ABSTRACT
Another way to explain the comparison between Arvin and Shafter would be in terms of how successful the managers were in defusing the inevitable conflict between capital and labor in the shape of the antagonism between the growers and the trade unionists among the campers. At Shafter the struggle came out into the open, what with Bud Fisher’s radical CIO column, the farm-owners’ furious reaction to it and the reverberations in the Bakersfield Californian . Within the camp too, dissension took on the vocabulary of class conflict, what with the campers’ objection to manager Barrie’s wife associating with “Shafter big shot women,” and Ray Mork’s reference to a “mob” of migrants, goaded on by “troublemakers.”
