LABOR: Battle of Consciences

Conscientious Labor Secretary James Mitchell works hard at trying to be a good Republican shepherd to all U.S. workingmen. With prosperity and union organization, most of his flock live fat in the fold—but he worries over one nagging exception. Wandering up and down the nation’s agricultural circuits, from California to Washington, Texas to Michigan, and Florida to New York, more than 500,000 migrant farm workers, following trails of seasonal planting and harvesting, work and live in scrabbling poverty which Mitchell calls a “national disgrace”: average earnings in 1957 of $892, hourly wages as low as 16¢, flagrant violations of child-labor laws, substandard housing, dangerous transportation, inadequate sanitation and health facilities. And he thinks the Federal Government should do something about it.*

Conscientious Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson strives to be a good Republican shepherd to U.S. farmers, hopes mightily to lead them out from under the oppressive fold of Government regulation, so that they can profit by their own ingenuity and hard work, and not by scandalous subsidy. Last week Ezra Benson’s conscience clashed with Jim Mitchell’s conscience over migrant labor in one of the few public Cabinet rows of the Eisenhower Administration.

Mitchell wants the Labor Department to deny U.S. agricultural labor recruitment services to farm employers who do not pay migrants the prevailing local wage rates, do not provide adequate housing or safe transport facilities. In two days of public hearings in Washington last week, farm employment groups battered his plan (earlier 29 farm-state Congressmen, mostly Southern Democrats, had branded the proposal “illegal, immoral and impracticall”). Alone among farm organizations, the National Farmers’ Union came to Mitchell’s aid, and the Very Rev. Msgr. George G. Higgins, of the”National Catholic Welfare Conference, praised Mitchell for “the greatest kind of courage.”

At week’s end, Ezra Benson called in the press, read a letter he had sent to Mitchell. Its gist: “The proposed regulations . . . retain the concept of federal intervention and administrative control and regimentation that is contrary to the principles of this Administration and that is so repugnant to agriculture.” Benson’s remedy for the migrants: more study.

*Farm labor is specifically excluded from wage-and-hour provisions of the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act, from minimum wage laws in every state except Wisconsin, and from unemployment insurance in every state but Hawaii.