This
report describes the demographic and employment characteristics of hired crop
farm workers - an important segment of the U.S. labor force whose performance
of numerous and varied agricultural tasks helps produce a large share of the
nation's food supply and contributes significantly to U.S. exports. The
information summarized herein was collected from the U.S. Department of Labor's
National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) between October 1, 2000 and
September 30, 2002 through face-to-face interviews with 6,472 crop farm
workers.
The
NAWS interviews workers engaged in "seasonal agricultural services," a U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA) designation of workers who perform "field
work" in the vast majority of nursery products, cash grains, and field crops,
as well as in all fruits and vegetables. The NAWS also includes persons who
work in the production of silage and other animal fodder. As such, the
population sampled by the NAWS consists of nearly all farm workers in crop
agriculture, including field packers, and supervisors, and even those who
simultaneously hold non-farm jobs. The sample does not include poultry,
livestock and fishery workers, secretaries, mechanics, or H-2A foreign
temporary workers.
The
NAWS is the only national information source on the demographic, employment,
and health characteristics of this population. Since its inception in 1988,
the survey has benefited from the collaboration of multiple federal agencies,
which continue to share in the design of the questionnaire. Information
provided through the survey informs the policies and programs of the many
federal government agencies that protect and provide services to migrant and
seasonal farm workers and their dependents.
This
report is organized in six chapters, each beginning with a summary of the
chapter's key findings. The report also contains two appendices: Appendix A
describes the statistical procedures used to analyze the data and Appendix B is
a table of the means and percentages of the principle variables presented in
the report.
Chapters
1 through 3 summarize the demographic characteristics of farm workers,
including place of birth, ethnicity and race, employment eligibility, gender,
age, marital status, household size and structure, education, and language
ability. Chapter 4 gives an overview of farm workers' participation in U.S. agricultural and non-agricultural sector employment, and Chapter 5 summarizes the
characteristics of farm jobs, including crops and tasks, recruitment and
retention, hours worked, and wages and benefits. Chapter 6 presents
information on crop farm workers' income, assets, and use of social services.
It covers personal and family income, assets in the United States and home
country, family poverty status, and use of government programs.
NAWS
uses multi-stage sampling to account for seasonal and regional fluctuations in
the level of farm employment. Seasonal fluctuations in the agricultural work
force are captured by three interviewing cycles, each lasting ten to twelve weeks.
Cycles begin in February, June, and October. The number of interviews
conducted during a cycle is proportional to the amount of crop activity at that
time of the year, which is approximated using administrative data from the
Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics and the USDA's Census of
Agriculture.
NAWS
samples workers in 12 regions, which are aggregated from 17 USDA-designated
agricultural regions. Within the 12 regions, sampling locations are selected
from a roster of 80 clusters. Clusters are either single counties or
aggregates of counties that have similar farm labor usage during the particular
cycle. The clusters are selected in each region with probabilities
proportional to size of farm labor expenses. Within clusters, counties are
then selected, also based on probabilities proportional to size of farm labor
expenses.
The
penultimate sampling stage is the selection of agricultural employers. In
order to maintain regionally representative data and yet have an adequate
distribution of rare events, simple random sampling is used. The employers are
randomly selected from public agency records. Principal among these are
unemployment insurance files, Agricultural Commissioners' pesticide
registrations, and lists maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and
various state agencies. The availability of these data varies by state. NAWS
staff review and update these lists annually.
The
end stage of sampling is the selection of farm workers at the establishment. Once
the sample of employers is drawn, NAWS interviewers contact the selected
growers, explain the purpose of the survey, and obtain access to the work site
in order to schedule interviews. Interviewers then go to the farm, ranch, or
nursery, explain the purpose of the survey to the workers, and ask a random
sample of them to participate. As such, only workers who are employed in
agriculture at the time of the interview are included in the sample.
Interviews are conducted in the worker's home or at another location of the
worker's choice.
