Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
agriculture with an idealized vision of family farming, and his testimony
to the La Follette Committee hinged on this distinction. Taylor defi ned a
family farm in terms of labor use, claiming that family farms used only
the labor of their family members for farmwork, perhaps occasionally
employing an extra “hired hand.” He described California agriculture as a
departure from this ideal and its labor practices as a deviation. In the fol-
lowing excerpt from Taylor's testimony, note how he uses framing words
such as common and abnormal to portray California agriculture's use of farm
labor as an aberration, leading to poor labor relations:
The recurrent confl ict between employer and employee in the agricultural and
processing industries of California, and in other neighboring states where similar
conditions prevail, has been heralded widely as confl ict between “embattled farmers”
and “farm laborers.” To describe the issues in these terms, however, is to mislead
all who understand the words “farmer” and “farm laborer” as they are commonly
used in other parts of the United States.
The superintendent of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Dr. Joseph
Schafer, recently stated clearly the traditional and well-understood meaning of
“American farmer.”
“The farmer,” he says, “is one who operates a 'family-sized farm for a living' rather
than for 'an actual or potential fortune'; a farm on which the owner and his son or
sons can perform the actual work of tillage, the female members of the household
smoothing the way by providing home comforts, assisting about chores, or in fi eld
or meadow as pressure of work may dictate. Hired men are rather the exception
than the rule in this typical agriculture. So far as they are employed, it is usually
with the instinctive purpose of raising the labor force to the normal family plane
rather than in hope of abnormally expanding the business beyond the family-farm
size.”
The great strikes which periodically wrack the agricultural industry of California
and may give rise to violations of civil liberties are not strikes between this kind
of “American farmer” and his “hired man.” In California, as in other parts of the
country, the conspicuous instances of labor strife in agriculture occur between those
individuals or corporations who are more properly called “agricultural employers”
and the numerous workers who they employ for particular specialized operations
such as picking, hoeing, or pruning during peak seasons at wages by the hour or
the piece. There has been more strife in the agricultural history of California than
elsewhere because here the number of farm employers who really are “agricultural
employers” is so large, and because they, with their great number of employees,
form an industrial pattern. (U.S. Senate 1940, 17215-17216)
Like McWilliams, Taylor used a distinction between the niche market
industries and “family farming” to represent industrial agriculture as a kind
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