http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/199511/guest-workersAn excerpt ...
The rise in the number of migrant workers in California, along with the growth in the proportion who are illegal immigrants, reflects a national trend that has passed largely unnoticed. During the 1960s it was commonly believed that within a decade there would be no more migrant farm workers in the United States. Experts predicted that technology would soon render migrants obsolete: if a crop could not be harvested mechanically by 1975, it would not be grown in the United States. Census figures lent support to this scenario. Philip L. Martin is a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California at Davis and one of the nation's foremost authorities on farm-labor demographics. According to his estimates, during the 1920s there were some two million migrant farm workers in the United States. During the 1940s there were about one million. And during the early 1970s, when Cesar Chavez's labor-organizing drive among migrant workers was at its height, there were only about 200,000. Then the number began to climb. Today it is impossible to gauge the size of the migrant work force with any precision, among other reasons because so much of it is composed of illegal immigrants. Martin believes that 800,000 to 900,000 migrant farm workers are now employed in the United States. And not only are there far more migrants today but they are being paid far less. The hourly wages of some California farm workers, adjusted for inflation, have fallen 53 percent since 1985. Migrants are among the poorest workers in the United States. The average migrant worker is a twenty-eight-year-old male, born in Mexico, who earns about $5,000 a year for twenty-five weeks of farm work. His life expectancy is forty-nine years.
It should be clear that one of the impacts of trafficking in cheap human labor has been the accelerated demise of the "family farm." After all, how could a family translate their labor into a living income when the corporate farms can (almost literally) exploit throw-away human beings?
When I met Felipe (a pseudonym, as are all the other names presented without surnames), he seemed in bad shape. His clothes were dirty and torn, his face haggard and unshaven. His strawberry field looked like hell too. The rows were littered with rotting berries, old boxes, and soda cans. There were broken irrigation hoses; no plastic enclosed the beds. "Too expensive," he told me. "The company doesn't pay me enough." Nearby, his workers picked "cat-faces"--small, deformed berries--off second-year plants. Rain had seriously damaged the field. Felipe was selling his fruit for twelve cents a pound. He couldn't understand why the price for strawberries for processing was so low, but the terms of his sharecropping contract required him to accept it. "They use us all year as slaves," he said. "They pay us whatever they want to." He promised to send me legal documents proving his claims. The season was just beginning, and Felipe was already $50,000 in debt--half of that amount rolled over from last year. He owed the IRS an additional $5,000. "I can't remember any time I've been in good shape," he said. "I'm always down in the hole." Felipe had been a strawberry picker when his grower approached him one day and asked if he'd like to become a "farmer." Now, after sixteen years as a sharecropper, Felipe owns few assets and is ready to quit.
California never enjoyed a period in which family farms dominated the rural economy, employing hired hands who could expect someday to own their own land. Its society never remotely resembled the Jeffersonian ideal. Monopolistic patterns of land ownership established under Spanish and Mexican rule were unaffected by California's admission into the United States. The vast bonanza wheat farms that emerged in California during the mid-nineteenth century offer the earliest example of modern American agribusiness, a model soon emulated by the state's fruit and vegetable growers. California's agricultural potential seemed limitless. The soil was rich, the climate was almost perfect, and water for irrigation was abundant. All the state lacked was an army of laborers to harvest its apples, melons, oranges, and dates. The historian Cletus E. Daniel has called the initial phase of large-scale agriculture in California "the search for a peasantry." First Chinese and then Japanese worked the fields, until the Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentleman's Agreement of 1907 limited their supply. In the early years of this century Mexicans were hailed as the solution to California's perennial farm-labor shortages. The Mexican, it was argued, would not only work hard for low wages whenever needed but also go home when no longer required.
This "race for the bottom" that enriches the already-wealthy will be disastrous for EVERYONE ... but the poorest will suffer the most and die first.
The answer CANNOT be "more of the same"!!!We have been told for more than a decade to bow down before "the market." We have placed our faith in the laws of supply and demand. What has been forgotten, or ignored, is that the market rewards only efficiency. Every other human value gets in its way. The market will drive wages down like water, until they reach the lowest possible level. Today that level is being set not in Washington or New York or Sacramento but in the fields of Baja California and the mountain villages of Oaxaca. That level is about five dollars a day. No deity that men have ever worshiped is more ruthless and more hollow than the free market unchecked; there is no reason why shantytowns should not appear on the outskirts of every American city. All those who now consider themselves devotees of the market should take a good look at what is happening in California. Left to its own devices, the free market always seeks a work force that is hungry, desperate, and cheap--a work force that is anything but free.
Read it. Believe it. This was written 12 years ago.
Does anyone think it's gotten better?????
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