Book Description

The fact that labor supply consists of men, women, and children in families with their own accustomed and often well-loved ways of living is often overlooked in any discussion of "the farm labor problem." this study uses both agricultural economics and cultural anthropology in analyzing employment problems. The analysis covers (1) histories of the development of the citrus, lettuce, and cotton industries with examples of companies using different harvesting operations, (2) the economics of the technologies, (3) the workers, (4) the participants in their distinctive cultural and institutional settings--Mexican-American, anglo-isolate, negro, Indian, and management, and (5) the participants in their common technological setting. Some of the conclusions were--(1) Arizona agriculture, as a variant of southwestern agriculture, is an instrument of exploitation of unsophisticated, culturally unassimilated peoples, and functions also as an assimilative mechanism working in the direction of upward occupational mobility and by doing depletes itself of its own labor supply, (2) displacement of the higher occupational classes tends to be permanent because its members do not fit the lower occupational classes, and (3) when members of the lower occupational classes are replaced by higher class workers, the members of the lower classes tend to remain in the industry and compete for the new higher-status jobs. Some implications for farm employment and manpower were--(1) an unemployed worker should be retrained in a higher occupational class, (2) if a worker is displaced from the highest occupational status in the industry, he should be retrained for another industry, (3) anglo-isolates cannot be rehabilitated by training programs, and (4) the concept of training for occupational adjustment must be broadened to deal effectively with institutional and cultural factors.