USA : Crops ?" and dignity ?" grew in our fields
Farm laborers have been the backbone of Kern County’s lucrative farming industry since large-scale agriculture’s introduction to the region. Large corporate farms dominated Kern County agriculture early on, and like Eastern
industrialists, growers sought to maximize their profits by paying low wages and pushing their workers hard.
Farmworkers, a largely migratory, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial labor force, have often clashed with growers in a struggle for fair wages, safe working conditions, and respect.
Chinese immigrants were among the earliest Kern farm laborers. Farmers relied upon skilled Chinese labor to divert irrigation water from the Kern River and manage canals and ditches. The Chinese also worked in the cotton industry, though their militancy in demanding higher wages, along with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, forced growers to seek other labor sources.
In the 1920s, Kern County expanded its production of cotton, the state’s most labor-intensive crop. Cotton’s growth depended upon skilled Mexican immigrant and Mexican-American labor, and by 1926, Mexicans comprised 80 percent of the state’s pickers. Though often portrayed as tractable, Mexicans regularly engaged in strike activity and they enjoyed some victories, but the migratory nature of field work made it difficult to sustain an organization.
In the 1930s thousands of migrants from Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas found work in Kern’s fields. The New Deal’s efforts to assist farm laborers brought conservative backlash, which united to stifle organizing. The 1935 Wagner Labor Relations Act had excluded farmworkers from its protections.
World War II created farm labor scarcity, as workers eagerly left the fields for jobs in the defense industry’s higher paying work. The 1942 Bracero Program, in response, brought thousands of Mexican nationals to work in California fields. The program had been created as a wartime measure, but it continued for nearly two decades. After the war, the use of braceros depressed wages for domestic farmworkers.
When the Bracero Program ended in 1964, domestic farm labor saw the chance for collective action. Farmworkers’ unions, such as those established by Filipino Americans and Mexican Americans, merged to form the United Farm Workers union and pressed to improve working conditions and wages. In the context of the 1960s civil rights movements, the farmworkers’ cause became not only a labor issue, but a civil rights and social justice issue, as well.
Last fall marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the UFW’s Grape Boycott. Its hard-won victory to raise wages and improve working conditions was a significant achievement. It recognized that farmworkers had a right to engage in collective bargaining, to influence the conditions under which they would toil in Kern County’s hot, dusty fields. In 1975, the movement cemented gains into law with the passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which established similar organizing and bargaining rights provided under the 1935 Wagner Act.
During the 1980s all unions, including the UFW, experienced decline in a political climate hostile to organized labor. Still, farmworkers continued to push ahead on issues like pesticide regulation, drinking water and sanitary facilities in the field, and shade protection. California’s laws governing agricultural workers are among the strongest in the nation. Farmworkers, through collective action, had proved that ordinary Americans could make history.