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203 CHAPTER SEVEN Labor Process, Laboring Life We further certify to you this increase in the certification of Mexican Nationals for the Imperial Valley Farmers Association will not supplant one single domestic agricultural laborer. Tom Finney, Manager, El Centro and Brawley Offices, Farm Placement Service, California Department of Employment, July 7, 1952 We have been advised by our San Francisco office that it is a general practice to charge a minimum fee [to workers] which is less than the actual cost for the carrot [tying] wires. This is done to prohibit the wasting of ties by the individual workers. The rate paid for tieing varies according to whether or not a charge is made for the ties. This is indicated in the letter submitted by your office and is a general practice, we understand , throughout California. . . . It was pointed out by our San Francisco regional office that without this charge the workers would be very careless and wasteful and destroy many ties. Secretary of Labor Maurice Tobin to Representative Cecil King (D-Calif.), ca. July 1952 There is no doubt that this change to field packing of the lettuce crop has caused extreme hardship to many workers and their families in Imperial Valley. Shed employment this year is under 700 when previously employment has been about 3,000. Loss of this well-paid seasonal work has been a source of concern to the workers and also to merchants in the area. Field pack work conditions differ greatly from the shed. Piece work rates, as set up on a crew basis, are about the same as rates paid in the shed but due to lower production in the field, most crews earn only the guarantee of 70¢ per hour per man. Accordingly, very few shed workers have shown an interest in packing lettuce in the field. The fact that jobs held by Mexican Nationals are available to domestic workers has been well publicized. Don C. Park, Farm Placement Supervisor, California Department of Employment to Edward F. Hayes, Chief, Farm Placement Service, February 18, 1954 204 • chapter seven ON DECEMBER 4, 1949, the Los Angeles Times reported that a “new monster” lettuce-harvesting machine was then at work in the Salt River Valley (Arizona) harvest. Invented in Salinas, the machine—essentially a series of conveyer belts on wheels—stretched across twelve beds (twenty-four rows) of lettuce and commanded a crew of thirty-four (including machine and truck drivers). Twelve workers—one to each bed—walked ahead of the machine cutting lettuce heads and placing them in the center of the beds. Eight workers followed behind, picking up the heads and placing them on one of the belts. Another eight workers sat on the machine catching the heads as they moved past and packing them in crates that had been handed onto another belt by a man working from the back of an attending truck. When crates were full, they slid along the belt to an automatic lidding machine, where two other workers snatched them off the belt and placed them back on the truck. When all the crates on the truck had been filled, the truck drove off to a waiting refrigerated car. The packing house, where once lettuce had been sent to be crated and iced, was no longer part of the harvest process. But because lettuce was not iced—it was “dry packed” in the terms of the field—the high temperatures of the heads made them more susceptible to rotting than lettuce packed in ice at the packing sheds. Therefore, harvesting with this new machine was done almost entirely at night, under the glare of floodlights mounted on the top of the harvester.1 Labor Process and Labor Struggle Field packing, which eliminated the work of the packinghouse, was much to be desired. Besides the savings incumbent upon doing away with several steps in the labor process, the cost for ice and perhaps even wooden crates could be eliminated as well (without ice, cardboard could be used). At least as important, from the grower-shippers’ perspective, was the fact that packinghouse workers were largely unionized, and field packing would greatly undermine their power. But the problem of heat in the dry pack remained a problem. Concurrent with the experiments with the new “monster” lettuce harvest machine, therefore, other inventors and engineers in the Salinas Valley, drawing on advances in vacuum technology made during the war, experimented with a “precooling” process for the lettuce. Prepacked crates of lettuce were...

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