Abstract
Kathleen Schwartzman’s The Chicken Trail is a fascinating glimpse into the poultry industry. Her view is global in nature, as the production of poultry in the United States involves migrant labor and foreign markets. The workers are recruited from Mexico, and the product is exported to Mexico. The relationship between foreign markets, migration, and poultry means that changes in the poultry industry impact both Mexico and the United States. The labor force of the poultry industry has changed much since the 1990s, shifting from predominately African American workers to Mexican migrant workers. Schwartzman addresses this transition, highlighting why the jobs are no longer filled by African Americans in the United States. Importation of poultry into Mexico has decreased employment opportunities within Mexico, encouraging Mexicans to head to the United States to seek employment.
The book is well written and thoroughly researched. The research questions are appropriately answered using multiple sources. The author employs several methods, from ethnographic narratives to quantitative analysis, to address her research question. She relies on a variety of sources, as the data come from the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Census, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Mexican Migration project. Data also come from Mexican sources including the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the Bank of Mexico. Using these data, the author is able to address what has happened to the poultry labor force and why a transition has occurred, outlining how the industry has impacted Mexican poultry producers.
Schwartzman investigates why the poultry labor force has shifted away from African American workers in favor of Mexican migrant workers. The book makes an interesting argument that the poultry business in the United States pushed African American workers out of poultry and recruited Mexican migrant workers to replace them. According to the author, the poultry industry was restructuring, and conflict over unionization led the industry to shift to Mexican migrant labor. African Americans did not leave the industry to pursue better opportunities, but were forced out by business owners who sought a more compliant labor force who would work for lower wages with few benefits. African Americans did not leave their poultry jobs, but were turned away. The author addresses many different reasons why African Americans stopped working in poultry, but increased Latino migration appears to have been the main factor. For African Americans, the result is higher unemployment and poverty. Schwartzman points out that Mexican migrants were preferred by the poultry industry over African American workers as they were viewed as more productive than African American workers and less inclined to complain about employment conditions due to their vulnerable status.
Schwartzman highlights the relationship between undocumented Mexican migration to the United States and U.S. poultry exports to Mexico. Mexican workers were coming to work in the United States at the same time that U.S. capitalists were gaining access to Mexican markets. They gained access to Mexican markets through NAFTA, which lowered tariffs on U.S. poultry. Before NAFTA, the tariffs on poultry imports were at times 260 percent. With NAFTA, the export of U.S. poultry grew greatly from 1990 to 2010. Many factors beyond NAFTA opened up Mexican markets including the IMF and the World Bank. This process brought Mexico into the global market.
Globalization may have brought Mexico into the global market, but it limited the opportunities of Mexican citizens. The increased flow of migrants to the United States is attributed to the shrinking opportunities that NAFTA and neoliberalism created. The growth of the poultry industry in the United States offered an opportunity for many Mexicans who decided it would be better to migrate to the United States, even if it meant encountering the risks associated with undocumented migration.
Although this story is compelling, future research should perform more sophisticated multivariate analysis of the relationships reported in this book. In terms of statistical analysis, Schwartzman relies on very simple correlations that do not take into consideration the multitude of factors which might alter the findings. The author argues that Mexican immigration hurt the labor market outcomes of African Americans, but there are a lot of other factors which might have changed between 1990 and 2000 that should be acknowledged before we can be sure that it was immigration that impacted African American workers. Similarly, the author argues that there is a bivariate relationship between poultry export and undocumented immigration to the United States and claims that this relationship is not spurious. However, it is difficult to determine whether the relationship is spurious without controlling for competing arguments. The author later outlines other factors which might have influenced undocumented migration: for example, the peso devaluation appears to have occurred exactly when migration greatly increased. To be fair, the peso devaluation and poultry exportation were all influenced by the introduction of Mexico into the global economy.
The power of Schwartzman’s argument is that the economies of Mexico and the United States are firmly aligned. Mexicans who worked in poultry in Mexico were pushed out of the industry due to the increased exports dictated by NAFTA, which were meant to liberalize trade relationships between Mexico and the United States. In turn, African American poultry workers in the United States were pushed out of the market when Mexican migrants came to the South to work in poultry. The author points out that poultry employers started the process by seeking other labor sources to fight off unionization and to lower the cost of production. In the short term, African Americans working in poultry were pushed out of the labor market, but future studies will need to establish what happened to such workers in the long term. Clearly, in the short term, the winners were the companies.