Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
4 A Repair Crisis: Farm Labor during World War II and
Beyond
An Ongoing Confl ict
As a small agricultural community, Salinas does not seem a likely place to
fi nd protest and violence. Periodically, however, the town has been a battle
zone, as long-simmering tensions led to public confl icts between growers
and farmworkers. In the fall of 1936 a strike action by lettuce packers in
Salinas captured headlines across the nation. Thirty-four years later, César
Chávez's United Farm Workers shifted its focus from the grape industry of
the Central Valley to the Salinas Valley's vegetable industry, sparking
another major battle between growers and farm labor. In this chapter I use
the strikes of the 1930s and 1970s to frame a period of confl ict that drew
growers and their backers, farmworkers and their sympathizers, and scien-
tists and other state-based resources into a complex struggle to maintain
or transform the social and material order of California agriculture.
In each case, these strikes violently and publicly revealed confl icts that
had always been at the heart of California's farm industry. For California's
niche market growers, farm labor has always been a very important part
of their production practices, and growers have long struggled to control
the use of farm labor. Even today, when much U.S. agriculture is mecha-
nized, many niche market industries remain highly dependent on the use
of seasonal, often migrant farmworkers to raise and harvest crops. This
labor system allows growers to produce niche market industry crops on a
scale and at a cost that can make these crops very profi table. Growers'
dependence on labor, though, has proven to be a double-edged sword
because they have constantly struggled to maintain control over labor in
the face of unionization and other challenges to their farm labor system.
Accordingly, confl ict between growers and farm labor has been an ongoing
