Volume 8, Number 1, Winter-Spring 1999
Findings of the National Agricultural Workers Survey indicate that volatility in the California farm labor market has increased, said Ed Kissam at the Seminar on Agricultural Risk Management. Comparing characteristics of farm workers and the farm labor market between 1989-93 and a more recent 1994-97 period, he noted that proportions of workers who are recent arrivals and unauthorized for U.S. employment have continued to grow.
Other key indicators of continuing volatility are that, in the more recent period, there are many more foreign-born workers in their first year of farmwork and not accompanied by family members; fewer of the teenaged and young adult workers say they plan to remain in farmwork for more than 5 years; migration of foreign-born workers is higher; and the share of U.S.-born individuals in the farm workforce is smaller. Moreover, the average number of weeks in which farm workers are employed in agriculture is down - from an average of 33 weeks in the 1989-93 period to 23 weeks in 1994-97. In Kissam's view, the shift toward uncertain reliance on migrant workers who themselves experience higher levels of annual unemployment stems partly from employers' overemphasis on meeting short-term harvest needs without corresponding attention to stability of a "core" labor force.
Harvest hourly earnings of California farm workers showed a modest increase from an average of $5.66 per hour during the earlier NAWS period to an average of $6.18 in the later period (about 2% per year), and hourly earnings in pre-harvest tasks had fallen from $5.24 to $5.02 [note: data collection for both periods took place before the series of legislated increases that have brought the current minimum wage in California to $5.75 per hour]. Dr. Kissam argued that increasing pay rates would be helpful but is neither a necessary nor a sufficient measure for growers who want to reduce their risks of falling short on labor to perform critical production tasks. Instead, successful recruitment, retention, and use of the available labor supply require managerial investments in:
Efforts to maintain an adequate working environment with fair treatment can keep farm workers from leaving to search for better conditions, even including higher pay rates.
Stabilizing the farm labor force by better managing the workers currently available is likely to be affordable, since increases in productivity and reduction of indirect expense offset costs of improving supervision and arranging for more off-peak employment. But although some agricultural employers have used such strategies very successfully, Kissam sees little evidence that this is likely to become the prevailing approach in California. He argued that labor management practices mutually benefiting employers and workers are increasingly incompatible with prevailing farm labor management trends in California.
Farm workers have their own risk management strategies for dealing with personal risks in an inherently unstable labor market. They tend to seek jobs with growers or labor contractors who provide opportunity for a relatively long stretch of employment and a work environment where they will be treated fairly, not verbally abused, and not cheated out of their due earnings. Newly arrived, inexperienced workers, however, have few options and generally work for whoever will employ them. The NAWS trend data show continuing importance of farm labor contractors; they employ about one-third of farm workers (unchanged from the earlier to the more recent period). According to Kissam, actions that weaken organizational linkages between growers and FLCs, i.e., that "commodify" labor, are likely to exacerbate the current problems of labor volatility and poor work conditions. Agricultural employers can and must find genuine organizational solutions to the problems of seasonality and rapidly moving workers from one crop-task to another. Unfortunately, he noted, efforts to secure legislation that adds to overall labor supply have traditionally seemed more cost-effective than investments in building producers' labor management capacity.
NAWS data indicate that the average hourly wage paid to farm labor supervisors has fallen slightly more than 1% per year, from $7.66 in 1989-93 to $7.25 in 1994-97. Kissam sees this decrease as a lead indicator of further increases in labor market volatility - because it dims the prospect of field workers' remaining in farmwork to achieve a measure of upward career mobility. At this level of pay (around $11,000 per year, assuming about 1,500 hours per year of employment) it is very difficult to attract and retain well-qualified supervisory employees. And another sign of declining farm employment conditions is that more workers are paying "raiteros" for rides to work, thus eroding their already modest net earnings.
While the conceptual notion of farm labor problems as mainly attributable to farm workers abandoning agriculture is flawed, said Kissam, there is cause to be concerned about the employment-eligible workforce of the future. NAWS data and other farm labor research show that farm workers are fairly well attached to their occupations. However, formerly unauthorized workers who were legalized under the SAW program (Special Agricultural Worker provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986) had a mean age of roughly 28 years in 1987, and this cohort of immigrant workers is now "aging out" of the California farm labor force. In the year 2000, the average age of those legalized under the SAW provisions will be 42 years.
Efforts to prolong current farm workers' participation in the agricultural labor market through better management planning and workplace supervision are important among rational strategies to meet California agriculture's labor needs. At the same time, Kissam foresees that additional farm labor supply will be absolutely necessary, given the aging of the foreign-born labor force and decreasing participation of U.S.-born workers. He does not regard a guestworker program as the answer, though, in part because it would do nothing to address the fundamental issues related to moving workers from one crop-task to another, and in part because it would exacerbate the downward spiral of working conditions and wages for current farm workers, further decreasing participation of available U.S. residents in the labor force. In contrast to the illusory "magic bullet" of a guestworker program, he said, efforts to improve supervision and work conditions would make both short-term economic sense and a lasting contribution to labor force stability. The costs of such efforts are much more affordable than those of recruiting, transporting, and housing workers from Mexico.
In concluding, Dr. Kissam suggested that a conceivable but politically unlikely legislative solution to farm labor supply problems would be a "SAW-2" program, which would offer legal permanent resident status to many of the unauthorized workers currently employed in California agriculture. Such a solution would be more equitable and less costly than a guestworker program. In considering it, said Kissam, Congress should be mindful of a lesson from IRCA experience - that an ungenerous decision to legalize farm workers but not their dependents stimulates shuttle migration and ultimately increases the flow of unauthorized workers. A better course of action in a SAW-2 program would be to provide for family unity from the beginning and to facilitate settlement here. With whole family units more settled in the United States, employers would have a larger, more stable pool of labor to recruit from, and the new residents would gradually attenuate their ties to the Mexican village-based networks through which most illegal immigrants have arrived.