The Farm Labor Movement in the Midwest

The Farm Labor Movement in the Midwest
Author: W. K. Barger
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2010-07-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0292792123

The Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) was founded by Baldemar Velásquez in 1967 to challenge the poverty and powerlessness that confronted migrant farmworkers in the Midwest. This study documents FLOC's development through its first quarter century and analyzes its effectiveness as a social reform movement. Barger and Reza describe FLOC's founding as a sister organization of the United Farm Workers (UFW). They devote particular attention to FLOC's eight-year struggle (1978-1986) with the Campbell Soup company that led to three-way contracts for improved working conditions between FLOC, Campbell Soup, and Campbell's tomato and cucumber growers in Ohio and Michigan. This contract significantly changed the structure of agribusiness and instituted key reforms in American farm labor. The authors also address the processes of social change involved in FLOC actions. Their findings are based on extensive research among farmworkers, growers, and representatives of agribusiness, as well as personal involvement with FLOC leaders and supporters.

Plantation Workers

Plantation Workers
Author: Brij V. Lal
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1993-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780824814960

Ten essays fill in some gaps in the study of plantations by exploring the experience of the workers themselves, focusing on their reaction and adaptation to their situation, which ranged from acquiescence to rebellion.

Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State

Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State
Author: Linda C. Majka
Publisher:
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1982
Genre: Agricultural laborers
ISBN:

Historical account of the social conflict between agricultural workers and agribusiness, and the role of state intervention in California, USA - analyses agricultural trade unionism since 1870, immigration of Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans and Filipinos, and its regulation; examines the economic recession of the 1930s, rise of rural worker organizations, internal migration, and state-enrolled contract labour; reports on the formation of the United Farm Workers and its struggle for trade union recognition, opposition, and state mediation. Bibliography.

Tortillas and Tomatoes

Tortillas and Tomatoes
Author: Tanya Basok
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780773523876

Based on interviews with Leamington greenhouse growers and migrant Mexican workers, Tanya Basok offers a timely analysis of why the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is needed. She argues that while Mexican workers do not necessarily constitute cheap labour for Canadian growers, they are vital for the survival of some agricultural sectors because they are always available for work, even on holidays and weekends, or when exhausted, sick, or injured. Basok exposes the mechanisms that make Mexican seasonal workers unfree and shows that the workers' virtual inability to refuse the employer's demand for their labour is related not only to economic need but to the rigid control exercised by the Mexican Ministry of Labour and Social Planning and Canadian growers over workers' participation in the Canadian guest worker program, as well as the paternalistic relationship between the Mexican harvesters and their Canadian employers.

Migrant Citizenship

Migrant Citizenship
Author: Verónica Martínez-Matsuda
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812252292

An examination of the Farm Security Administration's migrant camp system and the people it served Today's concern for the quality of the produce on our plates has done little to guarantee U.S. farmworkers the necessary protections of sanitary housing, medical attention, and fair labor standards. The political discourse on farmworkers' rights is dominated by the view that migrant workers are not entitled to better protections because they are "noncitizens," as either immigrants or transients. Between 1935 and 1946, however, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) intervened dramatically on behalf of migrant families to expand the principles of American democracy, advance migrants' civil rights, and make farmworkers visible beyond their economic role as temporary laborers. In more than one hundred labor camps across the country, migrant families successfully worked with FSA officials to challenge their exclusion from the basic rights afforded by the New Deal. In Migrant Citizenship, Verónica Martínez-Matsuda examines the history of the FSA's Migratory Labor Camp Program and its role in the lives of diverse farmworker families across the United States, describing how the camps provided migrants sanitary housing, full on-site medical service, a nursery school program, primary education, home-demonstration instruction, food for a healthy diet, recreational programing, and lessons in participatory democracy through self-governing councils. In these ways, she argues, the camps functioned as more than just labor centers aimed at improving agribusiness efficiency. Instead, they represented a profound "experiment in democracy" seeking to secure migrant farmworkers' full political and social participation in the United States. In recounting this chapter in the FSA's history, Migrant Citizenship provides insights into public policy concerning migrant workers, federal intervention in poor people's lives, and workers' cross-racial movements for social justice and offers a precedent for those seeking to combat the precarity in farm labor relations today.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Author: Gillian Niebrugge-Brantley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 900
Release: 2018-12-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351952579

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) is one of the most important women contributors to classical sociology, primarily because of the originality and significance of her theoretical work. Although well known to her contemporaries in both the United States and Europe, Gilman’s legacy was not fully acknowledged by sociologists until her work was recently rediscovered under the impetus of second wave feminist scholarship. Gilman's overarching accomplishment as a sociologist was to formulate a still unparalleled conception of gender. She was both the first theorist to separate gender, as socially constructed behavior, from biological sex and to treat it as a significant variable in social analysis, and the first to create a general theory of society in which gender stratification serves as the foundational principle. She also offered important ideas for the sociological subfields of economy, work, culture and family, presenting her arguments in a variety of forms: formal theory, verse, essays, public lectures, novels and short stories. The essays selected for this volume feature essays of interest to sociologists from across a spectrum of disciplines: economics, literature, women's studies, philosophy and history as well as sociology. The essays are arranged thematically with sections on: gender and society; economy and society; methodology; the public role of the sociologist; towards a sociology of women; and race, class and gender.

The Tejano Diaspora

The Tejano Diaspora
Author: Marc S. Rodriguez
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2011
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807834645

Each spring during the 1960s and 1970s, a quarter million farm workers left Texas to travel across the nation, from the Midwest to California, to harvest America's agricultural products. During this migration of people, labor, and ideas, Tejanos establish

Networks of Power

Networks of Power
Author: Robert Perrucci
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 148
Release:
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780202367477

Large organizations, particularly corporations, possess considerable resources, and with that comes considerable power, often extending beyond a single community or nation-state. Networks among large corporations enhance that power to the point that they exert a major impact on national and multinational economies and policies, influencing decision-making to achieve their own goals. Networks of Power applies interorganizational analysis to the study of power in three main areas: national policy domains, community influence structures, and national corporate structures. The main body of the text is comprised of original research by the leading authorities in the field and covers such areas as national policy decisions in health and energy, corporate structure, innovative theoretical and methodological approaches, and a critical review of network analysis of interorganizational relations and power. Also presented is an agenda for future research.