SCAS Fellow Don Mitchell has been awarded an RJ Sabbatical Grant by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

He receives the funding for the project "From Contracts to Contractors, From Sharecropping to Ride-Sharing: The UFW, the California Agribusiness Landscape, and the Surprising Roots of Contemporary Labor Precarity", which is a continuation of the research that he is currently conducting while in residence at SCAS. The grant amounts to SEK 2 224 445 and will, among other things, cover a several month research stay at the University of Glasgow.

The goal of Mitchell's sabbatical is "to complete a book with the working title “From Contracts to Contractors, From Sharecropping to Riding Sharing: The United Farm Workers, the California Agribusiness Landscape, and the Surprising Roots of Contemporary Labor Precarity.” Based on extensive archival research, the book examines the rise and fall of the social movement-oriented union, the United Farm Workers (UFW), between the early 1960s and the turn of the century, to show how its fortunes were decisive for the making of a new kind of labor precarity. Examining union, corporate, activist, and state agency records, as well as analyzing a suite of legislative changes and court cases, the book makes two primary claims. First, in its ascendency, the UFW was on the cusp of fully remaking the agrarian labor regime in California, with profound effects for the agribusiness political economy and landscape. Second, with its decline, agribusiness was able to reclaim control over labor relations both by increasing the role and importance of farm labor contractors in the procurement and exploitation of farmworkers, and by developing innovative sharecropping systems that forced the risks associated with growing profits onto the workers themselves. In turn, this latter move, led to a series of court decisions that created the legal landscape that later gig-based companies (like Uber) had to contend with to advance the forms of labor precarity presumably vital for their business models."

Don Mitchell is Professor of Human Geography ar Uppsala University and a Distinguished Professor of Geography Emeritus at Syracuse University. He is a Fellow at SCAS in the autumn of 2026.