Peach pickers' strike

The Peach pickers' strike at the Hooper ranch marks the novel's most direct confrontation between migrant labor and California's industrialized agricultural system. When the Joad family arrives at the ranch, they are escorted by armed state police through a line of shouting pickets and into a fenced compound where they are set to work picking peaches for five cents a box. The strike has already been broken in terms of wages: the original workers who refused the offered two and a half cents have been driven off, and strikebreakers—hungry families like the Joads—are brought in to replace them. The strike is not a single dramatic event but a dispersed, ongoing struggle that unfolds in the shadows of the orchard, in the ditch camps, and ultimately in a violent nighttime confrontation that changes the course of the Joad family's journey.

Causes and Background

The strike originates in the fundamental economic logic of California's corporate fruit industry. As Floyd Knowles explains to Tom Joad in the Hooverville, the system works by flooding the labor market: a grower who needs three thousand men for two weeks of ripe peaches sends handbills across the country, attracting six thousand desperate workers, then pays whatever he chooses because the surplus of hungry men will underbid each other. When the Joads arrive at the Hooper ranch, they learn that the advertised wage has already been cut. The men who refused the cut—Casy among them—were driven off by armed deputies and state police, their camps scattered, their families beaten. The strike is thus a refusal to accept a wage so low that a man cannot feed his family, a wage that the growers know will drop even further once the strikers are cleared out. Casy, who has been in jail since his arrest at the Hooverville, has emerged as a leader of the strike, having learned in prison that collective action—even something as simple as a unified yell—can force those in power to respond.

What Happens

On the night Tom Joad sneaks out of the Hooper ranch compound to investigate the picket line, he finds Casy and three other men camped in a tent beside a stream. Casy explains the strike's logic: the growers are paying the Joads five cents now, but as soon as the strikers are broken, the wage will drop to two and a half cents. He asks Tom to spread the word inside the compound, but Tom is skeptical that his own family—hungry, with a pregnant daughter—will give up their meat for the sake of other men. As they talk, the men outside grow nervous; they sense movement in the dark. A group of vigilantes, armed with pick handles, surrounds the tent. Casy steps into the flashlight beam and speaks: "You don't know what you're a-doin'." A heavy man swings a new white pick handle, crushing the side of Casy's head. Tom, standing beside the fallen preacher, wrenches the club free and strikes the killer repeatedly, then flees through the brush as the vigilantes pursue him. He escapes into a poison-oak thicket, his nose broken and cheek torn, and later learns that the strike has been broken: new pickers pour in, and the wage drops to two and a half cents as Casy predicted.

Consequences and Aftermath

The strike's immediate consequence is the destruction of the workers' collective action and the reduction of wages to a starvation level. But its deeper consequence is the transformation of Tom Joad. Having witnessed Casy's murder and killed the man who did it, Tom becomes a fugitive, forced to hide in a brush cave while his face heals. During his concealment, he meditates on Casy's philosophy—that a person has no soul of his own but only a piece of a great soul, and that "two are better than one"—and he resolves to carry on Casy's work. When he leaves his family, he tells Ma that he will be present wherever people fight for justice: "Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there." The strike thus serves as the novel's turning point, the moment when the family's struggle for survival intersects with the larger class conflict, and when Tom Joad, the paroled killer, becomes a conscious participant in the movement for social change. The strike also demonstrates the growers' strategy of using state power and vigilante violence to suppress labor organization, a pattern that the novel's intercalary chapters place within the broader history of California's agricultural system.