Newswise — President Bush's efforts to create a "guest worker" program, if successful, would represent just the latest public policy initiative to institutionalize migrant labor in this nation.
So says Paul Hancock, professor of business, economics and the environment at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont.
The use of migrant labor to harvest America's crops is a product of policy decisions dating back to 1909, he points out.
"It's far more complex than conventional economic principals about the supply and demand of labor," says Hancock. "Economic, political and cultural processes, operating in both the United States and in nations that send migrant workers to the United States, are at work."
Hancock presented a paper on the topic at a professional conference at Youngstown State University in May.
"Unfortunately," he says, "few people have examined migrant labor in anything other than simplistic economic terms."
In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt established the Country Life Commission which encouraged farmers to increase their acreage, mechanize and use more chemicals. The idea was to professionalize farming. One of the effects, however, was the shattering of the sharecropper economy, emptying plantations of black tenant farmers and sending them north to find work in industry.
"By World War I, facing a policy-imposed shortage of labor, the farm lobby pressured the government to recruit Puerto Rican farm workers to cover the harvest seasons," says Hancock.
The Country Life Commission had as one of its goals to provide farm workers the means to become farm owners. That ideal foundered, however, in the 1930s and 1940s, Hancock reports, when the southern wing of the Democratic Party assumed legislative power.
"No more agrarian romanticism was wasted on farm workers. The stage was set to inoculate the agricultural sector from national economic reform measures. New Deal legislation could not be passed unless farm workers were specifically exempted."
The consolidation of agriculture into big business resulted in little economic benefit for full-time farm hands, Hancock says. Many left the fields for the factories resulting in a shortage of workers at harvest time.
Hancock contends that the migrant worker system is strengthened because crop growers have been able to convince the government that it is beneficial.
"Having a skewed need for labor at harvest time makes agriculture vulnerable to labor action," he points out. "Perhaps no other industry hands labor as great an opportunity to threaten a year's profits. This leverage wielded by labor should have, under normal circumstances, given it power to dictate wages and working conditions.
"The set of strategies developed by growers, however, with the complicity of the U. S. government has created a pool of workers with the least control over their wages and working conditions of any in America."
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