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Unions without Borders: Organizing and Enlightening Immigrant Farm Workers
Author(s) -
Griffith David
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
anthropology of work review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.151
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1548-1417
pISSN - 0883-024X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1417.2009.01021.x
Subject(s) - farm workers , immigration , agriculture , migrant workers , work (physics) , space (punctuation) , production (economics) , sociology , labour economics , political science , business , economic growth , economics , geography , law , engineering , mechanical engineering , linguistics , philosophy , archaeology , macroeconomics
Farm workers pose special problems for union organizing due to their legal status, their high rates of turnover, their employment through subcontracts, and the temporary and seasonal dimensions of farm work. Yet by organizing farm workers, unions have developed and refined strategies that point to methods of meeting the challenges of contemporary work environments in and out of agriculture. This includes organizing workers across fragmented space, whether transnational or transregional, and organizing workers who are sifted into production regimes via subcontractual relationships. This paper examines two farm worker unions – the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers – in terms of their successes and failures with farm labor organizing. It finds that boycotts, the use of fine arts, balancing local and transnational interests, and building relationships based on confianza (trust) are critical to the formation and maintenance of effective union organization.