Labor's Outcasts

"A much-needed examination of two intertwined institutional histories: the effort to unionize farmworkers from the New Deal era to the eve of the UFW set alongside the growth and evolution of the Bracero Program. Labor’s Outcasts exhibits a remarkable depth of archival research into the actions of officials in the labor movement and the government."--John Weber, author of From South Texas to the Nation: The Exploitation of Mexican Labor in the Twentieth Century

"Why are farmworkers so poor? It’s not because they pick crops or get dirty, Andy Hazelton reveals in this important book. It’s because farmworkers--“Labor’s Outcasts”--were left out of the protections of American labor law. When farmworkers tried to organize anyway, they were crushed by a government-run labor supply system known as the Bracero Program. Long before Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers appeared on the scene, a fierce little farm labor union led by a southern socialist and a Mexican farmworker turned academic took on the agribusiness industry to battle the Bracero Program and organize farmworkers on both sides of the US-Mexican border. This is a story you don’t know and you won’t forget."--Cindy Hahamovitch, author of No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor

"Labor's Outcasts shows how labor migration was a transnational phenomenon that benefitted growers and governments while it exploited the labor power of migrants and ignored the protests of citizen workers." --Pacific Historical Review