Volume 6, Number 1, Winter-Spring 1997
Sizing up the agricultural labor market in California, no less comprehending all its dynamics, is fraught with complications and uncertainty. In seeking to understand and describe it, we often speak in terms of measurable dimensions, such as total payroll, number of jobs, and wage rate. Though numerical indicators of these concepts convey an illusory sense of clarity, confidence in what they represent is tempered by problems of data specification, accuracy, and comparability.
Many of us who rely, even cautiously, on numbers to help deal with complex phenomena have found ourselves having to defend the very use of statistics, countering charges that they are natural accomplices to "lies and darn lies." No doubt this burden has been increased by none other than the estimable New York Times, which on March 31 carried a front page article ("U.S. Surveys Find Farm Worker Pay Down for 20 Years") that may well have confused or misled readers with its use of figures from a host of sources, not all of which it identifies.
Writing from Salinas two weeks before a well planned and publicized union demonstration in nearby Watsonville, the author mentions "a United States Department of Agriculture study [that] found a 7 percent drop, to $6.17 an hour" in farm workers' wages over the past 20 years. What kind of study, and which farm workers? Lost to the casual reader is that this $6.17 represents an overall U.S. average for field and livestock workers in July 1996, as published in the USDA's quarterly Farm Labor bulletin, and that it was not part of any attempt by USDA to assess the course of farm wages. While USDA has long published wage and employment data collected from farmers, changes in its methodology and classification schemes over the years render comparisons across two decades rather problematic.
Each issue of Farm Labor presents not only national averages but also comparable figures for several groups of states and individual states, including California. The average hourly pay rate reported for California field and livestock workers in July 1996 is $6.42. That same issue of the report also shows averages for all directly hired farm workers of $6.82 in California and $6.55 nationwide. Further, it has a surprising $7.17 average rate of earnings for "agricultural service workers" (mainly employees of farm labor contractors and custom harvesters) in California, which is not easy to reconcile with the Times author's assertion that farm labor contractors pay about 20 percent less than farmers who hire directly. The most recent issue of Farm Labor shows April 1997 rates in all these classifications higher than last July. It reports field and livestock workers earning $6.63 in the U.S. overall and $6.99 in California, all directly hired workers making $7.10 in the U.S. and $7.35 in California, and agricultural service workers at $7.21 per hour in California (no comparable U.S. rate).
Despite implying that most of his data are from USDA, and using USDA's nationwide data instead of its state figures in a discussion mainly about California, the Times author, to his credit, acknowledges pluralism in the farm employment statistics business. On a continuing page he notes, "Farm wage studies often reach different conclusions because some are based on surveying farmers, some on farm workers, and some on census data."
The California Employment Development Department (EDD), source of probably the best time series on agricultural employment and pay in this state, has two particularly useful data bases that, like the USDA survey, draw their information from farm employers. One of them is built on the monthly survey of Current Employment Statistics for Agriculture, conducted by the EDD Labor Market Information Division. The survey sample of 4,000 agricultural employers, about 14 percent of all in the state but having more than 40 percent of all ag jobs on their payrolls, is composed to be statistically representative of the employer population by size, geographic location, and industry (mostly crop-based) categories.
EDD reports summary findings of this survey monthly in its California Agricultural Bulletin. Results are aggregated for the state as a whole and for six regions (groups of counties). They are shown, by industry, in five tables: (A) Number of Wage and Salary Workers (all who receive compensation from employers); (B) Number of Agricultural Production Workers (about 92.5 percent of those in A; excludes managers, supervisors, office, and other staff not involved in production); (C) Average Weekly Earnings of Production Workers; (D) Average Hours Worked by Production Workers; and (E) Average Hourly Earnings of Production Workers.
According to the Times article, the average hourly wage for strawberry workers in Watsonville has dropped from $6.55 in 1985 to $6.25 this year. EDD's year-end Bulletin, however, shows berry production workers making an average of $6.76 statewide and $6.70 in the Central Coast Region over the whole of 1996, more than $7 statewide during the high-activity months of April through August. The reported pay for all agricultural production workers during 1996 averaged $6.71 across the state, ranging geographically from a low of $6.45 in the San Joaquin region to $7.55 in the North Coast region. This figure is a bit lower than USDA's $6.82 for all directly hired farm workers in California during July 1996.
Estimates of overall California farm employment reported in USDA's Farm Labor (total of 333,000 in July 1996) and EDD's Bulletin (monthly average of 377,200 in 1996) are similarly closer to each other than either is to the 700,000 given in the Times article.
The second EDD information base on agricultural employment and pay is derived from unemployment insurance (UI) filings, and the sample for this "survey" is close to 100 percent of the population. Virtually all employers in the state are required to submit quarterly with their UI tax payments a form identifying all persons on the payroll during a given pay period each month, and the earnings of each during the quarter. From this input EDD creates both employer and employee data files. Every employer is assigned a single 4-digit standard industrial classification (SIC) code corresponding to its main line of business (e.g., 0131 for cotton, 0241 for dairy farms). Information in the UI employer file can be sorted and aggregated by SIC code, location, number of employees, and payroll size, to support a variety of analyses.
On a separate page is a table [156K] presenting one simple yet informative arrangement of selected data from the 1995 UI employer file, supplemented by production data from Agricultural Commissioner reports. It describes the distribution of agricultural jobs, payroll, and production value in California, county by county. The statewide average agricultural employment shown here is very close to that reported in the California Agricultural Bulletin, though the two estimates are made through different methods.
Counties are listed in descending (rank) order with respect to the average number of farm jobs they contain. This average is based on the twelve monthly sums of jobs indicated in the filings by all employers from each respective county. Job totals for the months with highest and lowest employment in each county are also shown, and they provide an indication of how much agricultural activity varies by season in each county. While Fresno County tops the list in terms of jobs, payroll, and production, most counties do not rank the same along all these three size dimensions, in large part because of differences in the labor intensiveness of crop production technologies, types of jobs associated with them, and local economic conditions.
Some geographic misclassification of employment activity is inherent in the UI data collection methodology, which assigns jobs and payroll reported by an employer to the county in which the employer is located. If administrative offices and record keeping for a large Kern County operation are in Los Angeles, for example, the UI data base (and our table here) would understate the actual jobs and payroll in Kern and overstate them in Los Angeles.
Considerably more serious problems attend the use of UI data to estimate agricultural employment in various commodity sectors. A presentation and discussion of job and payroll data sorted by SIC code will be in a future issue of LMD.
Both the USDA's Farm Labor and the EDD's California Agricultural Bulletin are now available on the World Wide Web. Readers who promise to cautiously interpret and responsibly use the data in these publications are encouraged to access them through links on the Public Data page in the APMP website, at http://are.berkeley.edu/APMP/links/data.html.