The haciendas of Spanish America were based on enormous land grants from the Spanish crown and became the sites of large plantation farms worked on a neo-feudal basis by servile or near-servile labor. Such farms, typically, were situated near large concentrations of native labor, and that labor was controlled primarily through debt-peonage. The haciendas of California were established on the preexisting pattern of Mexico, and located in places where large Indian populations were available to work the farms.
When California was annexed by the United States, the most influential Anglo settlers took over many of these haciendas and transformed them into modern agribusiness operations. The big California agribusiness plantations, built on the legacy of the haciendas, continued to rely on large amounts of cheap farm labor from segments of the population whose bargaining power was, for one reason or another, effectively nil. During the Depression and Dustbowl era, they relied on migrant farm workers from Oklahoma and other places who’d been tractored off their land by bank foreclosures.
In the 1940s, the U.S. government created the Bracero program to supply foreign guest workers from Mexico. Whether or not the irony was lost on them, I can’t say.
When workers got too uppity and attempted to fight for better pay and working conditions, the agribusiness plantation bosses had the U.S. government to enforce discipline on foreign workers by deporting them. When native-born migrant workers became unruly and tried to organize, the farm owners resorted to vigilantism — as recounted by John Steinbeck — using the same kinds of terror tactics as the blackshirts hired by Italian factory owners in the 20th century and the Central American death squads still operating today.
The armed assault on Bangladeshi strawberry pickers at New Manolada Farms in Greece fits into this background narrative like a foot into a well-worn shoe. The farm employs several thousand foreign migrant workers, many of them not government-documented. Around 200 migrant workers demanded six months’ back wages from the farm’s owners. The supervisors told them they would not be paid, and ordered them back to work. When a group of workers refused to comply, a supervisor opened fire, wounding 28 of them. New Manolada has been associated with high levels of anti-worker violence in recent years, including one case in which an Egyptian man was beaten and then dragged for a kilometer with his head jammed in a car window.
Although the local mayor dismisses this latest atrocity as an isolated incident, labor activist Natassa Panagiotara said such slave-labor conditions are common among the big strawberry farms employing foreign laborers in the area. The shooting took place against the background of economic collapse in Greece and the increasing prominence of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, which is associated with quasi-private paramilitary vigilantism against workers and immigrants.
In contemporary America, native-born wage-workers are intimately familiar with how it feels to have their livelihoods and subsistence subject to the whims of an employer. But at least they’re able to organize and expose their employer to public humiliation, as Imolakee migrant tomato pickers have in recent years and as Walmart workers did late last year. And if they get fired, at least they don’t have to worry about being deported for it.
But for undocumented immigrants, and even legal “guest workers,” this dependency is turned up several notches. As with Greece’s foreign farm workers, the genuinely slave-like conditions that exist for many American garment workers, sex workers, etc., are enforced by immigration law.
The enforcement of imaginary lines on a map results in an “illegal” status for many human beings which, despite being utterly imaginary in its moral basis, is all too real in its effects. Closed borders are a powerful tool for labor discipline by employers. They magically transform some workers into “illegal” beings dependent on a patron for their continued survival. And, much like racial divisions that weakened the labor movement (land owners in the south destroyed the tenant farmers’ union by exploiting such divisions), they facilitate a divide-and-rule strategy that pits native-born and immigrant workers against each other and makes them see each other rather than the employer as their enemy.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, Os Morangos da Ira.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, The Strawberries of Wrath, Batesville, Arkansas Daily Guard, 04/26/13
- Kevin Carson, The Strawberries of Wrath, Bell Gardens, California Sun, 04/25/13
Note to right-libertarians: I guess sometimes the employer DOES put a gun to your head.
New imaginary lines have recently been drawn by kooky local politicians in my neck of the woods with their Master Plan for what is basically a semi-private military corporation ("the city of…") running a traffic-trap, sign censorship, and drug-stealing racket.
Long-term residents and peaceful citizens suddenly find their papers are no longer in order and their lives and businesses are no longer compliant (the creepiest word in English right now) with the new malling of the old neighborhood. The more military control the council wants, the more judicial crime it needs to sanction as "ordinance enforcement."
The borders inside the borders are getting pretty tight now too.
Um… by and large, conditions (though not prospects) were in fact better for slaves – because they were usually valuable assets, not to be disposed of lightly. On the other hand, when conditions allow notionally free workers to be exploited, any associated costs are passed on to others – and so, the exploiters face little expense replacing them. In fact, the uniforms of the Janissaries – slave soldiers of the Grand Turk – had a soup spoon or ladle as part of the headgear, to symbolise that the wearers need never fear starving, unlike the common but free people. Because of the threat the Janissaries came to present, eventually they were abolished through massacre, but they never starved.
Oh, and most of the world’s borders aren’t mere imaginary lines but represent actual physical obstacles presented by geography, etc. that were at least formidable once, even if they are not always so in terms of the modern art of war. It is no accident that England is that part of the island of Great Britain that is neither mountainous like Wales and parts of Scotland, nor a shatterbelt like the Scottish borders in front of similarly naturally defensible terrain. That is, everything that is neither mountain nor march became England, because that was just how far the English invaders and those who conquered them could get on a permanent basis (some did get further north but got assimilated later).
Carson wrote: "Closed borders are a powerful tool for labor discipline by employers." So too are open borders and I would argue even more so. Can you spell increasing m-o-n-o-p-s-o-n-y, business c-o-s-t s-h-i-f–i-n-g to tax payers for the social costs associated with millions of "undocumented" workers," and "e-x-p-l-o-i-t-a-t-i-o-n as business cynically plays the interests of "undocumented workers" against
"documented workers" in a "free market" frenzy?
Further, the use of the politically correct term "undocumented worker" in Carson's world, where geographical borders are "imaginary" (read arbitrary), implies that those same workers are owed a duty of non-interference and even support from we, the "documented workers." Apparently, we're supposed to subordinate our admittedly parochial interests to the interests of Carson's globalized "free labor" movement unfettered by anything so reactionary as borders. Not I.