Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
feature of niche market farming in California, and the process by which
actors have defi ned the roots of the problem and proposed solutions is an
integral part of this history of confl ict. Growers, farm labor, and the state
each defi ned farm labor as problematic for California agriculture, but their
defi nitions differed in fundamental ways, and these differences, in turn,
suggested divergent forms of institutional repair.
Growers and other farm interests, for example, often defi ned the problem
in terms of the reliability of the labor supply—having a large enough
supply of workers to keep wages low—and ongoing attempts by workers
to unionize. Growers chose multiple methods to address these perceived
problems, including organizing to prevent the unionization of farm
workers, soliciting support from all levels of the state, and controlling
public opinion through the media. These solutions, however, constituted
a maintenance approach to repair. Although growers' solutions involved
a great deal of organizational work and cooperation with the state, they
changed relatively little about how growers actually interacted with
workers, and they served to consolidate growers' control over farm labor.
Farm labor was a
production
problem for growers, and state experts, includ-
ing UC agricultural scientists, often saw labor confl icts in these same
terms.
In contrast, critics of California agriculture's dependence on and exploi-
tation of farmworkers pointed to the continuous cycles of labor confl ict
and argued that the system was inherently irrational and required a more
humane and labor-friendly form of farmwork. These critics, such as the
writer Carey McWilliams and the UC economist Paul Taylor, defi ned labor
confl icts as a
social
problem and called for broad change during the labor
unrest of the 1930s. Their more systemic, or transformative, calls for repair
included plans for improving the working conditions of farm workers and
the suggestion (by McWilliams) to break up California's large farms into
smaller ones.
These two approaches to repair—maintenance or transformation—deter-
mined actors' responses to the labor demands of World War II. The war
was fought through the power of war commodity production, and labor
was an integral part of this mobilization. Just as the government took
special measures to increase factory production, it also acted to increase
agricultural production during the war years, and many of these efforts
were centered around the issue of farm labor. The onset of U.S. involve-
