ABSTRACT
The production of fresh fruits and vegetables for international markets is one of the most lucrative sectors in today’s global agricultural industry. The fresh-produce industry relies on an international division of labor in which the Global South specializes in the production of high market value crops for middle-class consumers in the Global North. In this chapter I unpack the labor regime of the fresh-produce industry in Mexico’s Baja California, one of the most advanced agricultural export regions in the country. I refer to this regime as regimented flexibility, a system based on a reorganization of space–time arrangements to maximize the extraction of surplus value from farmworkers, increase labor productivity, and achieve greater capital accumulation. Examining the workplace regime of modern agricultural production, I sustain, unveils the larger social process by which neoliberal agrarian policies are transforming indigenous migrant laborers into a new class of proletarian workers for the global fresh-produce industry.
