Who's Fooling Whom?

"Has Chavez fooled Harvard?" is a somewhat rhetorical question. If Chavez has indeed succeeded in fooling not only naive and somewhat stupid Harvard people, but also millions of consumers, the United Auto Workers and other unions, and gullible politicians, this is enough to make him one of the greatest entertainers and illusionists of all time. But the facts show that this is not the case.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture publication, "Hired Farm Working Force of 1972," 55 per cent of migratory farm laborers did only farm wage work and earned $1654 in 1972. Those who also did non-farm work made $2798 a year, a far cry from the figures claimed by some (the lowest being $7000 per year). Growers often have their pet farm workers testify to fanciful salaries.

These workers, we are told, drive cars. But a migratory worker without a car is not a migratory worker in most cases. For a migratory worker, feeding gas to the car is a higher priority than feeding himself or his family.

Growers often claim that their employees like farm work, and it is true that a great deal of seasonal labor is performed by kids, housewives and students. But I never heard of, let's say, Mrs. "Happy" Rockefeller picking strawberries in California or potatoes in Maine to supplement her income. The important question is why so many people--housewives, students and kids--have to go into low-paying and difficult farm work.

The 1972 American Friends Service Committee report on the Blue Sky sweatshop as well as congressional hearings convey a very different picture.

I have personally seen six-year-old kids picking beans for five cents a pound in the Willamette Valley in Oregon in 1971. It was 11 a.m. and these kids had already worked for four hours. It undoubtedly teaches them, in the growers' words, a "sense of responsibility."

There were 184,000 migratory farm workers in 1972 (U.S.D.A. "Hired Farm Working Force of 1972"). But this figure doesn't take into account "wetbacks," green carders or commuters, to say nothing of kids under 14. According to the front page of the New York Times:

Last year, over 600,000 Mexicans were arrested and "voluntarily returned" to Mexico after being caught trying to enter the United States illegally along the 2000-mile border.

But some 500,000 Mexicans are thought to have succeeded in slipping across the frontier and to have found low-paying jobs on farms and in cities. The Mexican Government has often complained that these illegal immigrants are subject to ill-treatment and unfair exploitation in the United States.

The only way to stop this shameful traffic is to prosecute the employers of wetbacks. This suggestion, made by the Mexican government as long ago as 1946, was always turned down by the U.S. government under the pressure of southwest and California growers lamenting of "labor shortages."

The study of corporate farming used by Peter J. Ferrara on this page last week, which supposedly shows the negligible importance of corporate farming, should not be taken seriously. The study was set up hastily by the Department of Agriculture to stem the tide of protests against corporate farming and to underestimate the real figures. I happened to meet one of the authors of this study and he knew quite well that his figures were unreliable. A counterstudy made by Professor Rodefeld in one state showed that the figures of U.S.D.A. were underestimated at least by one half.

Such figures are irrelevant as measures of corporate control and of concentration of U.S. agriculture. A more relevant but still unsatisfactory figure is that 1 per cent of U.S. farms account for 25 per cent of the sales and 5 per cent more than 50 per cent of sales. Better indicators are, for instance, the following: at least 70 to 80 per cent of fruits and vegetables going into processing, more than 90 per cent of the broilers (chicken), and a major part of the eggs, are produced under contracts with large corporations or groups. Large feedlots (over 1000 heads capacity) have taken over a dominant share in beef production in the last ten years. In California, large growers have formed marketing boards and growers' exchanges to control production (Sunkist, Sunmaid) and have compelled often by violent means, smaller growers to join. As early as 1939, California had 30 per cent of the large-scale farms of the United States. Now, the ratio of family labor to hired labor is one to four in California and one to six in Arizona. Three or four companies have gained control over the lettuce industry in California; the grape and wine industry has been recently merged into large multi-national corporations (such as Nestle).

When I asked a vice president of the Bank of America whether or not the bank was involved in planning agricultural production for the growers (i.e., telling them what to grow), the answer was "Of course, we do that all the time." And at that time, the Bank of America had $1 billion of agricultural loans outstanding.

The corporate control of agriculture in California through banks, processing companies, and growers' exchanges is, if not absolute, almost total. Family farms (i.e., farms using little hired labor) have never had an important economic role.

It is significant that in the 1930s, when there was a "threat" of farm-worker organization, the Associated Farmers, a growers' outfit, was set up to fight farm labor organization, with funds from all the big corporate names in California.

It is a mistake to assume that low profits for farmers do not mean that workers are not exploited. Farmers' low profits may be due to monopolistic control of the marketing or processing companies' high interest rates and high land rents. A better indicator of workers' exploitation is profits plus land rents. This conveys a very different picture--land rents (or price of land) have increased enormously in California since World War II.

The income of a small grower renting land and providing most of the labor on his farm is determined by the level of wages for farm labor in large farms producing the same crops. In bad years, and even normal years, it is hardly surprising that a small farmer ends up with a lower income than his workers. California is no land for small growers.

The fate of farm laborers in northern California--wages, health, housing--is better than in other states. Better, for instance, than on the eastern seaboard. This doesn't make that fate any better. Interstate migrancy has diminished due partly to mechanization, and partly to other forms of labor exploitation such as day-haul programs, which make it possible to tap the large pool of unemployed in the cities. In any case, being a seasonal laborer, migrant or non-migrant, means dangerous work (farm work is the third most dangerous occupation in California), low wages, abysmally low yearly incomes, unemployment and poor or nonexistent housing.

I know what the "unionization privileges" (sic) of California and Arizona are. I have some knowledge of the history of agricultural developments in the Golden State, of its undemocratic system of land ownership and farming. The story of migratory labor from the early Chinese to the Mexicans is as old as California itself. Workers' exploitation, racism, red-baiting, wage-fixing by agricultural employers, violent repression of the civil rights of farm workers with the active collaboration of the police and the courts, tax-payers' subsidies used to boost the profits of landlords and agribusinesses, from the story of Owens Valley ("Chinatown") to the West Side swindle and the importation of bracers, the bloody battles fought by early squatters and the recent murder of Juan de la Cruz on a picket line--all these are permanent features of the great agricultural valleys of California.

Having read thousands and thousands of pages on farm labor, I find the slanderous arguments about Chavez and the farmworkers very familiar. This sort of attack to hurt the very people they are trying to help is a common agribusiness and growers' rhetoric.

Jean-Pierre Berlan is with the Institut-National de la Recherche Agronomique in Paris, and was a research fellow at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He is working on a book on Californian agriculture.