U.S.-Mexico Economic Integration: Labor Relations and the Organization of Work in California and Baja California Agriculture

Carol Zabin

Economic Geography, 1997, vol. 73, issue 3, 337-355

Abstract: Through a case study of tomato production in Baja California and California, this paper examines the impact of U.S.-Mexico economic integration on the organization of work and on wage trends and labor costs. In contrast to most previous scholarship, which is based on aggregate economic modeling, this paper provides an institutional approach to the study of NAFTA and longer-term U.S.-Mexico economic integration. I explore the impact of cross-border links in capital, product, and especially labor markets on labor costs, worker income, regional competitiveness, and the location of production. The paper demonstrates that in response to differing economic conditions and institutions in California and northwest Mexico, employers choose different labor management strategies, even though they use similar production technologies. In California, growers extract much higher productivity from workers by paying piece rates and are able to externalize the costs of recruiting, transporting, housing, and retaining their seasonal labor force. As a consequence, the binational differential in wages is much greater than the differential in per unit labor costs, Baja’s competitiveness is constrained by low productivity, and downward convergence in workers’ net income is occurring.

Date: 1997
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DOI: 10.1111/j.1944-8287.1997.tb00093.x

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