This content traces the development of significant regulations and organizations in the early 20th century, primarily within the agricultural and labor sectors, highlighting how public outcry, investigative journalism, and the need for worker and consumer protection led to landmark legislation and the establishment of crucial institutions.
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okay so we're getting into the 1900s here
here and
there was a publication by upton sinclair
sinclair
i think it was first published in 1905
perhaps it was written in 1905 and
published in 1906
doesn't matter it was right about that
period of time
but it was a groundbreaking book because
it exposed what was going on in the
chicago meat packing industry
there were extremely unsanitary
conditions going on and it wasn't just
the chicago meat packing industry that
was just what was being highlighted
because it was what this
author often sinclair was able to uncover
uncover and
and
it was appalling
the things that were going on in the
meat industry and
and
it outraged public it outraged a lot of
people a lot of people pointed fingers
at this book saying this is a bunch of
that what the industry is doing is
garbage so it actually
led to a presidential commission to
generate the neil reynolds report and
that verified much of what was in that
book as true
and certainly
it led to other
actions and laws to again protect the public
public
so we're still in that late 1900s 1800s
early 1900s period but we're we got a
long way to go to fix things to make
that this whole book the jungle is a
really important landmark in terms of
a snapshot in the history of some of the
bumps and bruises in the agriculture industry
i
mentioned the precursor to the
pure food and drug act earlier but now
it officially
becomes the pure food and drug act in 1906
1906
and i'm sure that was a lot of the
outrage and
public sentiment coming out at the time
the book the jungle was
the right book at the right time with
the right mentality of the population
ready to hear that and wanting to do
something about it it's like we can't go
on living like this this is not okay
companies can't do that we have to fix it
it so
so
on comes the book along comes
these new
regulations our laws and regulations
pure food and drug act
as well as the federal meat inspection
act these are direct
results of the
uh
1910 the insecticide and fungicide act
was passed it's now called fifra
fifra
the fungicide insectis no the federal
insecticide fungicide
rodenticide act
but the earliest pesticide act was 1910.
we're not even to world war one yet and
we're already having
controls and regulations about
pesticides back then they were really dangerous
dangerous
they still are but at least they're
highly regulated we have safe ways of
handling them but
it was bad in the late 1800s early 1900s
the first farm bureau farm bureau is a
massively important organization in
agriculture there's the federal farm
bureau and all of the state's farm
bureaus and county farm bureaus we have
our own monterey county farm bureau
right in salinas and the very first one
woodrow wilson in the department of
really important to understand how
workers were being abused
work long hours poor pay
totally outrageous things
going on in terms of how businesses were
handling the workforce and
we needed some rules
rules
to say no
this people
need lives people need protections
people need
to be able to
have some rules to protect them it's not
just about you do whatever you want
business because it's all about profit
it still feels that way sometimes but we
have to be thankful for all the things
that happened
in the last
and it's because of things like this
department of labor act that allows us
some of the protections we have today
1914 the smith-lever act formalized
cooperative agriculture extension work
so we have that till today we have our
farm advisors office in salinas on
abbott street and
and
so in california it's all done through
the university of california largely
through uc davis and
and
so we have all this all of this
extension work which uses the resources
of the university system and the college
land grant system to perform
agricultural research
and use that agricultural research to
improve our ability to grow
effectively to
control pests and diseases effectively
and then get that information
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in most counties they actually organized
through farm bureaus initially and the
smith labor act did the extension work
under the umbrella of the
farm bureaus now it's done primarily
through universities and farm bureaus
have been more of an education
going towards the farmers and
lobbying going towards our politicians
so i will say this
since i mentioned the word lobbying
a lot of people think of lobbyists as
something that's a bad thing and
uncontrolled money in a in politics is
not a good thing i will definitely agree
with that
but people and industries do need voices
because if i'm
a legislator
in sacramento
i might be
formerly a school teacher i might
formally be formerly being
an attorney or a carpenter who knows
what my background is but i don't know
everything i can't know about all
industries so i need people to tell me
what's going on in agriculture
i need to be educated so i can make a
good decision as a
representative of my elected
constituents and that's the purpose of lobbying
lobbying
that's a really crucial purpose for lobbying
lobbying
you need lobbyists period
period
the problem is
mixed mixings of lobbying and money
and we will
support your candidacy in order to
do what we want vote the way we want
take this piece of
legislation that we as lobbyists wrote and
and
if you can push this into law we really
appreciate it by the way here's a
hundred thousand bucks for your
re-election campaign
that's where the problem
uh begins it's all about money where the
problem is
if you forget about
the money part as a
realize that's a separate issue
lobbying is crucial
you need people who can
individuals come from public
public
representatives who understand various
issues and educate your legislature legislators
legislators prior
prior
to the development of or during the
development of new laws and regulations
there's no way they can do a good job if
they don't have lobbyists
and so we have the farm bureau as one of
the major lobbying organizations
um so i think you've got a little bit of
my politics in there i try to keep it
out as much as i can here and there but
i think that's an important one lobbying
i think is something that's getting a
bad name
for the wrong reasons lobbying is
important lobbying is crucial we need it
what we need to do is get money and lobbying
lobbying separated
separated
that's when you corrupt the system anyway
anyway
on to the next one 1915 the clayton act
um it exempts unions from the sherman
antitrust act
huge remember i mentioned before about
antitrust you can't get together
to work out some sort of a back room
manipulate the market
so
what about a union
businesses were saying no no no unions
are illegal you can't have people coming
together and working on these deals and
you you know you've got the uh
farmworkers union which didn't exist
back then but let's just say the farm
workers union with farm workers from
40 different companies coming together
to try to negotiate working conditions
and safety conditions and all these
other things
that are important for
for
the workers
because that would be considered a
violation of antitrust and in a way
they were right the way the sherman
antitrust act was written you could
argue that unions were illegal
and so the clayton act came in to say no
no no no that's not the purpose individuals
individuals
don't have power
as individuals
businesses hold all the cards and all
the power so businesses
must comply with anti-trust to protect the
the uh
uh
population the public and the workers but
but
individuals can create unions to give
them some sort of
equal power to negotiate and discuss and
work out deals
deals
with business
so now the union
has the ability
to have some power to negotiate working
conditions for the workers
with their respective businesses
and so this 1915 clayton act is huge
and there's a lot of different sentiment about
about
pro-union anti-union and i've heard a
lot of anti-union talk over the last 10 years
years
and people talking about how um
um
unions do nothing but create lazy
workers and
um and protect people who don't do
anything and they're collecting a whole
bunch of money and getting fat off of
your dollars
there's a lot of uh individual
individual
tiny stories that give some sort of
legitimacy and truth to these kinds of arguments
arguments
but again i'm gonna
let some of my own personal politics uh
uh
come out here
unions are crucial
without unions we wouldn't have
40-hour work weeks or
minimum wages we wouldn't have overtime
pay we wouldn't have
worker protections we wouldn't have
anything that we take for granted today and
and unions
have turned what has been absolutely
absolutely
atrocious abominable behavior of businesses
businesses in
in
the history of the world
and at least in this country the unions
have allowed a
a rational
rational
ability for
working conditions to be
spelled out in the law
are there stories where unions do stupid
things or or
take advantage of situations yeah sure
there are some
there's some bad stories and i've been
pissed off at some unions like what the
hell did you do that for i've seen
unions protects people that have no
right being
protected um uh
uh
just a quick example there were two
people at a company
that i was not working for but i was
involved with the situation and
and
they basically worked for about 10
minutes every hour and took 50 minute
breaks because
nobody paid attention for 10 15 years
they had a routine
of doing their 10 minutes of work and
then going and sitting down and drinking
coffee and doing their little cheese
when they reorganize the company the
the new supervisor is like no we're
going to reorganize things people are
going to work you take your breaks when
breaks are due you take your lunch when
lunch is due but
we got a lot of things that need to be
done around here you're going to work for
for
a couple hours and then take your break
and work for a couple hours and then
take lunch
the union came in and was
livid and protecting these people that
wanted basically to work for about
an hour out of every eight hour shift
and and that was pathetic
um was i pissed at the union yeah
do i support unions
not in everything not with every single
decision i think sometimes unions are on
the right side of an issue sometimes
they're on the wrong side of the issue
but the fact that unions need to exist i
and anybody who thinks that union
shouldn't exist or want to crush unions
you better rethink it because
probably for the wrong reason
you might want a union on a different
side of a particular issue but
trust me you do not want humans to go away
away
that would be bad and there's a lot of effort
effort
in this country right now to crush
1916 federal farm loan act the standard
container act you need containers so
that they all fit in the same truck and
you can stack them on pallets without
standard containers it's really hard to
sell things
you know what is a carton of lettuce
well if one person's carton is six heads
and another per person's carton is 18 heads
heads
it's really hard so you've got to
standardize things in order to have
effective trade so again
we dealt with quality to a large degree
u.s grade standards for potatoes again
standardizing to help with interstate
and international trade
uh 1918 world war one ended
1919 the term biological control was coined
1922 the capri volstead act provided
legal status for agricultural cooperatives
cooperatives
really important
a cooperative is when a group of
companies can come together
and have better selling power so let's say
say
i develop a cooperative i'm some tiny
little farmer
and it's really hard for me to sell my
product to some of these big buyers
because i'm just a tiny little grower
what if i get together with 20 other growers
growers
and between
all of us
we can not only supply better more
product all year long but a better
variety of products when i'm at a
product this guy's got products so now
we've got one voice as a cooperative to
help sell our product
cooperatives can be fabulous and there
are some great
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