The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945

Epilogue

Epilogue . . . __ . . - ___-.--:<:" ___ n_ __ ~ ~ THE DECISION to import workers during the Second World War shaped the course offarm labor history over the next fifty years. In the aftermath of the war, Puerto Rican farmworkers replaced Italians in New Jersey and New York. In Florida, Bahamians andJamaicans monopolized all but a few hundred of the 8,000 to 10,000 cane cutting jobs. In the 1970S Haitians began arriving, making Belle Glade, for a time, the second largest Haitian community in the United States. But in the 1980s the Haitians found themselves passed over in favor of Mexicans and Central Americans, who remain the farmworkers of choice in the East. Thus a story that began with the transformation ofEast Coast agriculture by western grain ends with an influx ofwestern labor.l The Atlantic Coast farm labor market has been westernized in another crucial way as well. Before the Second World War, growers on the East and West Coasts manipulated their labor supply in very different ways. Only California growers were able to defeat farmworkers' organizational efforts with ethnic reserve armies. When Chinese contract laborers organized in the mid-nineteenth century, the Japanese arrived in California to replace them. When the Japanese organized and demanded higher wages, growers turned to Filipinos. White and African American workers flooded the labor pool in the 193os, and Mexicans and Mexican Americans were available all along.2 In contrast, East Coast farmworkers were mostly Mrican Americans (although Italians in New Jersey got more press), and eastern growers employed traditionally southern solutions to their labor supply problems . They chased labor recruiters out of their communities, used vagrancy laws to keep workers in the fields, invented a wartime work-orfight campaign reminiscent of Confederate Army labor drafts, used tar and feathers on occasion, and even sponsored a cross burning in New Jersey. None of these methods had to be used very often, however, be200 cause debt, boll weevils, and federal crop reduction programs kept the fields well stocked with labor for much of the twentieth century. Yet when the federal Labor Importation Program and its recent manifestation , the H2 program, gave the nation's growers the power to seek labor from abroad at taxpayers' expense, Atlantic Coast growers began to employ western methods of labor control. The result was a strategically diversified labor force in the East, in which one group of migrants could be pitted against another. In Belle Glade after the Second World War, African Americans were last hired in almost every instance. This diversity has persisted. Haitians now do the cane planting,Jamaicans the cane cutting, and Mexicans most of the corn harvesting and all of the highly paid lettuce cutting. Florida growers have so successfully played one group against the others that in 1977 and 1978 strikes by Latino farmworkers in South Florida were broken by Mrican American strikebreakers, and Rural Legal Services sued two growers for laying off Haitians and Mrican Americans in favor of Latinos. The westernization of the East Coast was almost complete. The final step was the institutionalization of illegal workers. There are now so many sindocumentos among the Latin Americans that growers have all but stopped pressing for the extension of the H2 or temporary labor importation program. Illegal workers are cheaper, more vulnerable, less likely to complain, and well worth the risk, as long as the Immigration and Naturalization Service continues to punish workers, not employers, for violating immigration law.3 For workers there remains much to complain about. Conditions and wages are generally considered worse in the East than on the West Coast. Housing is not only as poor as it was in the 1940s, it sometimes is what it was in the 1940s. In Belle Glade the Osceola and Okeechobee migrant labor camps, built by the FSA and sold to growers for a dollar each at the end of the war, are still in use. They remain outside the city limits, which means that black workers, despite their numbers, do not control city politics. Within the city, housing for farmworkers is as overpriced and undermaintained as it ever was. Only a handful of growers now provide housing; most farmworkers have to shift for themselves.4 East Coast field workers are also distinguished by their ill health. A 1991 study of migrant workers laboring in five North Carolina counties found a 3.6 percent rate of active tuberculosis among Mrican American migrants, more than 300 times the national average. Sixty-two percent of those tested had been exposed to TB. The researchers were quick to point out that this was not an imported problem brought by farmworkers from countries where medical care is a luxury of the very rich; the Latin EPILOGUE 201 American migrants had only a .47 percent active TB rate. The causes of the problem, they concluded, were all homegrown: poverty, poor nutrition , and living conditions as unsanitary and crowded as the sheds and barns that housed Italians on turn-of-the-century cranberry bogs.5 Social reformers did not give up their efforts to improve such conditions , despite the demise of the FSA. Advocates for farmworkers, especially church groups, succeeded in winning the Crew Leader Regulation Act in 1963, the Migrant Health Act in 1965, the inclusion of farmworkers in the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1966, and an amendment making them eligible for unemployment insurance in 1977. But all these efforts have been undermined by minimal funding, lax enforcement , and, increasingly, a hostile federal judiciary. Too much of reformers' attention has been focused, perhaps, on the workings of the crew leader system. Journalistic exposes have highlighted cases of outright enslavement, physical abuse, or crew members kept in debt by supplies ofwine or crack. But most growers do not want addicts in their fields any more than turn-of-the-century bog owners wanted small children tearing up their vines. And most farmworkers are not members of "wino crews."6 The majority of migrants today, like the Italian families and Mrican American migrants of the Progressive Era, are strivers, self-exploiters, sojourners. They take stereos and televisions back to Jamaica, send remittance checks back to Mexico, and if they stay in the United States, get out of field work as soon as possible. Most migrant farmworkers are too ambitious or too needy to stay long with a crew leader who is physically abusive or who would enslave them in what the Raleigh News and Observer called "almost medieval shackles of dependency." These are the sensational stories, the stories meant to shock, to make us pause before we buy a head oflettuce or cut into a tempting tomato. They reveal little about the causes of migrant poverty.7 Crew leaders do sometimes pocket workers' unemployment insurance deductions, skim off so much of their pay that they rarely receive the minimum wage, charge farmworkers exorbitant fees for trips to migrant health clinics, and cause deadly accidents by failing to maintain their vehicles. Yet crew leaders are a symptom, not the cause, offarmworkers' troubles. Though they are more destructive than they were when they ruled the berry rows in turn-of-the-century New Jersey, they are only as strong as farmworkers are weak. They become dangerously exploitive when fields are oversupplied with labor and when farmworkers can choose among neither labor contractors nor employers. It is the supply of labor, not the grip of the padrone, that dictates 202 EPILOGUE whether farmworkers will have the power to demand higher payor improved conditions. Even if crew leader, housing, and health laws were enthusiastically enforced, they would still be undercut by federal immigration policy. And there will never be enough federal and local officials to investigate housing conditions on every farm or check every worker's pay stub to see if the proper piece rate has been paid. Only farmworkers themselves can enforce their own bargains. As long as farmworkers have to compete among themselves for a finite number of poorly paid jobs, however, they will be in a poor position to do so. Conditions remain dismal, therefore, not because poverty is an inevitable feature of modern agriculture or because crew leaders trap migrants into a new sort of debt peonage. They are dismal because the federal government intervened on behalf of growers, undermining farmworkers' bargaining power and relieving growers of the need to recruit labor by improving wages and conditions. Not all federal labor supply efforts were intended to be so partisan; the turn-of-the-century Division ofInformation tried to match labor-hungry growers with unemployed workers but found neutrality an impossibility in a world where workers and employers were not equals. Officials of the Department of Labor's USES tried to supply farmworkers to growers during the First World War on the condition that employers met some minimal standards of pay and housing. They were stymied by southern planters' cries ofcarpetbaggery and trade unionism. None of these labor supply efforts were particularly successful both because growers were reluctant to accept the dictates of state managers and because the federal bureaucracy was too skeletal in the early twentieth century to assume control of the nation's farm labor supply and actually meet growers' labor demands. It was easier just to open the border to Mexico in the West and to recommend that planters resort to tried and true methods oflabor control in the South. Federal labor supply efforts only became effective when New Dealers built a vast administrative structure capable of counting, moving, and housing large numbers of workers. Acting on a policy ofwelfare reform designed to uplift and rehabilitate farmworkers so that they would abandon the migratory life, New Dealers created a reform apparatus on an unprecedented scale. But it was that apparatus, that combination of staff, buildings, media contacts, and operational procedures, that became the foundation for the vast and transformed labor supply efforts of the Second World War. When Mrican American farmworkers tried to turn uplift into empowerment, using labor camps as strike headquarters and federally supplied food and shelter as strike funds, growers' allies in EPILOGUE Congress commandeered the ship of reform. While the wartime U.S. Department ofAgriculture filled federal labor camps with foreign workers supplied to growers under fixed-wage, no-strike contracts, Congress made it illegal for any federal funds to be used for the improvement of farmworkers' wages or working conditions. By the end of the war, Mrican Americans, who were still the majority population in the East Coast migrant stream, were returned to obscurity, rendered invisible once again by the more remarkable presence offoreign workers. The only exception to this story of defeat and displacement was the "underground railroad" that supplied NewJersey growers and canners with labor, with the STFU and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters acting the part ofpadrone. However trivial this experience was in comparison with the federal labor supply program, it demonstrated that in a tight labor market, with the ability to bargain collectively, farmworkers were able to win higher wages, improved housing, better food, and greater respectall without striking. What might have happened if this experience had become the model for postwar farm labor policy, we can scarcely imagine. No great leaders emerged from the ranks of East Coast farm labor in the postwar period, perhaps because those ranks changed so dramatically. Would there have been a farmworker movement in the East if the federal government had not assumed the role of padrone? We will never know. Will there be a farmworker movement so long as the federal government shapes U.S. immigration policy to growers' needs? Probably not. We have seen what farmworkers got for fighting without the right of collective bargaining and without the ability to control the supply of labor: a volley of tear gas, a no-vacancy sign on the door offederallabor camps, a free ticket back to Jamaica. The state that walked unscathed out of the Second World War was a giant among dwarves. Farmworkers can only hope to transform it from a formidable enemy to an unreliable ally. To achieve this would require a revitalized labor movement-organized, vigilant, and sanctioned by law. Without such a movement, farmworkers will never reap the fruits of their labor. EPILOGUE ...