The reported recruitment difficulties are not necessarily inconsistent with observations of oversupply in the farm labor market. These survey findings may be seen as the result of respondent gamesmanship, but they alternatively may be taken as signs of legally authorized workers leaving agriculture, of farmers more carefully screening prospective hires for job-related knowledge and abilities, or of production technologies and job requirements changing. Tasks for which respondents had most difficulty finding capable and reliable production workers in 1991-92 cover a broad spectrum. The lesser-skilled work mentioned includes picking, packing, hoeing,and general labor. More commonly specified were tasks that require higher technical and cognitive skills, such as: girdling vines; operating and maintaining almond hullers, tree shakers, hay balers, forklifts, computers, or other equipment; managing and caring for animals; accounting for financial transactions; setting up and running irrigation systems; driving tractors with various rigs; and supervising other employees. A respondent who seems to have experienced the consequences of indiscriminate hiring writes that it was particularly hard to find “tractor drivers with some brains.” Survey respondents register strong concern about recruitment five years hence . If there is a surplus of capable workers today, few farm operators expect it to get any larger or even to last on its current scale. Nearly half think recruitment will be more difficult in 1997, a quarter see no change, and another fourth do not even venture to guess. Some may anticipate a recovery from the economic recession in California, which would certainly alter the balance of total supply and demand in the labor market. Respondents foresee a future collection of hard-to-fill jobs even more extensive than the 1991-92 set. Many comments specifically name or refer to jobs that require mechanical, mathematical, language, and managerial skills, suggesting anticipation of a more technologically sophisticated,ebb and flow trays capitalintensive agriculture. Nevertheless, tasks that demand mainly the application of physical strength and stamina under uncomfortable conditions arc also well represented on the list.
Farm operators would entertain multiple strategies for coping with labor procurement problems that may develop in the future. Their strongest inclinations are to adopt technological changes that substitute for labor input, and to step up their recruitment efforts . Smaller majorities of respondents say that they would also consider offering better terms of employment, lowering selection standards, and contracting more with FLCs or custom harvesters. One-third would look to shift their enterprise mix toward less labor-intensive’ crops, and more than a quarter to leave farm business altogether.Until the wave of studies on workers sparked by the 1986 immigration reform law, it was often lamented that too little was known about the hired farm workforce. There was then, and there has continued to be, even less known about how that workforce is managed. Influenced by legal, technological, market, and other contextual factors, farm labor management includes several types of decisions that in tum have direct consequences for agricultural businesses and workers. This study has attempted to analytically describe the different means by which people are brought to and dealt with on farms, to map management practices as they currently are, not to speculate on their adequacy from economic or public policy perspectives. Information from our survey provides for beller understanding of labor management across the range of California fam1s–and of the farms themselves. Though data from any self-administered questionnaire are to be interpreted with caution, these findings clearly tell of a complex industry comprised of diverse production firms and relationships among them. The structure of production agriculture embodies not only vertically integrated producer-marketers but also networks of more specialized, interdependent entities. These entities join efforts through temporary contracts, accomplishing a functional coordination that others pursue through relatively fixed roles and rules in a single organization. California farms exhibit as much variety in their organizational and management characteristics as in their products. Common to all is reliance on the work of people–more than a million different individuals who perform agricultural work some time during the year. While many farm operators intimately link their businesses with family and life style, most depend on people outside the family circle.
Only six percent of all year-round workers on farms, and two percent of the yearly peak workforce, are members of an operator’s family. The labor of non-family workers, who are responsible for the bulk of commodity production in this state, is one of the essential inputs that farmers may procure from external suppliers and contractors. Farmers obtain a large amount of non-employee labor through farm labor contractors , and pest control operators. Two-thirds of all workers on farms are direct farm employees, more or less in particular crop and business size sectors. But three of five farm businesses in the survey also used at least one FLC or CH In 1992. The shares of total labor obtamed from outside providers have increased since 1986. when directly employed workers were 72 percent of all at peak. Farm operators do not sort neatly into groups of either direct employers or labor service customers. Because engaging workers through both employment and contract is the norm, attempts to distinguish farms that hire directly from those that obtain labor in other ways are not likely to be illuminating. There are functions served in procuring labor by either means. The widespread use of contractors notwithstanding, most workers on farms are in fact employees on the payroll, and they are managed in styles that run from the very casual to the systematic. Structure in the personnel function–the extent to which labor management policies, responsibilities, and processes are clearly rationalized–is usually greater in large farm businesses. A bigger scale of operation makes more economical as well as necessary the employment of personnel staff specialists to facilitate hiring, developing, and keeping productive workers. Larger operators in the survey more commonly utilize in-house or external professionals to assist in managing human resources. They tend more to obtain information on prospective employees through written applications and medical exams; to communicate through employee handbooks. written job descriptions and work rules, staff meetings, and regular performance evaluations; to directly employ bilingual supervisors; and to offer non-mandatory fringe benefits. They also verify more carefully the legitimacy of FLCs with whom they do business. And they get audited more by regulatory agencies. Larger farms have assisted more of their formerly undocumented workers through !RCA legalization processes, and they have retained these employees from 1986 to 1992 at higher rates than smaller firms. More generally within a gi\’en commodity sector, employment stability and structured personnel management appear to better reinforce one other in larger farm businesses, particularly those which have geographic or crop diversity that softens net seasonal swings in the need for labor.
Employees are more likely to work year-round in large operations, and, on the whole, year-round farm employees are better compensated, receive more fringe benefits, and have more job security than their seasonal counterparts. Many farms preserve job stability for a core of employees by keeping their organizations lean and contracting for FLC or CH crews to meet additional necds during periods of high activity. This stabilization strategy. however, may effectively define or perpetuate the division between two tiers in the farm workforce. Sometimes juxtaposed in adjoining fields are crews from both tiers harvesting for the very same company label but under quite different terms of employment. Where FLCs are able to hold their operating expenses below those that farmers would incur for their own hires, they can offer customers a current cost advantage over direct employment. Even where they cannot, contractors are appealing to farmers who want to reduce their employment transactions, communication problems, legal liabilities, and technical difficulties in managing personnel. The total need for labor in California agriculture fluctuates over the course of a year, and in most crop sectors the work activity at a given farm swings with the seasons more sharply than in the statewide aggregate. Peak employment in an average farm business is more than three times the year-round level,rolling greenhouse benches and the number of different people employed some time during a year is half again the number present at peak activity. Administrative costs accompany every addition to and deletion from the farm payroll, and personnel transactions would be more numerous yet if not for outside service providers. It is not surprising that FLC employees make up almost twice as much of the peak as of the year-round workforce. The unpredictability of staffing for tasks that depend on weather and biological phenomena magnifies the value of “just-in-time” delivery of labor.Even a most disciplined farmer cannot be confident about seasonal employment plans far in advance, Employing a larger workforce than needed in off-peak periods, to avoid cyclical layoffs and recalls, makes labor expense more of a fixed overhead than a variable operating cost. Arranging for contractors to mobilize people and equipment when needed, in contrast, can help tic labor expense more closely to actual task accomplishment while keeping direct employment lean and stable. Contractual arrangements for labor thus may also enhance longer run flexibility to alter future production, technology, staffing, and terms of employment within the farm business. Cultural and language differences between farm operators and workers compound the challenges of direct recruitment, selection, supervision, instruction, and other job-related communication. More than one-third of farmers cannot communicate directly in the language understood by most of their production employees, usually Spanish, and another third have limited fluency. Finally, it is most difficult for agricultural managers to procure labor from capable workers and stay within all legal guidelines without getting overwhelmed by mandates, prohibitions, and reports.
Although growers and contractors may be deemed jointly liable for violations of some employee protections, farmers reduce or eliminate exposure to claims of wrongdoing by using contract labor. Alter two decades of legislation narrowing gaps between employee protections in the agricultural and non-farm sectors, farmers arc subject to pretty much the same liabilities and constraints as employers in other industries. Judicial decisions giving employees more legal rights within their jobs have also raised the costs and risks of maintaining a directly hired workforce. Increased regulatory complexity and the paperwork associated with agricultural employment in particular have added to reasons for contracting out tasks. The eligibility verification and nondiscrimination provisions of !RCA are only two of many bases for charges that agencies or workers may level against farm employers. Thus, there are practical business considerations behind the use of labor contractors and outside service providers that may include but do not hinge on the 1986 immigration reform. In broad terms, growers patronize contractors to get work done when needed by people who can do it without presenting undue complications. Finding and dealing with contractors, however, can involve other complications that farmers weigh against the burdens of hiring and managing their own employees.Streams of immigrants have been boosting the supply of labor available to California farms for more than one hundred years, but labor procurement is not and will not be merely a matter of numbers. Neither farm jobs nor farm workers are an undifferentiated mass. Even as the post-!RCA labor glut was developing, farmers had trouble filling jobs, and most now arc at least somewhat concerned about finding enough workers with the right qualifications to meet their operiltional needs in the future. Regardless of how many people Me looking for employment, farm operators may have trouble engaging workers with skills that arc suited to emerging and future technologies. Patterns of demand for agricultural labor will undoubtedly be different by the end of this decade. Technological innovations that change farm jobs will hilve effects on who porforn1s them and how these workers are managed. While production systems may retain their basic characters, the context if not the content of virtually every agricultural job will be altered somewhat before the 21st century. Mechanization in the past has been designed to achieve a variety of private and social benefits, such as improved crop quality, more efficient use of fertilizers and pesticides, reduced worker exposure to hazards, preservation of environmental quality, and conservation of water and energy. Whether or not explicitly intended, an increase in labor productivity–or a decrease in the number of people needed to produce a given output–usually has accompanied the other benefits of such change.