Abstract
In the United States, farm-workers are traditionally excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and from the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) which guarantee basic rights to workers, including the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. In a sense, farm-workers are confined to a secondary market characterized by substandard wages and labor conditions. This study explores how migrant farm-workers in North Carolina have responded to their labor conditions with a campaign that culminated in the achievement of the first labor contract for guest-workers in US history. Based on ethnographic research, it reflects upon the role of grassroots organizing in challenging a culture of racism that has remained dangerously alive in many parts of our society.
Highlights
My first visit to North Carolina occurred in 2004 in the middle of a boycott campaign
North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA) suggested that Farm-Labor Organising Committee (FLOC) helped the workers manufacture injuries and sickness in order to guarantee them the right to return to work in North Carolina: It appears that there is a disturbing trend evolving that all workers who are warned, terminated or are leaving of their own accord are allegedly injured if FLOC is involved
According to the report published by Cano and Najar in the Mexican journal La Jornada (2004), when they reach North Carolina after a 40 hour journey, they are met by an NCGA representative who gives the farm-workers srict warnings of their obligations: they must fulfill their labor contract or they will be declared ineligible to return to the US the following year; and they must not communicate with Legal Services or the union, because communication with such bodies has already “killed the H-2A program in New York, Maryland and Florida” (Cano, Najar 2004)
Summary
Summary 1.1 The Plight of Rural America. – 1.2 The Inherent Ambivalence of the Guest-Worker Program. Summary 1.1 The Plight of Rural America. – 1.2 The Inherent Ambivalence of the Guest-Worker Program. By the end of the 1970s, anti-unionism had supplanted racism as the South’s most respectable prejudice. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a former segregationist, found it easier to cope with black voting than with the threat of unionization. “he’ll accept blacks but you still don’t see Storm shaking hands with union people”
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have