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This chapter discusses the influence of the agricultural lobbies on the government's preparations in food and agriculture. Agriculture lobbies, rather than food associations, are emphasized, primarily because of the different relationship each sector had with the government. Although both had direct access to governmental departments, the tie between Food Defence Plans and the food industry seems to have been based on cooperation, while that between the Agriculture ministry and the farming community was much more fragile and at times antagonistic. The focus is on four agricultural lobby groups: the National Farmers' Union, Central Landowners' Association, National Union of Agricultural Workers, and Women's Institutes. Other groups are also discussed, such as the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, the Royal Agricultural Society of England, the Agricultural Economics Society, and the loosely organized Farmers' Club and their concerns about defence matters.

Between 1963 and 1965, the imminent demise of the bracero program and the gathering momentum of the civil rights movement created new organizing opportunities and new resources for farm worker organizers. As the farm labor market grew unsettled, the arena of contention shifted from Washington to California and from legislative committees to the fields. Both the AFL-CIO's Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) and the Farm Workers Association (FWA) found they had to respond to these new conditions. In early 1965, both groups were drawn reluctantly into strikes. The difference was that the FWA leaders had the strategic capacity to learn from this experience in ways that the AWOC leadership did not. The FWA leaders actually enhanced their strategic capacity by expanding and diversifying their team. This development set the stage for the radically different ways the two groups would conduct the Delano grape strike beginning in September 1965.

On September 8, 1965, 800 Filipino workers organized by Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) struck ten Delano grape growers, demanding a wage of $1.40 an hour plus 25 cents per box. Two weeks later, on September 20, at least as many Mexican workers, organized by the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), struck an additional ten growers. By the time the rains brought the table grape harvest to an end in November, thirty-two growers had been struck, over 5,000 workers had indicated support for one of the two unions, and a movement began to emerge, intended to achieve the revolution in agriculture. Leaders of both the NFWA and AWOC made tactical choices about how to deal with a grape strike that neither had planned, but they drew upon different strategic capacities. AWOC organizers, operating within a strategic frame focused on local labor markets, targeted the hardcore of the table grape industry, counting on their members' skill and solidarity to provide sufficient leverage to get wages raised. Initially, the NFWA targeted growers based on where its constituency happened to work. However, a more specific target emerged as the experimental process of probing, pushing, and trying a little of this and a little of that continued.

This chapter explores the racial and labor landscapes of the Salinas Valley prior to World War II. The land that became the Salinas Valley was inhabited by Native Americans for 700 years before the Spanish, who colonized Mexico in 1521, arrived in present-day California. The valley's first residents were mostly migrants from the eastern United States, Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland. This chapter considers race-making in California after the U.S.-Mexican War and Gold Rush and how conceptions of racial difference led to the ethnic succession of Asian and Mexican workers in the state's fields. It shows how racialized beliefs that Asians and Mexicans were “naturally suited” for stoop labor led to other forms of discrimination It also discusses the strikes staged by “Okie” and Filipino agricultural workers during the 1930s, along with the antiunion hostility displayed in these moments of labor militancy and its impact on Mexican-origin workers.

This chapter develops the argument that deportability, as it applies to participants in a temporary migrant work program (TMWP) permitting circularity, is an essential condition of possibility for migration management. Under this paradigm, TMWPs—such as the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP)—which are perceived to represent “best practices” by, for example, offering participants the prospect of return, simultaneously sustain this approach to governing migration and represent its limit, including in contexts in which unionization is permissible. The legal struggle of SAWP employees of Sidhu & Sons to unionize, secure a first collective agreement, and maintain bargaining unit strength gives substance to these claims. It reveals how deportability is lived among temporary migrant workers and the central modalities through which it functions. As such, these SAWP employees' experience provides rich empirical evidence for a grounded critique of migration management revealing that, despite its call for “regulated openness,” this global policy paradigm introduces new modes of control.

This chapter describes hazards for agricultural workers. This is a large and exceedingly diverse group, with work—often precarious work—being performed by very young and very old persons, workers who are often economically disadvantaged, and workers of many nationalities and languages. There is considerable variation in power between employers and workers who frequently lack authorization for legal employment in the United States. Emphasis is placed on the hazards faced by migrant workers and immigrant workers. A number of factors, including public policy and the hazards involved with agriculture, such as pesticides, impact worker health and safety. Agricultural workers do not have many of the regulatory protections provided to workers in most other industries in the United States. Mechanical, large-animal, environmental, and toxicologic challenges all contribute to the markedly elevated rates of fatal and nonfatal injuries in these workers. High rates of stress and suicide affect these young workers.

This chapter details the attempts of the union representing Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) employees at Sidhu & Sons to organize, gain certification, and secure a first collective agreement for a bargaining unit encompassing participants in a temporary migrant work program (TMWP) permitting circularity. Through an analysis of the legal proceedings surrounding United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 1518's bid for certification, it explores SAWP employees' two important motivations for organizing: namely, to preempt termination without just cause prompting premature repatriation and to secure mechanisms for recall suitable to workers laboring transnationally. Local 1518, in seeking to represent SAWP employees, came up against tensions arising both from the Labour Relations Board's (LRB) understanding of its role of facilitating access to collective bargaining under the Labour Relations Code (LRC) and from limits posed by the parameters of the TMWP in play. Consequently, the unit obtained certification, but only on a restricted basis. At the same time, it introduced mechanisms aiming to limit termination without just cause prompting premature repatriation and offered novel provisions on recall and seniority.

Countries with more than 50 percent of their workers employed in agriculture are poor, and countries with fewer than five percent of workers employed in agriculture are rich. The shrinking farm workforces of richer countries are more vulnerable due to rising shares of migrant, guest, and unauthorized workers. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are immigration countries that confront the challenge of protecting vulnerable workers who do not have secure statuses. Farmers in richer European countries hire migrants from poorer countries, including intra-EU migrants from Central European countries such as Poland and Romania. Brazil is an agricultural powerhouse, the leading exporter of commodities ranging from coffee to sugar, whose farmers rely on migrants from the poorer north and northeastern states. Some Brazilian migrants face harsh conditions, leading to efforts to extirpate modern slavery.

This chapter examines three key aspects of the legal regime applicable (until recently) to agricultural workers in the UK: Agricultural Wages Orders, which applied to employees in agriculture, local or migrant; the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme, which enabled workers from Bulgaria and Romania to come to the UK on a temporary basis to work in agriculture; and the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, which regulates those who supply labour (whether local or migrant) in the agriculture sector. The chapter argues that the abolition of the first two elements of the regime, and recent reforms to the third, demonstrate a shift in regulatory policy from ensuring that agricultural workers enjoy decent terms and conditions of employment, given their vulnerability, to combating serious crime such as forced labour and trafficking. While the reasons for this are understandable, it is suggested that there is still room for a worker-protective agenda in the sector.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of temporary migrant work. In the age of migration management, temporary migrant work is a significant phenomenon in many countries where relative labor shortages fuel demands for temporary migrant work programs (TMWPs) that provide comparatively low labor standards and wage levels. In this context, workers laboring transnationally in such programs are turning to unions for assistance in attempt to realize and retain access to rights. Yet even those engaged in highly regulated TMWPs permitting circularity—or repeated migration experiences involving one or more instances of emigration and return—confront significant obstacles tied to their deportability. This book tells the story of Mexican nationals participating in a subnational variant of Canada's model of migration management program, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). It explores how these workers organized to circumvent deportability, but despite achieving union certification, securing a collective agreement, and sustaining a bargaining unit, ultimately remained vulnerable to threats and acts of removal.

The Algerian Communist Party (PCA) played a particularly important role in the anti-colonial movement in the Chelif region, a prominence that explains why it was chosen as the primary base for the ‘Red Maquis’ guerrilla force in 1956. Chapter 7 looks at the way in which the PCA, dominated by the French Communist Party, initially opposed nationalism and followed the orthodox Marxist doctrine that the peasantry could not constitute a revolutionary class, a vanguard role that could only be assumed by an industrial or urban proletariat. In the Chelif region the veteran communist and trade union leader Mohamed Marouf reflected this position and focused propaganda work on the farm labourers of the plain while neglecting the mountain peasants that were seen as a form of seasonal, blackleg labour. However, from 1932 onwards a minority movement began to emerge in the PCA that was favourable to a peasant-based strategy, and in 1944 this led to the creation of the Syndicat des petits cultivateurs (SPC). The peasant-based movement that developed in the Aurès, Tlemçen, and Chelif mountains during the late 1940s and prepared the ground for a later guerrilla movement.

This chapter examines migration from the Asia-Pacific region to Australia, with particular emphasis on the nexus between students' migration and eventual permanent settlement. It first considers the scale, composition, and trends in population mobility between Australia and Asia-Pacific countries, showing that it is more realistic to depict their migration relationship as a system involving a complex of two-way movements than as the north-south displacement that is conventionally invoked in the migration and development discourse. It also notes the exponential increase in movement from Asia and the Pacific to Australia in recent years, but this has been overwhelmingly selective of highly skilled groups, and it was only in 2008 that Australia announced a pilot scheme to bring in temporary seasonal agricultural workers from the region. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the consequences of the two-way movement for development in origin countries.

This chapter first estimates coverage of the labour force (mainly salaried) by contributory pensions in private and public systems, compares both estimates, and identifies problems in them. It then focuses on two major groups of workers that are difficult to cover: (a) the urban informal sector particularly self-employed, employees of microenterprises, and domestic servants; and (b) the rural sector including various types of agricultural workers, as well as peasants. It shows the importance of these groups in the labour force and summarizes their legal coverage status: compulsory, voluntary, and excluded or under restrictions or special regimes. This is followed by discussions of social assistance pensions for the uninsured and impact on poverty; coverage of the older population; and the impact of the reforms on coverage.

This chapter examines Native women's agency in the transformation of economic life in Central California over the century that followed the establishment of American jurisdiction in 1848. It focuses on Northfork Mono women' s seasonal migratory labor patterns in relation to their efforts to sustain family and community physical and social well-being under the complex circumstances of land dispossession particular to California. Native societies in California survived and persisted, despite overwhelming odds posed by land dispossession, largely as a result of women's resourceful efforts to maintain the kinship structures, and to continue aspects of cultural life tied to traditional subsistence activities as they also took on roles in the non-Native economy as agricultural workers.

This chapter argues that the deployment and circulation of narratives of (dis)possession by the devil, particularly among women, represent a gendered form of understanding marginality and of confronting exploitation, domination, and material adversity. The compelling presence of the devil and malevolent spirits called jinn in the Delta region of southern Yemen in the 1990s echo accounts of spirits, tricksters, or aye in West African and New World cultures. Moreover, Margaret Garner's life history as interpreted by Toni Morrison in Beloved connects readers with a spiritual world of memory and possession that mirrors the experience of women spiritual healers and their patients in Yemen's al-Wadi Delta. Ultimately, internal and external struggles for control dominate Morrison's narrative of enslaved American women and the lives of women agricultural workers in southern Yemen.

This chapter deals with contesting the sentencing guidelines regime put in place decades earlier. The chapter begins with newly appointed Gregory Presnell’s questioning of the 1984 guidelines as established in 1984. The chapter analyses Presnell’s decisions while also examining the disparities of sentencing guideline for those convicted of possession of crack versus powder cocaine. The chapter then turns to the increasing unpopularity of the Patriot Act, and challenges of the act in the Middle District. U.S. Attorney Paul I. Perez’s defence of the act is discussed. The chapter then turns the prosecution of one of the the Middle District’s most controversial defendants: University of South Florida engineering professor Sami Al-Arian, who was accused of funding and supporting terrorist acts while a professor. Several cases are included. A number of prosecutions of persons employing immigrant laborers in inhumane conditions are included. The cases of other foreign nationals charged with doing illegal business in the district are covered. Among these are cases involving illegal arms sales, international drug smuggling, money laundering, illegal importation of exotic animals, the illegal entry of war criminals into the U.S., and disputes involving conflicting international claims of treasure salvors.

This chapter discusses the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) that was signed by President Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1986. It explains how IRCA provided legal status to anyone who could prove continuous residency in the United States since January 1, 1982. The chapter discusses the Special Agricultural Workers provision for people who had toiled over perishable crops for at least ninety days between May 1, 1985 and May 1, 1986. It focuses on the Márquez familys' story, which offers insights into some of the core elements of immigration enforcement in the mid- to late 1980s and beyond. It also highlights how the Immigration and Naturalization Service targeted the vast majority of people for deportation because they entered the country without authorization or overstayed a visa.