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)

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Summary

Rural Wounds

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”

The Plight of Rural America
The Inherent Ambivalence of the Guest-Worker Program
Violence in the Fields
In the Fields of North Carolina
The Political Economy of Race
Unsanitary, Unhealthy and Dangerous Conditions
On Wage Theft
Death in the Fields
Compensation (or Termination) for Work-Related Injuries
The Political Economy of Food
The Origin of a Food Regime
Cheap Food for Conquest
Emigration by Dispossession
NAFTA and the Disruption of Food Sovereignty
Debts and Recruiters
Labor Representation in a Right-to-Work State
The Collective Bargain Agreement
Unions Make Harvesting Unprofitable
Violations of Recruitment Standards
Torture Protects Peace in the Labor Market
Union? Mexico!
The Affective Dimensions of Farm-Labor Organizing
The Union Is Us
The Human Right to Abuse
Corporate Neglect and Anti-Union Practices
The Inherent Anti-Union Character of Labor Externalization
A State of Fear
The Unconceivable Right
The White Supremacist Roots of Anti-Unionism
Conclusion
Notes on Methodology
Fields of Solidarity and Violence
The Importance of the Workers’ Grievances
The Political Economy of Farm-Labor
Findings
Lessons from Farm-Labor Organizing in the Age of Trump
Full Text
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