Wages: Worth it to Pay More?
When it comes to farmers, what does it mean to be “a nice man to work for”? According to an Oneida County editor and publisher named T.B. Miner, it was a compliment that someone “pays very dear for the empty honor of such a name.” Miner had operated The Northern Farmer and The Rural American, giving him some latitude in addressing readers of The Genesee Farmer. He asserted that “hands who have no interest in the result of their labors, beyond receiving their wages, can and often do fritter away a great deal of valuable time in useless conversation.” Rather than attempting conciliations that wouldn’t work, Miner bluntly advised a more authoritarian stance: “When you hire a man, let him understand at first that his labor and time belong to you” (“Hired Help”). Such remarks are all the more ghastly when considering that they appeared in 1862, during a time when Northerners were at war with Southern slaveholders who asserted absolute ownership of bodies.
The photograph here—dating a little more than a century later—shows a migrant laborer working on the Wayland, NY farm of Roy Gibson, generally considered a nice man to work for. Donna Belanger, director of the Wayland Migrant Day Care Center, observed that his labor camp was “more tightly run and the crew boss is fair with his people. What they earn, they get.” Where Miner had counseled a farmer never “absent from his hired hands a minute more than is absolutely necessary,” some contemporaries of Gibson effectively outsourced surveillance to crew bosses. Belanger called it “enslaving their own people” by overcharging for food, transportation, and debt (Gallagher 5B). Still, a nagging question lingers over the photo: if Gibson owned the land, the tomatoes, and the harvesting machinery, who owned the labor of migrant farmworkers?
Farmers’ ownership of land conferred a different, and oppositional, status than their laborers. For Miner, even conversation reduced the value of labor to “three-quarters of a fair day’s work… if he works for you, in a gang of men, he has got to keep a close mouth” (151). It’s clear that, for farmers at the time, wages were a big stress. Many tried to find the cheapest way to get the work on the farm without any other considerations, leading to cold-blooded ideas for the manufacture of bone meal fertilizer that “could be performed by very cheap labor; even the inmates of the Poor House might be profitably employed, or old persons and children” (L.D.).
Some farmers, familiar with wisdom that the “difference in price between a cheap and a good tool may be earned by the latter in a single day,” recognized that “low paid labor is not always cheap labor” (“Farm Work”; “Irish” 368). In its “Farm Work for January” feature one year, The Genesee Farmer recognized that winter was the time to hire summer farmhands, “as the best will always be engaged early; and it often happens that by paying a dollar or two more per month, a greater amount in valuable assistance will be secured—or, in other words, the best are generally the cheapest” (19). Why did this acknowledgement of valuing labor in one’s self-interest not occur more often? We have to conclude that ownership and power for its own sake had a strong appeal.
Works Consulted
-- Farm Work for January.” The Genesee Farmer 25.1 (Jan. 1864): 19-20. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- “Farm Work for June.” The Genesee Farmer 25.6 (June 1864): 174. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- Gallagher, Peg. “Migrant Workers.” Elmira Star-Gazette 25 Oct. 1981: 4B-5B
-- “Irish Emigration to America” (368). The Genesee Farmer 25.12 (Dec. 1864): 367-368. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- L.D. “Bone Manure.” The Genesee Farmer 8.5 (May 1847): 111. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- Miner, T.B. “Hired Help on a Farm.” The Genesee Farmer 23.5 (May 1862): 151. Courtesy of Internet Archive