Mobilizing for farmworker rights in an era of shifting legal and governance opportunities

Abstract

Farmworker movements have often been at the forefront of efforts to use the law to achieve social justice. While past generations of farmworker movements in the United States won gains by innovatively using state law and economic tactics to improve their working conditions, farmworkers today face a shifting landscape of law and governance stemming from the development of global value chains. This Article analyzes how contemporary farmworker movements are exploiting both “legal opportunities” and what we term “governance opportunities”— strategic openings for action arising from the contingent industry structures and private governance of global value chains. We analyze two cases of recent farmworker mobilization: Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida and Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) in Washington State. By comparing the strategic decisionmaking and processes through which these movements ultimately found success, we show how legal and governance opportunities are interdependent and interactive. Our analysis suggests that the governance opportunities that social movements pursue are highly dependent on the contingent legal contexts in which they operate. Legal opportunities provide important symbolic and constitutive effects for farmworker movements, but as we show, governance opportunities can provide movements with greater leverage and allow them to expand beyond the limited legal protections provided to farm labor. Examining the tactics of farmworker movements—workers that face multiple forms of marginalization— therefore offers significant insights into the strategic opportunities for social change amidst the changing relationship between public and private governance.