Labor and Automation
Movements championing automation and mechanization in American economic sectors have become very popular in the 21st century. Ultimately, the goal of these movements is to save money on the part of the business, as a machine can work tirelessly for a long period of time without any sort of compensation. In a rural setting, mechanization has been pursued, and to some extent achieved, for many years. For the most part, gone are the days when American fields were populated primarily by human hands, with only the occasional animal-drawn piece of equipment.
Mechanization is a great thing for businesses, but not for hired workers, who depend on the very jobs targeted by automation. Cultural geographer Don Mitchell argues that “struggles over the labor process relate dialectically to struggles over labor control,” with the ultimate goal of “power over how labor supplies [are] constructed and deployed” (344). What this means is that factors like a shortage of farmworkers, a unique skill that they possess, or a collective union all give hired laborers more power in their negotiations and usually higher wages. One tactic that growers have used to re-assert control over labor supply is the importation of contingent farmworkers, like the Bracero Program (1942-1964), but arguably automation has been the most powerful tool for transforming the labor process. It leads to fewer workers, of less skill, and thus expands the pool of (low-wage) labor.
For more than two centuries, farmers have expressed their disdain for the cost of hired laborers compared to mechanization. For example, an 1848 advertisement for Hussey’s grain harvesters quoted several Western New York farmers affirming how the machines could outwork laborers for less money. John Delafield, owner of Oakland Farm near Seneca Lake, described harvesting 104 acres of wheat in eight days, at the cost of $23. “The same work,” he said, “would have taken six cradlers eight days: this at $1.50 a day, board included, would amount to $72, showing a saving by the machine of $49” (“Hussey’s” 162). Testimonial "certificates” by Delafield and others reveal the calculated fiscal motives of the farmers, who were keenly aware of how much it would cost to employ migrant workers. Compared to this, a machine was preferable in every instance. A Chenango farmer named E.A. Bundy claimed of this immutable supremacy that “no man ever yet went back from machinery to hand-labor, because its unavoidable effect is to emasculate manual labor and make it irksome!” (S.W.).
Heavy emphasis on saving money was inseparable from the negative stereotypes of migrant workers. The fact that laborers required some form of compensation resulted in their portrayal as being greedy and lazy; the burden of paying them became distorted over time and migrant workers themselves became the burden. Bundy held that laborers “take advantage of your necessities, and don’t work as many hours or as well as they used to at lower wages. But with my machine…I am independent of the rascally mowers” (S.W. 144). They can be portrayed this way because of the existence of a machine to which they are compared. It is not that migrant workers don’t work hard; rather, it is because they cannot compare to a machine that they are looked on so unfavorably.
Since long before the 21st century, migrant workers have been stereotyped as parasitic and lazy. Their inability to keep up with technological advancements are shared in many other industrial sectors. This is an entirely unfair judgement, as it would be impossible for anyone to match the output of an unfeeling machine. Still, there is a unique hostility towards migrant workers in particular. Laborers outside of the agricultural sphere are routinely replaced by automated machines, but face fewer stereotypes. When a cashier’s job is replaced by a self-checkout line, the cashier is not lambasted as being lazy or idle. They are, rather, a sympathetic wage-earner whose job was taken from them by the forces of automation.
Works Consulted
-- “Hussey’s Reaping Machine.” The Genesee Farmer 9.7 (July 1848): 162. Courtesy of Internet Archive
-- Mitchell, Don. “Taylorism Comes to the Fields: Labor Control, Labor Supply, Labor Process, and the Twilight of Fordism in California Agribusiness.” Economic Geography 99.4 (2023): 341-362. Link to article
-- S.W. “Notes for the Month.” The Genesee Farmer 19.5 (May 1858): 144. Courtesy of Internet Archive