It is a mistake to assume that low profits for farmers do not mean that workers are not exploited. Farmers' low profits may be due to monopolistic control of the marketing or processing companies' high interest rates and high land rents. A better indicator of workers' exploitation is profits plus land rents. This conveys a very different picture--land rents (or price of land) have increased enormously in California since World War II.

The income of a small grower renting land and providing most of the labor on his farm is determined by the level of wages for farm labor in large farms producing the same crops. In bad years, and even normal years, it is hardly surprising that a small farmer ends up with a lower income than his workers. California is no land for small growers.

The fate of farm laborers in northern California--wages, health, housing--is better than in other states. Better, for instance, than on the eastern seaboard. This doesn't make that fate any better. Interstate migrancy has diminished due partly to mechanization, and partly to other forms of labor exploitation such as day-haul programs, which make it possible to tap the large pool of unemployed in the cities. In any case, being a seasonal laborer, migrant or non-migrant, means dangerous work (farm work is the third most dangerous occupation in California), low wages, abysmally low yearly incomes, unemployment and poor or nonexistent housing.

I know what the "unionization privileges" (sic) of California and Arizona are. I have some knowledge of the history of agricultural developments in the Golden State, of its undemocratic system of land ownership and farming. The story of migratory labor from the early Chinese to the Mexicans is as old as California itself. Workers' exploitation, racism, red-baiting, wage-fixing by agricultural employers, violent repression of the civil rights of farm workers with the active collaboration of the police and the courts, tax-payers' subsidies used to boost the profits of landlords and agribusinesses, from the story of Owens Valley ("Chinatown") to the West Side swindle and the importation of bracers, the bloody battles fought by early squatters and the recent murder of Juan de la Cruz on a picket line--all these are permanent features of the great agricultural valleys of California.

Having read thousands and thousands of pages on farm labor, I find the slanderous arguments about Chavez and the farmworkers very familiar. This sort of attack to hurt the very people they are trying to help is a common agribusiness and growers' rhetoric.

Jean-Pierre Berlan is with the Institut-National de la Recherche Agronomique in Paris, and was a research fellow at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He is working on a book on Californian agriculture.