Migrant farm labor has been the seamy underside to American capitalism for centuries. However, the size and color of the agricultural workforce has changed over the past fifty years in the United States, shifting from family and local community members to predominately Hispanic seasonal migrant workers. Since the 1990s, Mexicans can be found picking citrus fruit in Florida, harvesting tobacco in North Carolina, collecting mushrooms in Pennsylvania, tending poultry in Maine, packing orchard crops in Washington, cleaning fish in Alaska, and working in the slaughterhouses in Iowa, while continuing their longstanding tradition of engaging in all forms of farmwork in California. The winners in the migrant farming world are clearly the farm-owners, who are able to pay below-market wages to their undocumented workforce precisely because they are illegal immigrants. The clearest losers are the legal domestic workers, who cannot afford the cut-rate jobs that are available and who in many cases will not get hired anyway. The migrant workers themselves are often the losers as well, forming a 21st century class of indentured servitude: they provide back-breaking labor for a pittance, work in unsanitary conditions, live in squalid camps, and are at the mercy of their employers' every whim and can be dismissed out-of-hand.
Before analyzing the state of migrant farming in California, we will take a look at the industry generally. The Census of Agriculture defines a migrant farmworker as a person who crosses county lines and stays overnight away from home to do farmwork for wages; a typical migrant farmworker obtains at least half of their annual income from agriculture, working anywhere from twenty-five to one hundred and five days each year (Martin 10). Farm laborers are either paid by a minimum wage or piece rate. A piece rate pay scale is determined by the amount of produce the worker picks rather than by the hour. The legality of a piece...