Taylorism Comes to the Fields

Labor Control, Labor Supply, Labor Process, and the Twilight of Fordism in California Agribusiness

Bibliographic Data

ID4043243
AuthorsDon Mitchell (0000-0001-8796-7756, Uppsala University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume99
Issue4
Pages341-362
Publication date2023-08-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEconomic Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-0095 • E-ISSN: 1944-8287
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00130095.2023.2188188
OpenAlexW4361218966
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited27

When the Bracero (guest worker) Program ended in 1964, California agribusiness seemed to be facing a labor crisis. Growers had lost access to a large pool of essentially unfree labor, and (consequently) unionization in the fields was on the rise. As a result, researchers in the various agricultural divisions of the University of California embarked on a broad effort to reengineer the farm labor process through the development of labor aids; mechanization of pruning, thinning, and harvesting tasks; redesigning fruits and vegetables; and extensive time-motion studies. This article traces these efforts and uses their history to argue that labor and economic geographers should focus attention on how struggles over the labor process are frequently struggles over the ability to shape and deploy the labor supply and not only matters of how work is organized on the shop floor (or in this case, in the fields). More broadly, the article argues that focus on the fine-grained details of innovation in the labor process is vital for a full understanding of fundamental transformations in the agribusiness landscape. As a consequence, the article explains why a set of innovations, which contemporary analysts figured would lead to agriculture adopting labor relations much more like those in more traditionally Fordist industries, actually paved the way for a set of even more highly casualized, exploitative relations than had existed heretofore

Agribusiness · Agriculture · Business · Economics · Economy · Fordism · Geography · Labor relations · Labour economics · Market economy · Process (computing) · Work (physics) · American Environmental and Regional History · Engineering · Labor Movements and Unions · Political Economy and Marxism

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