In order to succeed, these movements depend on the support of the public; to that end, please explore the “Related Organizations” and “Penn State Opportunities” sections below to find out how you can become involved.