The fruits of their labor

Cindy Hahamovich has written an outstanding narrative on migrant farm labor between 1870 and 1945. It's a shame that her book hasn't reached an audience outside academia. Hahamovich looks at the relationship between the United States federal government, farm workers, and the growers (both small-scale farmers and after the 1920s, commercial agriculture). She argues that the federal government played a decisive role in creating the permanent, transient class of migrant laborers through its efforts to placate farmers, who during the First and Second World Wars yelped about the scarcity of labor and rising wages on the farm.

When the First World War ignited in 1914 it drastically shut down the out-migration of Europeans into the United States—a diverse collection of Italians, Poles, Czechs, Russians, and other eastern and southern Europeans who worked on small-scale farms along the East Coast of the United States during the slack times in industrial work. With this population diminishing during the war years, the United States' declaration of war against Germany and the subsequent large-scale conscription of Americans only exacerbated the real and imagined labor scarcity on farms. Farmers lobbied the government for assistance with rising wages, falling profits, and the dearth of labor to pick berries, beans, and other crops that were not mechanized. The government responded. It threatened black migratory workers in the South with "work-or-fight" laws spelling out that if blacks did not show evidence of substantive employment (i.e. farm laboring) they would be conscripted and sent overseas to Europe. The First World War also threatened the hold of white supremacy in the South. As Hahamovitch shows, southern whites controlled black labor in the South primarily through debt peonage during Reconstruction and the latter nineteenth century. African-Americans realized that farmers needed them far more than they needed the farmers during the First World War and had effectively organized and struck for higher wages. This threatened to loosen to bonds of debt that held African Americans back socio-economically in the South. Alongside work-or-fight laws, Immigration Services (under the direction of the Department of Labor) opened the borders for Mexican and West Indian immigrants in the hopes that an influx of immigrants would offset the collective power of African-American laborers. The First World War fostered a "class struggle exacerbated by racial antagonism."

Hahamovitch briefly covers a number of others topics during the interwar period—the rise of commercial agriculture, the draining of the Everglades, and the rise of a permanent class of migratory labor that moved up and down the East Coast to make a bare subsistence living.

The New Deal and the Second World War proved decisive for creating a dependent class of migratory laborers. Most of the New Deal legislation that helped the working-class (or those working in factories and processing plants) excluded domestic labor and migrant labor. Thus, farm workers were denied collective bargaining under the Wagner Act of 1935 and could not organize into federally recognized unions. Instead, the federal government adopted migrant laborers as "wards of the state" by providing relatively luxurious migrant labor camps and shuttling migrants across the country. But those policies that most helped migrant laborers also proved the most detrimental. During the Second World War, the federal government denied farm workers freedom of movement and reached an agreement with Mexico and other countries to pour tens of thousands of new migratory laborers into the United States. This created a glut of labor and squashed a key moment when mostly African-American farm workers in 1943-1944 could have collectively organized (or voted with their feet) to demand higher wages and official recognition by the state.


My summary doesn't necessarily do justice to this book. It's clearly written, concise, and fairly entertaining despite its coverage of a depressing, declension narrative. It raises important issues about who constitutes the working-class and the scope of working-class politics in the United States. Certainly, the working-class is a definition that deserves some expansion to include migratory laborers, farm workers, and domestic workers—and today, those working in a service-based economy. Hahamovitch demonstrates in this work how limited definitions of "working-class" and "labor" have historically excluded non-whites who performed labor outside processing plants and industries. This is also an important work for understanding why the debate over illegal immigration is still a contentious issue today...