The hiring hall, the farm labor contractor, and the state: the United Farm Workers’ struggle for control over the labor supply

Understanding farm labor contractors to be central agents of exploitation in the California fields, the United Farm Workers demanded hiring hall provisions be included when it started winning contracts in the 1960s. Hiring halls were a crucial means for gaining control over the labor supply and thus a means for significantly decasualizing farm labor. Growers fought back, seeking to protect their traditional control over hiring. A multifaceted class struggle thus evolved, one in which the role of the state was also always important. This paper traces this struggle, showing how histories of the UFW, while noting the importance of the hiring hall to the fate of the union, underestimate both the significant challenges the union faced in running its halls and the intensity of the class struggle within which the halls operated. This article clarifies why and how the hiring hall became an important flashpoint in UFW's two-decade-long effort to unionize farmworkers, why it was so strongly resisted by growers, the role the state played in mediating this conflict, and, finally, the ways in which the UFW ultimately failed in its quest to wrestle control over the labor supply from growers and their allied farm labor contractors.