4. Socioeconomic Forces

In the fields of Wayland a crew harvests potatoes, likely for the Frito-Lay company because farm owner Roy Gibson was a preferred supplier. Gibson, the man wearing a hat and glasses, is working alongside a mixture of local farmhands and migrants who have traveled from Florida to work for several weeks in New York. The six people on board the Farm Machinery Corporation (FMC) harvester are joined by an unseen driver, sorting through potatoes at a rate unthinkable a century earlier. Each person has their own story, but their activity here has been shaped by socioeconomic forces beyond their control--and probably beyond conscious awareness.

This section of Needful Labor considers four different ways to understand migrant labor in wider contexts. First, a large field dedicated to potatoes means they’re being grown as a commodity crop, part of a global market. How does that form of production impact the farmworkers’ role? Another page looks at the history of automation in agriculture, especially how it structured an adversarial relation involving farmers, labor, and wages. The presence of Black migrant farmworkers in Gibson’s crew isn’t an accident, either, given the American history of slavery, sharecropping, immigration, and marginalized ethnic groups associated with farm labor. Finally, thinking about farmworkers as an economic class, not individuals, leads to consideration of unionizing efforts. Long before the formation of United Farm Workers in the 1960s, both laborers and landholding farmers organized for their collective interests. A word like socioeconomic implies abstraction and impersonal structures; still, the consequences of social forces are real and life-changing.