Are the Rates High Enough?
Someone I Know Very Well
I saw Truth just the other day
Breakin his back in the fields.
EVEN THOUGH IT WAS AGAINST HIS WILL!
He knew he had to pay his bills,
he wanted to live.
I said, “Truth, how hard are the bills?”
“Very hard, harder than a lie;
lies are easy, easy as apple pie,”
Truth said. Then passed out
from aches and pain.
--Gary McClelland, Luis Figuaroa, Shirley Edwards, James Wind, Shawn
This collectively written poem from the 1970s might easily speak for countless other migrant farmworkers, as well: the unsolvable equation of living, and working to pay for a living. There are statistics for “farm labor” that help us understand what hired workers have been paid for various tasks dating back to the 1800s, but they don’t tell the full Truth of the story. As the advertisement above confirms, farmers kept bookkeeping ledgers to account for incomes and expenses, including hired labor; besides the numbers we’re challenged to envision what they mean.
In 1844, Wheatland farmer William Garbutt estimated a year’s wages at $120 for a hired laborer, or $18 per month during the harvest season (75). In 1864, a sixteen-year-old boy was paid $12 per month, plus room and board; during the harvest season an experienced worker might be paid $20 per month (“Walks” 202). These wages are consistent with the statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture--which estimated average farm wages at about $20 per month without board, or $13 per month with board, throughout the 19th century when adjusted for inflation (Holmes 29-30). Those rates were higher if laborers were hired by the month or even the day during harvest season, to the point where one farmer spluttered about paying $3 per day plus room and board during wheat harvest. He wanted farmers to create a closed labor market by sharing hands, “so that there would not be any necessity for paying such exorbitant wages” (“Labor”).
A zoomed-out economic view hides all kinds of intimate negotiations, differentials, provisions, deceptions, and desperations. Sometimes hired hands received additional compensation in the form of grazing and stabling rights (for their horses or milk-cow) or a small garden-plot. What constituted the quality and quantity of boarding must have been wildly variable. What economists called “female domestics on farms” also were hired by the year or season, at a rate about two-thirds that of men. Their work as servants or in a farm’s “domestic economy” gradually shifted to employment as field-hands alongside men. Disputes over what a person was worth brought hired labor into direct conflict with a farmer’s economic interests.
Occasionally a person speculated about more reciprocal arrangements. In the economic fallout from the Panic of 1837, a ruined financier named Nicholas Biddle—he had been president of the Second Bank of the United States before it went bankrupt—was desperate enough to acknowledge that “A laboring man is not a mere machine—a human poor-box, into whose mouth is put a daily number of cents never to re-appear, but a living being with wants and desires, which he will not fail to gratify the moment he possesses the means... It is for this reason that one of our shrewdest farmers used to say, yes, give our laborers good wages, and they will buy our beef” (7). Readers of this address in The Genesee Farmer and elsewhere don’t seem to have taken even this self-interested advice to heart, for in terms of purchasing power wages among hired farmworkers remain among the lowest of anyone’s.
Works Consulted
-- Biddle, Nicholas. “Biddle’s Address.” The Genesee Farmer 2.1 (Jan. 1841): 6-7. Courtesy of Internet Archive.
-- Garbutt, William. “Wheatland Farming.” The Genesee Farmer 5.9 (Sept. 1844): 74-75. Courtesy of Internet Archive.
-- Holmes, George K. Wages of Farm Labor: Nineteenth Investigation, in 1909, Continuing a Series That Began in 1866. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Statistics. Bulletin 99. 1912. Courtesy of Hathitrust.
-- “Labor.” The Genesee Farmer 25.8 (Aug. 1864): 258. Courtesy of Internet Archive.
-- McClelland, Gary, Luis Figuaroa, et al. “Someone I Know Very Well.” In The New Nomads: Art, Life, and Lore of Migrant Workers in New York State XIII.1-2. (1987): 147.
-- “Walks and Talks on the Farm—No. 7.” The Genesee Farmer 25.7 (July 1864): 201-204. Courtesy of Internet Archive.