Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Committee, after Robert La Follette, a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin who
led the investigation, the committee collected testimony related to several
factory and mine strikes but also included evidence from some of the more
prominent labor confl icts in California agriculture, emphasizing the con-
tinuity between stereotypically different industrial and agricultural forms
of production and their labor relations (U.S. Senate 1940; Auerbach 1966).
One of the farm labor confl icts that the La Follette Committee chose to
investigate was a strike action by lettuce packing shed workers in Salinas
in 1936.
The La Follette Committee's investigations of the 1936 strike reveal a
complex, interlocking set of grower organizations that served to suppress
dissent among the growers themselves, to win public support, and to
undermine the unionization drive by the packing shed workers. Therefore,
the key to growers' power and their ability to keep farmworkers largely
unorganized over many decades lies in growers' own success at organiza-
tion. Among the most important grower organizations for the 1936
packing shed strike was the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association (GSVA).
GSVA was (and remains) the keystone of grower organization in the Salinas
Valley vegetable industry. Formed by a group of the most prominent
lettuce growers in 1930, GSVA includes members from all parts of the
vegetable industry: the growers who produce the crops, the packers and
shippers whose companies ice and transport the vegetables, and the fi nan-
cial and agricultural input interests that support and profi t from the indus-
try. From its inception, a large part of GSVA's function has been to serve
as a united front for growers to organize and resist potential labor con-
fl icts, but the series of strikes in the early 1930s motivated growers across
the state, including those in Monterey County's GSVA, to organize further
and become even more vigilant in the face of labor activism. In 1934
growers and other interests affi liated with California agriculture created a
statewide umbrella organization, the Associated Farmers. 8 Originally, the
Associated Farmers acted mostly at the level of the state, holding confer-
ences, infl uencing legislation, and organizing industry support to break
labor actions. But as Roosevelt's New Deal labor programs, especially the
National Labor Relations Act, threatened to give workers more rights to
unionize, the Associated Farmers formed county-based chapters in major
agricultural areas, including Monterey County. This Monterey County
chapter of the Associated Farmers (MCAF) allowed the local vegetable
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