California has the largest and most complex agricultural labor market in the United States, reflecting seasonal employment demands, the predominance of immigrant workers and the significant role of labor contractors in matching workers and jobs. Whether measured in sales, production or acres, California agriculture expanded in the 1990s . Farm sales reached $27 billion in 2000, with about 77 million tons of crops produced on 8.8 million acres. More than half of these sales were in fruits and nuts, vegetables and melons, and horticultural specialties , such as flowers and nursery products. Rising yields meant that more tons of vegetables were produced from the same acreage, while acreage of fruits and nuts rose from 2 million acres in 1990 to 2.4 million acres in 2000, a 19% increase over the 1990s. Many FVH commodities are labor intensive, with labor accounting for 15% to 35% of production costs. Most of the workers employed on FVH farms are immigrants from Mexico, and a significant percentage are believed to be unauthorized . In recent years, several proposals have aimed to reduce unauthorized worker employment in agriculture . In September 2001, Mexican President Vincente Fox called for a U.S.-Mexico labor migration agreement so that “there are no Mexicans who have not entered this country [U.S.] legally, and that those Mexicans who come into the country do so with proper documents. Regularization does not mean rewarding those who break the law. Regularization means that we give legal rights to people who are already contributing to this great nation.” President George Bush agreed: “When we find willing employer and willing employee,plastic pot manufacturers we ought to match the two. We ought to make it easier for people who want to employ somebody, who are looking for workers, to be able to hire people who want to work” .
The United States and Mexico appeared close to agreement on a program to legalize farm and other workers before September 11, 2001. However, after the war on terror was declared, the momentum for a newguest-worker program and the legalization of immigrants already in the country slowed. In summer 2003, there were several new proposals for a migration agreement with Mexico to legalize the status of currently unauthorized workers and allow some to earn immigrant status by working and paying taxes in the United States. There is little agreement, however, on what impacts such a program would have on California’s farm labor market. We used a unique database to examine farm employment trends in California agriculture. The data suggests that: about three individuals are employed for each year-round equivalent job, helping to explain low farm worker earnings; there was a shift in the 1990s from crop farmers hiring workers directly to farmers hiring via farm labor contractors ; and there is considerable potential to improve farm labor market efficiency, by using a smaller total workforce with each worker employed more hours and achieving higher earnings.California employers who pay $100 or more in quarterly wages are required to obtain an unemployment insurance reporting number from the California Employment Development Department . The EDD then assigns each employer or reporting unit a four-digit Standard Industrial Classification or, since 2001, a six-digit North American Industry Classification System code that reflects the employer’s major activity . Major activities are grouped in increasing levels of detail; for example, agriculture, forestry and fisheries are classified as a major industrial sector and, within this sector, SIC 01 is assigned to crops, 017 to fruits and nuts and 0172 to grapes. We defined “farm workers” as unique Social Security numbers reported by farm employers to the EDD, and then summed their California jobs and earnings. This enabled us to answer questions such as how many farm and non-farm jobs were associated with a particular SSN or individual in 1 year, and in which commodity or county a person had maximum earnings.
We adjusted the raw data before doing the analysis. Farm employers have reported their employees and earnings each quarter since 1978, when near universal UI coverage was extended to agriculture. Although it is sometimes alleged that farm employers, especially FLCs, do not report all their workers or earnings, there is no evidence that under reporting of employees or earnings is more common in agriculture than in other industries that hire large numbers of seasonal workers, such as construction. We excluded from the analysis SSNs reported by 50 or more employers in 1 year . We also excluded wage records or jobs that had less than $1 in earnings and jobs, or that reported earnings of more than $75,000 in one quarter. These adjustments eliminated from the analysis 2,750 SSNs, 62,571 wage records or jobs and $803 million in earnings. These exclusions were about 0.25%, 2.7% and 6.1% of the totals, respectively, and are documented more fully in Khan et al. . There is no single explanation for the outlier data we excluded. In some cases, several workers may share one SSN, while in others our suspicion that a SSN had “too many” jobs may represent data-entry errors. During the 1990s, the Social Security Administration cleaned up SSNs, including threatening to fine and reject tax payments from employers with too many mismatches between SSNs and the names associated with those SSNs, which should have reduced the number of SSNs reported by employers. We think the rising number of SSNs reflects more individuals employed in agriculture, not more noise in the data.Agricultural employment can be measured in three major ways: at a point in time, as an average over time or by counting the total number of individuals employed over some period of time.If 100 workers are employed during each month and there is no worker turnover from month to month, then point in time, average and total employment is 100. However, agricultural employment during the six summer months may be 150, versus 50 during the six winter months, meaning that point, average and total employment counts differ.
We began with all SSNs reported by agricultural employers , summed the jobs and earnings of these SSNs within each SIC code, and assigned each SSN to the four-digit SIC code in which the worker had the highest earnings. This means that a SSN reported by a grape employer as well as by an FLC would be considered a grape worker if his highest-earning job was in grapes. Farm workers had a total of 1.5 million farm jobs in 1991, 1.7 million in 1996 and 1.8 million in 2001. One-quarter also had at least one non-farm job — about 407,000 workers were both farm and non-farm workers in 1991, 453,000 in 1996 and 697,000 in 2001 . The total California earnings of persons employed in agriculture were $11.1 billion in 1991, $12.0 billion in 1996 and $15.8 billion in 2001 . The share of total earnings for farm workers from agricultural employers was 77% in 1991, 77% in 1996 and 71% in 2001, indicating that in the late 1990s,black plastic plant pots wholesale farm workers tended to increase their supplemental earnings via non-agricultural jobs. Average earnings per job were highest in livestock, $13,800 per job in 2001. There was little difference between average earnings per job in agricultural services and crops . Average earnings per job were higher for the non-farm jobs of agriculture workers than for agriculture jobs .In 2001, California’s farm workers held 2.5 million jobs, including 1.8 million jobs with agricultural employers. These agricultural jobs included 630,000 in crops, 69,000 in livestock and 1.1 million in agricultural services. The agricultural services sector includes both farm and non-farm activities, such as veterinary and lawn and garden services; FLCs accounted for 70% of the employees reported by farm agricultural services. Fruits and nuts accounted for 53% of the crop jobs, dairy for 39% of the livestock jobs and FLCs for 58% of the agricultural services jobs. The major change between 1991 and 2001 was the drop of 54,000 jobs in crop production and increase of 313,000 jobs in agricultural services. We placed SSNs in the detailed commodity or SIC code that reflected the maximum reported earnings for the worker, and considered workers to be primarily employed in the SIC with maximum earnings. In 2001, there were 877,000 primary farm workers, and they included 322,000 reported by crop employers, 50,000 reported by livestock employers and 504,000 reported by agricultural service employers. Fruit and nut employers accounted for 47% of the crop-reported workers, dairy for 40% of the livestock-reported workers and FLCs for 44% of the agricultural services–reported workers. The major change between 1991 and 2001 was the increase in number of SSNs with their primary job in agriculture — from 758,000 to 877,000. There was a slight drop in the number of workers reported by crop employers, a slight increase in livestock workers and a sharp 135,000 increase in agricultural services workers, anchored by a 59,000 increase in workers reported by FLCs in 2001. Most farm workers had only one job. In 2001, 53% of the SSNs were reported by only one employer to the EDD, 26% were reported twice, 12% three times, 5% four times and 4% five or more times.
During the 1990s, about 65% of farm workers were reported by one agricultural employer only, 17% to 21% by two agricultural employers, 5% by at least two agricultural employers and one non-farm employer, and 9% to 12% by one farm and one non-farm employer. In the three-digit SIC codes representing more detailed commodity sectors, 60% to 83% of the employees had only one job. For example, in 2001 79% of the employees reported by dairy farms had one dairy farm job, while 7% also had a second agricultural job — 3% had a dairy job, a second farm job and a non-farm job, and 11% had a non-farm job in addition to the dairy job. About two-thirds of the employees of FLCs and farm management companies had only jobs with one such employer; 22% had another farm job; 6% had an FLC job, another farm job and a non-farm job; and 6% had a non-farm job in addition to the FLC job. Even more detailed four-digit SIC codes showed the same pattern: the commodities or SICs most likely to offer year-round jobs such as dairies and mushrooms had 70% to 80% of employees working only in that commodity, while commodities or SICs offering more seasonal jobs, such as deciduous tree fruits and FLCs, had 53% to 63% of employees working only in that commodity. At the four-digit, SIC-code level, the five largest SICs accounted for about 45% of the agricultural wages reported.Agricultural employers paid a total of $11 billion in wages in 2001, an average of $10,200 per worker . Earnings were highest for the 64,000 workers primarily employed in livestock; they averaged $14,800, followed by those primarily employed by crop employers and those employed by agricultural farm services, custom harvesters and FLCs . There was considerable variation in earnings among workers in agricultural farm services: workers in soil preparation services averaged $21,100 in 2001, versus $12,700 for crop preparation services for market and $4,400 for FLC employees. The average earnings of primarily farm workers varied significantly, even within detailed four-digit SIC codes — in most cases, the standard deviation exceeded the mean wage . Median earnings were generally less than mean earnings, reflecting that higher wage supervisors and farm managers pulled up the mean. If the workers in detailed commodities are ranked from lowest-to-highest paid, the lowest 25% of earners in an SIC category generally earned less than $4,000 a year. For example, among workers primarily employed in vegetables and melons in 2001 , the first quartile or 25th percentile of annual earnings was $3,000. This reflects relatively few hours of work — if these workers earned the state’s minimum wage of $6.25 an hour in 2001, they worked 480 hours. The 25th percentile earnings cutoff was lowest for those employed primarily by FLCs, only $634, suggesting that FLC employees receiving the minimum wage worked 101 hours. The highest 25th percentile mark was in mushrooms , $9,491, which reflects 1,519 hours at minimum wage. The 75th percentile marks the highest earnings that a non-supervisory worker could normally expect to achieve — 75% of workers reported earning less than this amount and 25% earned more.