Literature Review : Wage Suppression / Bracero Program

1. The contract limits the freedom of the laborers in that they are still under the power of the land owner, with essentially the same rules as being a slave except they were getting paid in the crop for their work.

Over the past couple decades the number of undocumented immigrants involved in American agriculture has increased by the hundreds. They have dominated the fields on the west coast and have been put to work in some very harsh conditions. Many people in the US believe that these men, women, and even children are occupying jobs that legal citizens could have. We realize that even though much of our agriculture these days is harvested by modern technologies, a big part of the agriculture’s economy is made up of labor intensive from people, such as harvesting grapes, strawberries, pistachios, raspberries, etcetera. As we dig deeper into this topic we will realize why our agricultural

Under the Bracero Program Mexicans were contracted to United State farmers to tend the land (Espinosa). These Mexicans are known as Braceros. In order to be legal, Bracero’s had to obtain permits and enter the United States through recruitment centers where they had to be deemed physically capable of the hard labor work they were signing up for. One poplar recruitment center was Ciudad Juarez, across the border of El Paso, Texas (Espinosa). Barcero’s were under contracts with the employer Farm Security Administration of the Department of Agriculture of the United States of America. Farm Security Administration of the Department of Agriculture of the United States of America could enter into contracts with farm owners known as sub employers (Marentes). The contracts were to be written in Spanish but often times they were written in English and the Bracero’s would sign without comprehending what the contract mandated.

Farmers in Texas, such as Nelson, had a strong influence on the level of protection that the government provides the cotton industry. The Bracero program, authorized by Congress in 1942, benefited Nelson’s ranch and other cotton farmers by allowing Mexican labor to enter the U.S. to work for short periods of time. “Disasters happen to cotton but not to people,” (Rivoli, 2014) due to the level of protection provided by the U.S. government to cotton farmers. In 2001, Nelson lost his entire cotton crop to a hailstorm, but government crop insurance ensured Nelson’s farm would survive until the next year.

Throughout the era of the great depression, migrant farm workers were put at unfair labor. A man named Cesar Chavez helped migrant farm workers by boycotting the fruit companies they worked for and forming unions for them. The beginning of Chavez’s life, striking and boycotting fruit companies, and his new projects were the biggest impact in changing farm worker’s lives.

The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of immigrants to the United States over the past century is one difficult to ignore. At times the border did not exist, however in more recent times the US has created policies to curb Mexican migration into the states. The relationship the US has with it’s southern neighbor has always been a complicated one. Both countries have a relationship like no other two countries in this world, in which depending on the time period is a give and take relationship. Each group of immigrants have their own story about coming to America, but none quite like the stories of Mexican immigrants. The Bracero Program, planted the seeds of Mexican migration between 1942 and 1964. An estiminated 4 million of Mexican men were contracted to work in the United States as part of a war effort called the Bracero Program.Of the millions U.S. Mexicans, who self-identified as being of Mexican, trace their family’s arrival to the United States to a Bracero.Cheap and foreign labor has always played an important role in the development of agriculture in the United States. And for the first time, an official program for migrant farm workers was developed and Mexican ‘Braceros’ - Bracero loosely translates into “arms”- flocked to the United States in order to harvest crops. The most important concept to understand about the Bracero Program, was that these men were not seen as humans, but instead as commodities that should be

The Berkeley findings also show a case where a Florida employer threatened hundreds of Mexican and Guatemalan workers to harvest fruit. It also shows a case where a Washington D.C. couple brought Cameroonian teenagers to work fourteen hours a day as domestic servants, without pay while threatening them with deportation. The teenagers were promised a better education (Gilmore 2).

The farm workers’ rights issues were also a major matter that the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement dealt with along with the other issues. Mexican-American migrant farm workers had to endure the harsh working conditions while traveling from farm to farm in the United States in search for work. While working, the farm workers tended to be exploited by farm owners while also receiving low wages that kept them below the poverty level (Ramirez). Due to certain

The Bracero Program was a temporary contract labor program initiated in 1942 by the United States and Mexico. Designed originally to bring a experienced Mexican agricultural laborers to harvest sugar beets in Stockton, California, but soon spread to most of the United States and to the railroad industry. Although the railroad program ended in 1945, after World War II the agricultural program continued until 1964. Originally, the program was designed to protect the illegal migrant workers against the exploitation by American farmers. However, it was criticized and was viewed as a failure from the humanitarian point of view.

Way before Cesar Chavez even existed, the Southwestern United States, where there was a significant amount of agriculture work, was in desperate need of agricultural unions. The life of the average farm worker wasn’t a luxurious one. Working in crops often involved harsh working conditions which were filthy or dangerous and negligible pay.(Source N) With over 3 million farm workers in the United States, 72% were from a foreign

Judith Halberstam points out that the movie Chicken Run illustrates how aggressive industrial businesses maximize profits above anything else or businesses that have a partnership between owners and workers to maximize profits. “What are we to make of this Marxist allegory in the form of a children’s film”

The article, “Displaced People: NAFTA’s Most Important Product”, written by David Bacon for North American Congress on Latin America, discusses how economic crises have caused Mexicans to be displaced. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has caused the price of crops in Mexico to lower so much that there are no economic benefits from planting them. There are around 500,000 indigenous Mexicans from the state of Oaxaca now living in the United States as farmworkers. The article states that between 2000 and 2005, the countryside in Mexico has lost a million and a half jobs. This causes indigenous Mexicans who relied on planting crops to make money to migrate to the United States. Families that cannot migrate to the United States and are now jobless will go hungry as they search for buyers to buy the crops they grow. While the crops they grow continue to lose money value, the price of the food that they need to survive keeps increasing. After Mexico adopted NAFTA, the price of tortillas has more than doubled and companies continue to monopolize tortilla production. Poor Mexicans are left with no ability to make money and

Capitalism’s profits are produced by the surplus value comes from the unpaid, exploited workers. The workers’ wages, under the system of capitalism,

In a paper titled “Four Reasons Not to Increase the Minimum Wage,” the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, offers four empirically backed consequences of increasing the minimum wage; these consequences include: the loss of jobs, low skilled workers being disproportionally affected and priced out of the job market, a minimal effect on reducing poverty, and higher prices for goods. The paper compiles a number of studies to support these

Going back to the rules of how wealth will be managed in the perfect community, wages will be determined based upon factors such as contribution to society, and overall difficulty or amount of stress level. This may be a very extreme stance on wealth distribution, but in reality this is the fairest system of wages that a society will ever achieve. As one would think, profits in the community will reflect upon this. The money required to run anything wealth-related such as running the business or paying taxes will still be perfectly intact, it is just that the leftover money will be used in a fair manner all across the board. The head person will most likely not be making the most money as that position may not be as demanding as its lower positions. Although the director of an organization may have built a company fromt the ground up, in the world of business gaining a bigger status can be based upon an unpredictable risk-reward system. In looking at the philosopher and economist ideas of Karl Marx, he believed in a more extreme position than what is being proposed. In Robert Heilbroner’s book Teachings From the Worldly Philosophy, Heilbroner takes a sample of the collected works of Marx and collaborator Friedrich Engels that talks about wealth distribution. In the sample(in Heilbroner), Marx says “The value of labour-power