Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
have them approved and then fi nd that when they get here they were not
needed. . . .
Also, this Farm Production Council, which I happened to be the secretary
of the thing . . . there were times when there were labor shortages in certain
areas of the county, to perform certain jobs. And when that was recognized
an effort was made to move the labor from, say, Salinas to Gonzales—let's
say the labor was needed in Gonzales. And this council was very effective
at doing that. It was one of the outstanding things I think that they did.
And these meetings of this Farm Production Council were held every week
at night, so it took a lot of time on the part of those that were involved
and those of us that were in the Extension Service had to attend these
meetings too.
CRH:
How would you fi nd out about, say, a certain need in a certain area,
and how would you get the people down there?
Retired Advisor:
Well, a lot of the big vegetable growers had labor camps
and they had their own buses with which they transported the labor. And
there also were some smaller growers that worked on a cooperative basis,
that did the same thing. And then there were independent labor contrac-
tors who operated labor camps, and they had buses. And contact was made
through these labor contractors and the [GSVA], which was an association
of all the vegetable shippers, they acted also as a clearinghouse. [Growers]
would phone [the GSVA and say,] “On Monday morning I want to start
thinning, can you get me so many people to come and thin my fi eld?”
And so our activities were primarily to try to coordinate these activities
and see that the labor was provided where it was needed.
From these comments, we can see the extent to which growers actually
controlled the recruitment and placement of Mexican nationals and other
sources of labor during the war. Although this retired advisor was an active
member of the Farm Production Council, serving as its secretary, the
council was dominated by representatives of the beet sugar industry (whose
role I describe more fully in the next section) and the vegetable crop
industry, through GSVA. These growers monitored labor needs, responded
to requests for labor to be transferred to areas of the county with labor
defi cits, and even made the transfers in their own buses.
This close relationship, however, also had the potential for confl ict. Like
any other interaction with growers, advisors' involvement with labor issues
