In the summer of 1937, the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), a breakaway faction from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), chartered a new union to organize agricultural laborers, from fields to processing factories, from Florida to Alaska, from California to New Jersey. This union, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), had a difficult, urgent mission: to represent and empower “hundreds of thousands of workers in the most bitterly exploited and least organized industries in America,” according to union president Donald Henderson. These people, who were not landowning farmers, harvested and processed the nation’s food, fibre, and tobacco for wages. They represented the full diversity of the American working class: African Americans, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, native- and foreign-born whites, Japanese Americans, and Filipinos. Women performed a large share and in some cases a majority of these low-paying, difficult jobs. Some were American citizens, but many lived under undemocratic regimes; others were immigrants, some subjects of American empire. To do so, the union faced off against a growing agribusiness industry, dominated by national and international corporations, that commanded what Henderson called one of the most “powerful lobbies in Congress, a lobby that controls the entire southern bloc of reactionary Democrats and Dixiecrats.”1 That lobby had shaped federal law, including the recent New Deal, to ensure the continued exploitation of these workers. No union, at the time or arguably since, attempted anything as audacious as what UCAPAWA tried to do.
The New Deal labor regime that proved so crucial in improving the lives of American workers, beginning with the National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, in 1935, excluded “agricultural labor.” This meant that all field workers—whether landowning farmers or farm laborers—were denied the new federal right to join a union, to seek remedy for unfair labor practices, and to collectively bargain. The 1935 Social Security Act also excluded “agricultural laborers” from disability, old age, and unemployment insurance. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created overtime, the federal minimum wage, and the ban on child labor, followed suit. While the explanations for these exclusions vary, scholars have identified a devil’s bargain at the center of the story: the New Deal improved the lives of workers in most industries but only by accommodating agribusiness interests and segregationists, usually represented by the same people, to deny crucial protections and rights from the workers who needed them most.2 The effort to unionize agricultural laborers among whom were large numbers of racial minorities and women thus faced off against ruthless opponents playing with a stacked deck. The odds were long.