U of Ideas of General Interest -- March 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Mark Reutter, Business & Law Editor (217) 333-0568; [email protected]
LABOR Change law to let farm workers bargain collectively, scholars say
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The time is ripe to amend the New Deal law that prohibits farm workers from bargaining collectively with their employers, two University of Illinois experts write in the coming issue of the Emory Law Journal.
The exclusion of migrant and seasonal farm workers from collective bargaining -- ironically by the same law that gives industrial workers the right to form unions and bargain with employers -- has been a major cause of the persistently low wages and poor working conditions in the sector.
"Farm workers fit the profile of an employee that Congress intended to benefit from collective bargaining," Michael H. LeRoy and Wallace Hendricks, both at the U. of I. Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, wrote in the journal article. "If collective bargaining agreements raise workers above poverty wages, why should a 1935 law deny so many poor workers the right to bargain collectively?" Researching the origins of the National Labor Relations Act, the U. of I. professors found that the exclusion of agriculture from collective-bargaining coverage was an "anomaly" of the Depression era.
"The exclusion was not the product of a deliberate policy," they wrote. "Instead, it resulted from Congress' focus on industrial employment, and fleeting policy discussions that equated agricultural labor with small-scale, family farm work. Thus, the exclusion of farm laborers was meant to benefit another vulnerable fixture in the American economy, the family farmer."
But times have changed. The family farm has been in continuous decline since 1935 with the total number of farms dropping from 6.8 million then to under 1.9 million today. What's more, there has been a growing concentration of "factory farms" that closely resemble industrial employers. In these establishments low wages are a perennial problem, with workers earning about 60 percent of the average wage of non-farm workers.
The absence of federal bargaining protections has led to a mish-mash of state laws that do little to help farm workers who migrate from state to state to pick crops. This problem has been aggravated in recent years by illegal immigrants coming into the country, sometimes recruited by employer agents. As many as 600,000 agricultural workers are believed to be illegal aliens.
"Thus many farm workers are in one of two binds," LeRoy and Hendricks wrote. "They are legal immigrants who are passed over in favor of illegal aliens in an already crowded labor market or they are illegal aliens who, because of their unlawful presence in the United States, are exposed to extraordinary potential for employer over-reaching." In discussing how to change the 1935 law, LeRoy and Hendricks propose to continue the exclusion of small family farms from collective bargaining, but treat factory farms like the industrial conglomerates they mimic.
-mr-
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