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Legal Conflict and Class Structure: The Independent Contractor-Employee Controversy in California Agriculture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Miriam J. Wells
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Abstract

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This article examines the interconnection between legal conflict and class structure in American agriculture. Law, as seen in the example of the California strawberry industry, is intimately involved in the transformation of economic systems and class relations and is itself affected by those changes. The impact of the law on social class varies across industrial subsectors and over time. In this case legal distinctions, in the context of changing political pressures and technoeconomic constraints on production, have encouraged the adoption of sharecropping. This form of production alters the legal status, economic interests, and subjective identification of workers, thus creating a new basis for future class interrelations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , 1987 , pp. 49 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

This research has been supported by the Agricultural Experiment Station and the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences of the University of California, Davis. I am especially grateful to Marty Bennett, Jane Collier, Ben Orlove, Bernadette Tarallo, and Beverly Lozano for their invaluable suggestions on sources and analysis and to the latter two for their assistance in legal documentary research.

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