MAY is a rich, exciting month in the San Joaquin Valley. Vast hay meadows and alfalfa fields wave and ripple high and ripe in the breeze. Asparagus and beets need hoeing. There are onions, peas, potatoes, carrots. And cherries are red and must be picked in a hurry.
Migratory workers come to the valley from all sides, on foot and in prehistoric flivvers; and for a month from eight to nine thousand of them, mostly men, toil seven days a week. San Joaquin in May has work for nearly everybody who wants it, but wages are meager, ranging from seventeen to thirty cents an hour. You work hard under the hot sun and, lest you faint, you must eat solid food at least once a day; and that costs money. Evenings, unless you are a Spartan or very old, you crave, if not a girl who charges two bits, a glass of beer, and you drink two or three glasses against your better judgment. Thus you spend from day to day everything you earn, just to keep going. Then, with the last days of May, the rush is over, and through most of June only about three thousand temporary workers are needed in the valley; the chances are that you move on, with five thousand others, as poor as you were in April.
San Joaquin has many small farms owned and run by little people, most of whom are nice enough folk as husbands or wives or as parents or neighbors, and probably in other ways, but apt to be hard with migratory workers. The idea of paying the hands as little as possible and working them as hard as possible is in the air. Besides, caught in competition with the big corporation farms and ranches, the little people are "up against it," and some can't very well pay more than twenty-five cents an hour.
The big farms dominate--indirectly, but firmly--the valley's labor policy. They are owned by the big people in San Francisco and elsewhere, who are also in banking and shipping. Very often the land is leased, sometimes to Japanese; but in not a few cases the owners manage their farms, even if they happen to be big ones. Most operators, however, whether owners or lessees, turn the important work over to labor contractors or bosses. These contractors are Mexicans and Japanese, sprinkled with Americans and Italian-Americans, who, by and large, work on a shoestring. Petty would-be capitalists without money, trading in the energy and ability of others, they are bent of course on making as high a profit as possible. They have no labor camps or money for camps. Every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 they go into Stockton, the valley's principal city, and pick up a truckload of men, jamming as many as sixty or seventy into one truck. The trucks bring the men, ten, twenty, forty miles to the job, where they work an average of nine hours, and then are hauled back to town. They are paid only for actual time at work.
A few owner-operators have camps, but these are usually poor, showerless, and unsanitary. Some bunk ant board the men and profit in the process. One man went out on a farm at two bits an hour and had to pay a dollar a day for board. He worked an hour in this field, two hours in that orchard, but received wages only for actual labor time--nothing for going from field to orchard--and on quitting collected $1.40 for three days' work. But his net earning was only forty cents, for he had paid an employment agent a dollar for the job!
In cherries, which probably are the most important business in May, the following system is generally in effect: The owner engages a labor contractor to pick and pack the crop. He furnishes ladders, buckets, and packing boxes. He pays the contractor from thirty-five to forty-five cents a bucket for picking. The contractor goes to the so called "Skidway" or "slave market" at Market and Center streets in Stockton, hires the pickers at from twenty to thirty cents a bucket, and although his sole expense is that of running a truck or bus into town, makes from ten to fifteen cents on each bucket. The packing is a different process but is handled similarly.
At 4:45 a.m. streets around the Skidway in Stockton are jammed with men--Mexicans, Filipinos, Italians and ether foreigners, Americans from Oklahoma and Arkansas and probably every other state in the Union. Last night some of them looked like bums. They drank. Some drank on the curb pints of wine charged with "dynamite." Some slept in fifteen-cent flophouses or in the open, or spent the night in two-bit brothels. "Why not? What else is there to this life?" But now, quarter to five, with the rich California sun well up in the blue sky, none look like bums. They are sober. Workers. Thousands of them waiting to be bought off the curb for a day.
Huge trucks with trailers pull in. They are after men for beets. Two bits an hour. No, no more! Smaller trucks for cherry pickers. Two bits a bucket. No, no more! One truck offers twenty-seven and a half cents a bucket. There is a rush. Fifty men climb aboard. The contractor only needs twenty. He picks his crew. The others climb down.
Most trucks and buses have no! trouble filling up. But here is a guy--that is what the men call him in checked overalls, a white man, an American, who calls out coaxingly to the dense crowd on the curb. "Royal Anns," he says. "Good pickin', no kiddin'.;' He looks around, waiting. "Some guys made four bucks apiece yesterday." "Yeah, them and who else?" retort two or three workers from the crowd. Others "Christ! I wouldn't horse you," says the boss. "Oh, no! the men roar. They "know" the guy. They "know" several other guys, but this guy especially, and some of the fellows tell him from the curb what they think of him and what he did to a gang of cherry pickers a week ago. "Make it thirty-five cents and pay in advance!" He whines. He has two trucks to fill, wants sixty pickers. A woman in white pants who looks shyly at the men drives the other truck. She and the guy are working together. She is the sex appeal in the racket. Her pants are tight, and her arms bare, and her blouse is thin and low in front, showing part of her loose breasts. "Come on, boys!" she cries, "pickin' is real good where we're goin' today, near Lodi." But there is something decent in her, and she is genuinely embarrassed before all these men--Mexicans, Negroes, Filipinos, Slavs, Italians, and Americans, young and old--some of whom wince and smile sheepishly before her. She is a dame: what wouldn't a man do for a dame? And so, hungry in more ways than one, a few of them jump on her truck. The guy wants more and gives her a quick, sharp look. "Come on, boys!" she cries again and gives a gay little jump on the running-board so her breasts bounce in her blouse. By 5 :30 the guy fills both trucks at two bits an hour, and he and the woman drive off with their loads.
A worker still on the curb says, "Christ! we'll never stick!" "The hell we won't!" says another worker. "This is their last trick. They gotta use women to get us." "We gotta organize," says a third man. "Organize, organize--" The word goes around.
There is talk of organizing on the Skidway every morning. In the fields there is talk. Then, evenings, in the beer-joints, in pool halls, in flophouses, on the curb. The "stiffs" and "bums," as they call themselves, discuss what happened lately in Salinas, in Watsonville, in Santa Maria, where the Fruit and Vegetable Workers' Union recently won some demands in the lettuce and celery fields. They discuss the vigilante terror in Imperial Valley and the bloody riots in the fields at Venice and Dominguez Junction, near Los Angeles. There are arguments. Someone always says, "But you can't organize us! We're here today, there tomorrow. Bums. Tramps. Who'll organize us? The A. F. of L.? They don't want us!" "The reds want us." "We don't want the reds." "We don't want no politics." "You don't, don't you? I guess you don't want more than two bits an hour, either, do you? And you want to work twelve hours and get paid for nine, do you? And you want to rid ride on trucks twenty, thirty, forty miles each way to the job and back, and have the guts jolted outa you, do you?" "Oh, no. We don't want the A. F. of L.; we don't want the reds even if they want us. We just want to organize." "The reds are all right if they're like Harry Bridges. He's honest. Those guys on the docks in Frisco are making money. They're organized. What's the cliff, reds or not reds?" "Who's behind this Fruit and Vegetable Workers' Union?" "Whoever it is, they're O.K. What we need is some kinda tie-up with Bridges and his outfit, the Maritime Federation. We are all workers." "We need somebody to show us how to organize, run a union, pull a strike, win demands."
There is talk of Paul Scharrenberg, the A. F. of L. villain in charge of "organization" in agricultural fields for twenty years. "He did a swell job for the bosses. He didn't organize a single local." "The hay-balers organized a couple months ago, got a charter in Stockton, but the big shots in the A. F. of L. told 'em not to take in any field workers." "Those hay-balin' stiffs better take us in, because if they ever pull the pin on a job over chow or wages, you'll see what'll happen. A thousand stiffs will walk all over 'em and take their goddam jobs." "They don't want us. They are A. F. of L." "The top guys don't want us, sure, but we gotta talk to the stiffs, the rank and file. They'll take us in all right--if not right away, by and by." "Aw hell, we're just talkie'!" "Sure, we're talkie', but stiffs like us never talked before like we talk now; not since I. W. W. Stiffs like us are talkie' like this all over California, and there's close to three hundred thousand of us. That's a lot of stiffs, especially when most of 'em are talkie' the same thing. And what are we sayin'? Organize. We ain't got nothin' to lose and lots to gain. Look at those dock-wallopers in Frisco!"
One man asks another, "Are you a red?"
"Am I a red?" He reaches into his pocket and brings out three or four cherries. "Listen. Yesterday I picked cherries near Lodi and I stuck a few in my pocket." He crushes the cherries in his hand, then opens the hand. "This is how red I am." He laughs and everybody around him laughs.
It is 6: 30, then 7: 30; men are still talking on the Skidway; others are talking in the fields. At eight o'clock jobs begin to appear on the boards of employment agencies, Six men to hoe potatoes, seventeen and a half cents an hour. One hay hand, thirty dollars and board. You pay a dollar for the job.
"Organize--"
People who know anything about the agricultural labor situation in California hope and fear-some hope, others fear--that this summer there will be "hell to pay" in the rural districts and in the fields along the peripheries of large cities. Unions are being formed everywhere. Most of them are still small, some mere rank-and-file committees, but big enough to be effective centers of the growing union sentiment. Considerable strikes in July and August all over the state are almost a certainty, and the great agricultural interests, which are also the banking and shipping interests of California, are getting ready for them. Chiefs of police and sheriffs are well supplied with shotguns and tear bombs, strike-breaking agencies are busy and ready, and the high-ranking militia officers in the state are not unmindful of their importance in the impending struggle.
