Working Conditions

Overview

Agricultural laborers worked in fields, orchards, packing sheds, and processing plants, producing food to sustain the domestic population. The specialization of labor created different classes of workers who performed specific tasks over and over again. “Stoop labor,” illustrated in the photograph below, involved bending to the ground to harvest crops such as potatoes or strawberries. This physically demanding work took a toll on the body, making these jobs less desirable. The specialization of farm labor and the conditions of precarity that all migrant farm workers faced created a state of competition between workers. Often, the least protected class of workers - those without U.S. citizenship - ended up performing stoop labor and other less desirable jobs.

Questions

What are some of the impacts of stoop labor and other physically demanding farm labor?
How do we determine which workers are protected from physically demanding labor?

Man with a large burlap sack attached to his belt stoops down to harvest potatoes in front of other men and machines working an in agricultural field.

Curved Spine of an Agricultural Laborer as He Picks Potatoes Links to an external site., Henry Pope Anderson Papers, larc.ms.0422, Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University.