Читать книгу Trampling Out the Vintage - Frank Bardacke - Страница 10
ОглавлениеBehind every fruit and vegetable for sale in the supermarket lies an unknown world of toil and skill. Broccoli is one of the easiest vegetables to harvest because it grows on plants that are about waist-high, so workers don’t have to bend over completely to cut the unopened, densely compacted flower buds that people eat. The plants grow two rows to a bed in lush fields that extend for hundreds of acres. From a distance, workers, organized into crews of a few dozen, clad in bright yellow rain slickers to ward off the morning dew, seem to be plodding through the plants, hunched over, tiny specks of gold too few to make an impact on so much green. Up close, any illusion of sluggishness dissolves before the athletic spectacle of the broccoli cut.
The heads of green compacted buds, three to six inches in diameter, shoot off the main stalk of the plant, sheltered by the broad leaves at the top and hidden among the long leaves that surround the buds before they flower. Not all the heads mature at the same time, and only through keenness of sight can the harvesters—most of them are men—quickly find the ones that are ready to cut. The harvester grabs the head with one hand while with the other he thrusts the short, broad knife downward, cutting the leaves away from the stalk. Then with a sideways stroke of the knife he cuts the head off the plant, leaving just the right length of stalk below the wide unopened flower. He stretches his fingers to grab another head with the first still in his grip and cuts a second stalk. Depending on his quick judgment of the size of the heads and the proximity of the next one ready to cut, he may even grab and cut a third head while holding the other two in his extended hand. Finally he throws the heads onto a conveyer belt moving through the fields, or onto a small platform pulled by a tractor, or into a metal-framed basket on his back, as he looks ahead for the next bud mature enough to be harvested. Each cut takes about three seconds; in an average eight-hour day he might cut 11,000 heads of broccoli.
In the UFW years harvesters often used the baskets, especially when it was too wet to pull the awkward conveyer belt through the fields. They are not so popular now, but they are still used, and when they are full of broccoli they weigh about thirty pounds. The workers carry them across the rows of plants to dump the broccoli into larger bins, which are being towed through the fields by a tractor. Those bins, four feet high, sit on flatbed trucks, which are already a few feet off the ground. So the harvesters must transfer the baskets to the loaders (usually two per crew) who are standing on a makeshift platform that extends out from the bed of the truck.
The exchange between the harvester and the loader is done with the precision of a handoff in football, or the flip of a baseball between two middle infielders at the beginning of a double play. The cutter backs up to the loader who is hovering above him, and at the exact moment that he feels a hand take hold of the top of the metal frame, he thrusts his shoulders up, giving the basket a boost so that the loader can more easily lift it up and over the top of the bin. If the loader lifts the basket just a little bit late, he does not get the full effect of the boost—more important, though, the weight of the basket may come back down heavy on the harvester’s shoulders. It is not exactly Melville’s monkey rope, where the life of the sailor cutting blubber alongside the ship depends on the care and sense of responsibility of his comrade above him, but when a loader is late he puts his fellow worker at risk of serious injury. Word travels fast among the pickers, and loaders who don’t get it right don’t last long on the crews.
Not all farm jobs require equal skill. Different techniques are required for thinning, weeding, or harvesting, for working on the ground or climbing on ladders, for working by the hour or doing piece work, and each crop has its own craft secrets and know-how. It is one thing to cut and pack lettuce, another to girdle table grapes, another yet to pick lemons. Not all the physical skill of farmwork depends on the coordination of accomplished hands and sharp, experienced eyes. The work also requires physical endurance. Farmwork is hard not only in the sense of being skilled but also in the sense of requiring toil, exertion, and extended physical effort. When arriving in the early morning to begin work, Pablo Camacho would often say, “Ya llegamos al campo de la batalla” —“Now we arrive at the field of battle.” Although intending to provoke a smile, Camacho was not being ironic. Most people who have worked in the fields say that it is the hardest work they have ever done. It is hard to put up with the inevitable pain and physical exhaustion, to last until the end of the row, the end of the day, the week, the season. “To last” is not quite the right word. The right word is a Spanish one, aguantar: to endure, to bear, to put up with.
Pablo Camacho was proud of his ability to aguantar, even arrogant about it, often claiming that he never felt pain while he was working. That is a pose that a lot of farm workers assume, even among themselves. At work, no one complains about pain. Camacho believed that the ability to put up with pain was part of the Mexican national character, especially evident in sports. Like many farm workers, he was an avid boxing fan. He could name all the boxing champions in the lighter divisions from the 1930s to the 1970s, as well as recount the ways Mexican fighters had been denied championship opportunities. Mexicans were the best boxers in the world, he argued, especially in their ability to withstand punishment. They were also good marathon runners and long-distance bicycle racers, he said, sports in which endurance and patience are the essential virtues.
But Mexicans do not have an exclusive franchise on the ability to tolerate hard work. Endurance is a trait of slaves and the oppressed in general, and also characteristic of peasants and other agricultural people—whether free or unfree. Agriculture by its very nature requires patience. Farm workers have to wait for nature to do her work. They must plant, water, and wait. Weed and wait. And finally, after enduring the wait, they may harvest.
Physical labor has received bad reviews since people began to write. It is Adam’s curse in the Old Testament. Aristotle contended that “occupations are . . . the most servile in which there is greatest use of the body.” The dynamic relationship between the brain and the hand was ripped asunder by early philosophers, leaving two separate activities: valued intellectual labor (suitable for free men) and devalued manual labor (suitable for women and slaves). This philosophical predisposition against the work of the body had its greatest worldly triumph in the development of capitalism and the factory system. As Marx so passionately chronicled, English factories destroyed English handicrafts. What he called “modern industry”—machines built by other machines strung together in a continuous process of production where laborers are “mere appendages” to the machinery—replaced the earlier system of production that “owed its existence to personal strength and personal skill, and depended on the muscular development, the keenness of sight, and the cunning of the hand.”1
The cunning of the hand, what farm workers call maña, remains the basis of California farmwork as surely as it is the basis of a major league pitcher’s job, or a skilled craftsman’s. Many farm worker jobs are not only hard to do but hard to learn, often requiring years to master, and skills typically are passed from one generation to the next. Farm workers use hand tools: knives, hoes, clippers, pruners. They do not tend machines or have to keep up with an assembly line.
This plain fact has been obscured by all the current references to factory agriculture and industrial farming. The confusion began with the title of the first popular book about California agriculture, Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Field. What McWilliams meant by that wonderful, albeit misleading, title was that California agriculture was not made up of small family farms but rather was dominated by large-scale farm businesses, tied to international markets, which employed a landless agricultural proletariat to do the actual work. Those workers, the book’s title implied, should be protected by the same laws as factory workers. But McWilliams never argued, nor is it true, that the actual labor process, the work itself, is like a factory assembly line.
That is not likely to change. Agriculture remains dependent on natural cycles and rhythms. Agribusiness cannot escape the seasons, unpredictable changes in the climate, and the natural tempo of individual plants, which do not mature at the same rate. It cannot escape mysterious differences in seed performance, or the interactions between water, sun, and soil, all of which make it relatively hard to mechanize agriculture, and virtually impossible to convert it into a kind of deskilled manufacturing process.
This is not equally true for all farmwork. The planting and harvesting of so-called field crops—grains, sugar beets, and dry beans—have been successfully mechanized and deskilled. But field crops take up a rapidly diminishing percentage of California farm acreage, and the UFW never tried to organize the few people who operate field-crop machinery. Where the UFW did organize, among fresh fruit, vegetable, and nursery workers, mechanization has been mostly an unattainable goal, and the workforce remains skilled: people working with tools in their hands.
Broccoli cutting has never been mechanized. Workers pass through a broccoli field several times, selecting the heads ready to harvest and leaving the immature ones for a later pass-through. Agricultural engineers have never been able to build a machine that can do that. This is the typical technical problem in trying to mechanize fresh fruit and vegetable production. Because plants mature unevenly, they can’t be treated as identical inanimate objects moving along an assembly line.
Biologists have tried to redesign the plants genetically so they mature all at once, but nature has proved to be too stubborn. In the early sixties, when growers realized that the bracero program, thus their guaranteed cheap labor supply, was coming to an end, they and their collaborators at the University of California began to build machines and remake seeds that they predicted would mechanize farm workers out of existence.2 That project has been a colossal failure. Eighteen years of research and millions of dollars were thrown away on the lettuce machine alone. Early schemes involved gamma rays or mechanical fingers that would give each head a little squeeze before cutting, but gamma rays couldn’t beat the eye, and the metal fingers damaged the lettuce. A USDA engineer, Paul Adrian, finally announced that he had solved the main technical problem: his machine would X-ray every head of lettuce to decide which ones were mature enough to harvest. It, too, was useless; Adrian couldn’t figure out how to get the harvested lettuce into a box without the help of human hands and eyes.3
Each failed attempt has its own story. The strawberry machine bruised the berries. The asparagus machine couldn’t cut the shoots without destroying the ability of the bulb to generate more shoots for a later harvest. The celery machine couldn’t cut the stalks cleanly enough to be suitable for the fresh market. The lemon tree shaker produced three to seven times as much unmarketable fruit as did hand picking. Most other tree shakers do too much damage to the tree roots, although many nut trees can withstand the shaking. The one great mechanical success is the contraption that picks canning tomatoes, which, combined with a reengineered tomato, did replace thousands of workers. Otherwise, fresh tomatoes, like most other fruits and vegetables, are harvested by proficient workers making judgments and wielding tools. As the anthropologist Juan Vincent Palerm quipped about the growers’ dream of mechanization, “What we have witnessed over the past years is not the mechanization but rather the ‘Mexicanization’ of California agriculture.”4
Farm workers evoke comparisons to athletes—football players and middle infielders, long-distance runners, bicycle racers, boxers—because the centuries-long destruction of craft work is almost complete, and the only context in which people still believe in the skill of physical activity is sports. At work, Marx’s world of modern industry is triumphant and the wisdom of the idle philosophers whose leisure depended on slaves is completely vindicated: mental labor is skilled, physical labor is not. Only in play and in certain kinds of physical art such as dance do we continue to recognize and admire the skills of the body.
The most striking athletic comparison, however, does not involve the graceful agility of the individual worker but rather the collective abilities and internal solidarity of the harvest piece-rate crews. These crews are like athletic teams: they closely coordinate difficult physical maneuvers in a contest that lasts an entire season. And they are professional teams in which everyone is paid at the same rate. If a baseball team worked the way a piece-rate vegetable crew does, there would be a set rate for each completed game, and the players on the field would divide the take evenly among themselves. Crews take great care to make the individual jobs equally difficult and to organize the work so that it can be done quickly. They stay together for years and are often made up of groups of relatives—fathers and sons, brothers and cousins—or people from the same rural Mexican town. The crews lose a few members every season to retirement or injury, drink or other forms of dissipation, while recruiting new members to replace them, on the basis of extended family connections and ability. The new recruits often work for a couple of years on hourly crews, the equivalent of minor leagues.
While working on the hourly crews, new men hone their skills, continuing to get better and faster, and learn to put up with the physical pain. This is a much different experience from that of production line workers in a factory. (Factory maintenance workers, whose jobs are skilled and often interesting, are a different case.) On the line a person either learns the job in a few hours or is not going to learn it at all; the biggest problems are adjusting one’s rhythms to the pace of the machinery and fighting the boredom and isolation imposed by the task. Working hourly in the fields, a worker has to master the tool in his hands rather than accommodate himself to a machine, and although a person may choose to work alone, he can also work alongside other people—joking, talking, arguing, singing, bitching, philosophizing.
Not all vegetables have extensive “minor leagues.” In the celery there are few hourly crews. Most apieros learn the job as Maniz did. They go to an already established crew where friends or relatives help them get by until they learn the job. Some people trying to make it in the celery will go to a regular crew and join in the work without sharing in the pay, thereby both learning the job and helping others get through the day. This is fine with the bosses, because they get the free labor of those trying to learn. There are two rows of celery to a bed and each apiero cuts his own bed, so it is easy for a new man (they are all men) to help the veteran by cutting in his bed, ten or twenty yards in front of him. This is also called giving another worker “a ride.” When the apiero assigned to the bed gets to the place where the raitero (the person giving the ride) began working, the celery is already there on the ground, and he can simply walk ahead to the spot where the other man is cutting. Both stand up, stretch their backs, and exchange a few words. Usually the raitero will then cut in someone else’s row, so that the cutters advance evenly.
However new celery workers start out, the first thing they must understand is the knife. It has a short wooden handle, not much longer than the palm of an average adult hand and about an inch wide. Embedded in the handle is a steel blade, one-eighth of an inch thick, eight to ten inches long, and three-quarters of an inch wide. The inside of the blade has a sharp edge. At the end of the blade, the knife widens and makes an abrupt thirty-degree angle upward. The outside edge of the fanned blade is also sharp. Knives differ quite a bit as workers fashion them to their own liking, changing the angle of the bend through their own smithing skills or by getting a friend to make the desired variations.
The celery knife has its own folk history. Up until the early 1960s, it was completely flat, without the bend at the end. An Oxnard celery worker who had been a blacksmith in Mexico was the first to bend the last two inches of the knife, so that when he thrust it into the root of the celery it made a better cut at the bottom of the stalk. His improvisation was so successful that he started to buy the standard knives, convert them, and sell them to other apieros or to foremen, who distributed them to the men. He supposedly made so much money refashioning the knives that he retired from the fields. The knife company didn’t get around to manufacturing the knives with a bent, upturned end until years later. Apieros still reinforce the bend with a homemade weld, and dismiss a knife unmodified from the store as el bruto—unfinished.
Celery Crew, Pajaro Valley, 1982. Photo by Fred Chamberlain.
“The only knives that are any good are called Ontario,” Maniz said many years after leaving the fields:
I think the steel is better. They come from Canada. They are famous, those knives. But even those knives the people adapt, reinforcing the bend with a weld. Any knife without the reinforced weld is worthless. With a good knife you can work all day without getting tired. With a bad knife you are wasted in a couple of hours. A person who does not know celery, and who has a new knife in his hand—I swear to you, he could not cut a single piece of celery. . . .
And, you know, the knives are passed around quite a bit. Some sell for thirty dollars, some for twenty. Among friends they are given away. Of course, nobody is going to sell his favorite knife. No. You can’t buy somebody’s favorite knife. He might give it to you. But you couldn’t buy it.5
Apieros talk a lot about their knives. They discuss the differing qualities of the steel, the feel of the handle, and the correct angle of the lift at the end of the knife. When a new man is learning how to cut, people come over to help him out, to teach him how to do it right. After some instruction, they might take his knife and demonstrate, just as a tennis instructor can only talk so long before taking the racket out of the student’s hands and telling her to watch. With the knife in their hands, the teachers finally understand the problem. The knife is dull, they say, or it is made of the wrong kind of steel, or the balance between the handle and the blade is wrong, or the fan at the end is too broad or too narrow, or the angle at the end is too steep or too flat. New men might buy more than a few different celery knives (some from the very pros who are giving them instructions), trying to get the perfect one that will make them good cutters. “Es el cuchillo,” those trying to learn jokingly tell each other. “It is all in the knife.”
Celery is planted only inches apart, and unlike lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, and many other vegetables, the worker cuts every piece. Usually the celery is cut with three strokes. For the first cut the apiero grabs the celery with his non-knife hand at about midstalk. He bends the plant back slightly and, with a short thrust of the knife, cuts the piece of celery at the root, using the angled, fan end of the knife. Just where to cut it, and the exact angle of the first thrust, is part of the skill. Every piece of celery is a little different, so where the first cut lands varies. Cut it too high, and all the individual stalks will separate; it will no longer be a whole piece of celery. Cut it too low, and the next stroke will be more difficult. Cut it at the wrong angle, and some of the outside stalks will be lost.
If the first cut is made correctly, the worker lifts the celery to a horizontal position parallel to the ground and makes the second cut, a sharp downward thrust with the straight edge of the knife, squaring off the first cut at the root. As he finishes this cut he loosens his hold on the knife to make a circular motion with his hand at the just squared-off root, trimming away the remaining loose strands and tendrils. While trimming these “suckers” he turns the piece of celery over with his other hand and then makes the third cut, which trims the top edge of the piece of celery and leaves it about fourteen inches long. Then he drops the celery on top of all the trimmed stalks that protect it from the dirt. When a worker is learning, he masters the strokes, develops his own style, and takes his time. An experienced apiero does the whole operation in one fluid motion, at a rate of about one piece of celery every three to five seconds.
People who can do it well are a sight to behold. The fastest cutter at West Coast Farms in the mid-1970s was nicknamed Tremendo. He was not tall; he had earned his name with his massive chest and arms. He had Indian features, came from a small town in Michoacán, and was particularly robust, on a job where everyone is vigorous. He was one of the younger men, in his early twenties. Piece-rate crews do not generally have teenagers on them; most people are between their mid-twenties and their mid-thirties, with a sprinkling of veterans in their forties and fifties, and sometimes even sixties. Very young men don’t have enough endurance to do this work, some apieros say, pointing out that long-distance runners (unlike sprinters) reach their peak when they are middle-aged. Others say that the young are too easily distracted to get through a season, or that the only way to make yourself do this work is if you face deep necessity and obligation, and the young have not lived long enough for that. Quite simply, they say, it is a job for family men, not bachelors. Tremendo, young and with neither wife nor children, was an exception on the crew.
His cutting technique was nothing to marvel at. What made him special was the energy with which he went about his task. He rarely straightened up or paused at the end of a row, and he seemed to get stronger as the day went on, like the NBA great Moses Malone, who at the height of his career came on strongest in the fourth quarter, earning himself the nickname Train, as in “this train just keeps on comin’.” Tremendo didn’t start quickly, but usually by midmorning he was ahead of the other cutters, and he always extended his lead in the afternoon. He worked alongside his compadre, Jose Olivarez, who was not as fast, so during the day Tremendo would move over to Jose’s row and give him a little ride, enabling the two men to remain close together as they worked. That in itself was not unusual; sometimes even three people would help one another out in this way. What was remarkable was that Tremendo could do it and still lead the crew.
One Thursday, Tremendo was challenged to a race. It wasn’t a formal challenge, not begun with a bet or a dare or even a word, as far as anyone could tell, and most of the workers didn’t even realize the race was happening until it was well under way. There was a man on the crew who usually worked as a closer, stapling shut the filled boxes of celery. He was called Manguera (“hose”), because his body was so flexible. He was also called el Joker, because he could do any job on the crew well—cut, pack, close, or make and distribute boxes. On Monday he had traded positions with a cutter and spent the whole day cutting, which was odd because the position of closing the boxes belonged to him by seniority, and closing is easier than cutting. He kept quiet about what he was doing, telling those who asked only that he wanted to “loosen up my back,” which, as Pablo Camacho later remarked, was like a scorpion saying he wanted to sharpen up his sting.
Manguera’s stroke was beautiful. Long and narrow, his movements fluid, he made the job appear effortless, as if the celery were gliding through his hands and floating to the ground below. He often made his first thrust of the knife so accurately and cleanly that he didn’t have to make the second cut. He just had to clean the end of the celery with the short circular motion of the side of his knife hand and then cut the top end off and drop it to the ground. By sparing himself the middle cut, he saved a lot of time. He worked Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday this way, staying in the middle of the pack, loosening up his back. On Thursday, at some point before the morning break, Manguera, several rows away from Tremendo, was working ahead of him. This was not happenstance. It had to be a race.
It turned out to be a long race: about six hours, with a half hour for lunch and two ten-minute breaks. A marathon takes about three hours, and the competitors aren’t stooped over, with dangerous knives in their hands. The two cutters were soon working far ahead of the rest of the workers, who stood up for long periods to watch, thereby holding up the general progress of the day’s work. There was no clear finish line, as foremen hardly ever tell the crews how long they are going to work. How much apieros cut and pack depends on how many boxes the brokers will sell that day, and foremen say that if they were to tell the workers one thing in the morning it might change by the afternoon, so it is best not to tell them anything at all.
But if the foremen at West Coast Farms that day didn’t help the race by establishing a finish line, neither did they hurt it by hassling the two racers about the quality of their cuts or by telling the other workers to stop watching and hurry up. The race was the event of the day. Even the supervisor, who usually didn’t spend much time in the fields, spent a good part of the day watching the two men work.
Nothing dramatic happened. Neither man dropped dead of a heart attack. Nobody keeled over with a back spasm. No fingers were cut. Manguera now works as a high-in-demand handy man in Watsonville, a true joker, and suffers no particular aches and pains that he could trace to his years as an apiero and strawberry picker. Tremendo has not been so lucky. His chronic back pain earns him a small disability check but prevents him from doing physical labor. That is hard on him, but he and his wife have managed: they run licensed daycare out of their home that supports their family of five. Although that one-day race did not do him in, Tremendo’s bad back is certainly a legacy of his time in the fields.
Manguera built up a big lead. At lunchtime it looked insurmountable. But after lunch he began to fade, and on came the big train. As he gained on his challenger, Tremendo began to bellow out screams of joy. It was a slow process; Tremendo was gaining but Manguera did not collapse, and when the crew stopped for the afternoon break, the foreman marked the place where the cutting would stop for the day. The mark seemed to clinch victory for Manguera, as there didn’t seem to be enough time for Tremendo to catch him. And that is the way it happened, but with a twist. Twenty yards before Manguera got to the finish line, he straightened up and stopped cutting in his row. Then he walked over to Tremendo’s row and, starting at the finishing point, cut back toward Tremendo, giving him a ride. In no more than five minutes Tremendo’s row was done. Then the two of them walked back to Manguera’s row and finished the last twenty yards, talking, comparing strokes, standing up while they were trimming the celery, enjoying the end of the day together.
“It is back breaking work,” people say, and although backs don’t exactly break, back pain is nearly universal in the fields, and back injuries are common. The work stresses the muscles and the frame. From bending over much of the day, the muscles in the back get overstretched and strained. The long up and down muscles in the front of the torso get overcontracted, which is why it is hard to stand up at the end of a row. The overworked muscles sometimes spasm, and cause farm workers to spend days in bed on their backs or crawling around their homes on their knees. Also, while a worker is bent over, the front of the vertebrae get compressed, which over time causes arthritis. All of these conditions taken together—overstretched back muscles, overcontracted stomach muscles, overworked vertebrae—are dangerous to the discs between the vertebrae, and in the worst cases can cause those discs to bulge, slip, or rupture.
Agriculture ranks third (behind construction and transportation and public utilities) in nonfatal job-related injuries and illnesses in California. Nationally, “overexertion” is listed as the most prevalent cause of injuries on the job. Such statistics are incomplete and certainly underestimate damage to the back. The workers’ refusal to complain while working does not alter the grim reality. Cesar Chavez’s bad back was emblematic. Most people who spend a significant number of years working in the fields have chronic back problems.6
Only infrequently do apieros cut themselves. Usually the cut is bandaged in the fields, and the cutter goes back to work. During the UFW years, if the cut was bad, the worker was given another job not as demanding on the hand—making and carrying boxes, or packing, or even closing the boxes—and somebody else took the person’s place cutting. This slowed the crew down a bit, which meant everyone had to work longer to make that day’s quota of boxes, but it was done in good cheer. It was a decision made among the crew, not by the foreman.
On piece-rate crews the workers drive themselves hard. Celery crews in the 1970s raced through the day, starting slowly as they warmed up in the morning, hitting their fastest pace in the two hours between the ten-minute morning break and the half-hour lunch, and then slowing down in the afternoon. The faster they got the work done, the sooner the workday was over, and the higher the hourly wage. On many days crews worked six hours or less, which was the way the workers liked it. Foremen still gave workers a lot of grief. But, generally, they watched out for the quality of the pack, and tried to slow down the crews so that they would do a better job. Foremen also wanted workers to specialize as much as possible, as they thought this resulted in a higher-quality pack. But because rotating the tasks of cutting, packing, closing, and making and distributing the empty boxes is easier on the body, workers would often trade positions for a while among themselves.
The pain is why most apieros prefer to pack celery rather than cut it. Packing requires constant up-and-down motion, as the packer picks up pieces of celery off the ground and then straightens up and puts them in boxes that ride about waist-high on the large, wheel-barrow-like burro. Up and down all day long is not easy on the back, either, but it is easier than the near-constant bent-over position that cutting requires.
Celery is packed in five different sizes, as many as four sizes at a time. The biggest celery goes into boxes containing eighteen pieces, the next biggest into boxes of twenty-four pieces, then thirty, thirty-six, and forty-eight as the celery decreases in size. The boxes all have their special places on the burro, and particular ways that they are filled, so that the packers know where and in what direction (root end left or right) to put the celery, and can count in multiples of six, rather than one piece at a time. The basic problem is that lying on the ground, all the different sizes of celery are mixed together. The packer has to pick up the same size celery and place it in the right box as quickly as possible, keeping track of what goes where and when a box is full. Some cutters, unable quickly to master the intense concentration and careful counting, decide to stick with the job they already know, despite the pain. Others prefer cutting for what they consider the privilege of working alone.
Packers work three men to a burro, packing behind three cutters. The three have a highly coordinated routine. Two of them work less than an arm’s distance from each other, and the third not much farther away. If one man is slow, the others can help out, “carrying” him for a while, but the responsibilities of the three men are clearly defined and conscientiously executed, unless there are special circumstances—somebody is learning the job, or not feeling well for a few days, or hung over in the morning, or distracted by a problem at home. These trios often stay together for years, and sometimes are made up of close relatives. All sorts of informal adjustments and accommodations are made among them, as is required by the surprises of life and work. But bad trios do not last as long as bad marriages, as bickering packers damage the whole crew, and the squabblers return to cutting or trade places with other packers sooner rather than later.
During the UFW years, some piece-rate crews formed soccer teams and played in recreational leagues, at night or on weekends. Well paid, skilled, proud of their jobs and their abilities, they were greatly admired in farm-worker communities. The cooperative nature of so much of their work prepared them for various kinds of collective action. The dominant ethos of the crews, that combination of solidarity and competition that is essential to a successful sports team, had always been useful in coordinating harvest-time job actions, like slow-downs and short work stoppages. It was also useful in building a union. The piece-rate crews of Salinas were not the only workers who built the organization that ultimately became the UFW, nor even the first. In fact, in the beginning none of the people who founded the union were thinking much about the ways the jobs in the fields had already organized workers, and what that might mean for a union. Only later would it be clear that the character of the work itself was as pivotal in the story of the union as the workers who did it and as telling as the character and deep background of the founders.
