Paradoxes of the Border: Labor Shortages and Farmworker Minor Agency in Reworking California’s Strawberry Fields

I examine how strawberry growers’ experiences of a farm labor shortage have led them to attend to plant vigor and the conditions of strawberry harvesting as a labor recruitment strategy. Both allow harvest workers, who work primarily on piece rates, to earn more money per input of time. These were unexpected findings in a larger study in which I examine how California’s strawberry industry is responding to tighter regulatory restrictions for soil fumigants. Drawn from semi-structured interviews with strawberry growers and industry representatives, these data paint a picture of worker capriciousness in an industry in which loyalty has been a major form of labor control. In making the empirical case, I engage with the work of Wells, who wrote extensively about how industry structure and the natural characteristics of the strawberry had coalesced to discipline workers. Noting that her arguments revolved on conditions of labor surplus, I discuss recent changes in labor market conditions, brought about in part by the changed US border and immigration policy, that have given workers a modicum of leverage. Nevertheless, working conditions remain grueling and pay rates not substantially changed, suggesting that growers would prefer to tinker with the technological conditions of production than significantly alter prevailing wages. In noting workers’ apparent effect on the material conditions in which they work, this article contributes to discussions in labor geography on worker agency in shaping economic landscapes at the same time it speaks to the broader constraints farmworkers face in agricultural labor markets.