Time-based pay is now the norm , but use 01 both piece rates and houdy rates for different jobs on the same larm is very common. As one survey respondent writes, “It all depends on what we’re doing rat the time,” Three 01 four respondents overall pay mostly by time, typically by the hour but a sizable minority by the week or month. Time-based pay is particularly dominant in the animal products, nuts, and nonedibles sectors, where businesses tend to be more capital-intensive and have smaller payrolls, Weekly or monthly salaries are paid by a substantial majority of animal producers. Output incentive pay that either constitutes workers’ total earnings or supplements their hourly wages is most common in production of grapes and other fruit. Many larm busmesses , in all crop and size classifications, offer supplementary incentive pay based on valued results other than output quantity. Time-based pay can be designed to encourage continued employment, high level perlormance, or both. An explicit structure of wages on a farm reveals to workers the opportunities that exist to increase income by moving up in a pay range for a given job or advancing to a higher-paying position. Hourly wage differences among employecs on a larm may reflect both “job factors” and “individual lac tors” . The lairness 01 paying more lor work in jobs that entail more skill, responsibility, or unpleasantness, and lor better or longer service within a business, is generally accepted. Problems in applying this concept usually stem Irom difficulty in measuring all except the last 01 these laclors. Do farmers pay different hourly rales to production employees in the same type 01 job? Almost three in live do. They base differences most commonly on length of employment ,botanicare rolling benches which can be measured objectively, and secondarily on evaluation 01 worker performance.

Far lewer vary wages as a lunction 01 time 01 work shilt , season of year, current financial status of the farm, and such worker characteristics as versatility, previous experience, judgment, and reliability. A majority of farmers who use hourly rates adjust them yearly, nearly one-quarter do so at irregular intervals, and a fifth scasonally . Piece rates arc as commonly set each season as each year, and some farmers change them with every entry of a crew into a new field. In determining pay rates, farmers give most attention to comparative information obtained through their own systematic surveys and information conversations with other local operators. A large majority indicates giving some consideration to what their employees say and a bare majority to published survey results. Farm operators offer various fringe benefits in addition to monetary wages. While employers are generally required by Jaw to provide a few “mandatory” benefits, most farmers give one or more additional fringe benefits at their own option. Survey respondents provide all optional benefits much more frequently to year-round than to seasonal workers . They most commonly report offering to “some” or “most” year-round employees vacation pay , health insurance , and housing . Farms with larger payrolls and those organized as corporations tend significantly more to provide all benefits except housing and transportation. Farmers fluent in their workers’ language arc more likely to include farm products in the tota; compensation package. Other benefits that respondents mention providing for employees include pension plans, holiday pay, paid utilities, free lunches, gasoline and car repairs, interest-free loaos, term life insurance, and use of a farmer’s own vacation home in the mountains, About three times as many farmers say that they offer such benefits to year-round employees as to seasonal employees.Labor management is no longer only about dealing with workers, if it ever was. It is no secret that farmers have felt their operations increasingly constrained by government requirements as well as by market competition. Relations between farmers and the people they hire are subject to a large set of public policies that apply to the many but are comprehended by the few. Agricultural employers and workers are challenged yearly to keep up with new developments that alter an already bewildering array of legal obligations and constraints?

The laws affecting farm labor management are formidable in their variety, fluidity, and sheer volume. One kind sets standards for specific terms of employment , a second regulates interaction between employer and employee , and a third affects overall supply of labor and workforce development outside the employment relationship .Several law5 require farmers to report to the government about their operations. Agricultural employers, like all others. arc obliged to regularly submit information on their payrolls and employees, and to respond to “anous agency requests for other information. During a typical month of active production, farmers and their office staffs spend a median seven person-hours completing the employment-related reports that are required by federal, state, and local agencies . The larger the farm payroll, the more ad’ministrative time is devoted to these reports, as many as 29 hours median for farms with $] million payrolls. Almost two in five of these largest employers, and some of even the smallest employers, spend 40 or more hours per month on reporting. While a plurality of firms in the smallest-payroll group devotes less time than 2 hours per month to employment reports, ]5 percent in this class and 39 percent of respondents overall spend ten hours or more.Government forms arc infamous for their design and instructions. Survey respondents overall cite understanding report requirements second only to filling out the forms as the most consuming task in preparing reports to agencies. Perhaps because they have more specialized office staff, however, larger firms tend to find that comprehending instructions takes less time than gathering records and obtaining information needed from workers. Certainly not all communication with government agencies is via the dreaded paper form. Farm operators make phone or personal cont~ct with agency staff members to obtain technical advice, clarification of rules and legal standards, and other practical information; and agencies get in touch with farmers for inspections and audits. Only one in ten respondents, disproportionately those with small payrolls, report having had no communication during 1991 and 1992 with any of eight listed agencies . UC Cooperative Extension and the county Agricultural Commissioner’s office are the two agencies with which farm operators most commonly made contact, the U.s. Department of Labor and the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health least. The Employment Development Department and US Internal Revenue Service were the agencies initiating contact with the greatest shares of farmers.

While farms of every size approached Cooperative Extension, an educational and research institution, at roughly the same rate, the larger businesses were significantly more in touch with each of the other agencies, which have regulatory as well as informational functions. Reported rates of contact initiated by Cal-OSHA, the Labor Commissioner, the DOL, and the INS–presumably for law enforcement–are extremely sensitive to payroll size, those by the EDD and the IRS considerably less so. It is quite possible that EDD, like most of the enforcement agencies, actually has a proclivity to inspect larger operations. If respondents took this very survey to be a contact by EDD, numerous non-inspectees from all size groups would have indicated having EDD-initiated communication, thus obscuring in our results a true relationship between regulatory contact and farm size.Of all the laws affecting the agricultural community in California since 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act has been most pervasive in the farm labor market. Requiring all employers to conform to new hiring standards and offering generous opportunities for alien legalization, it raised issues for employers, aliens, and government agencies. Its impact in agriculture was to be shaped through individual responses to the inducements and penalties it created. Farm operators faced choices about not only the new recruitment, selection, and record-keeping obligations, but also their non-regulated management practices and labor relations more generally.Underlying the special treatment of agriculture by !RCA were assumptions about buyers and sellers of agricultural labor. Responses to some provisions were rather immediate and far reaching, but the effects of others and the law as a whole would take form gradually. Most employer and alien decisions that the law was designed to influence were in the future, and the very context of these decisions was fluid. Provisions did not all take effect at once,commercial plant racks and many key implementing regulations and administrative polieies took months, some even years, to establish.. The accuracy of predictions about agriculture after immigration reform could not be assessed until well after December 1, 19BB, when the SAW application period ended and employer sanctions became fully applicable in agriculture. Nevertheless, the watch was on early for indications of what lRCA would bring. Long-term effects might be reflected as changes in: the composition of the farm workforce, the mobility and occupational choices of newly legalized former farm workers, workers’ exercise of legal protections for employees, union organizing activity, pay and other terms of employment in agriculture, reliance on farm labor contractors. use of production technologies that substitute machinery for labor, and ultimately, the viability and structure of labor-intensive agriculture in the United Stat~s. California farm employers were understandably concerned about the impact of the new law. In spring 1987, fears of widespread summer harvest disruptions were fed by general confusion about the new law, by IRCA regulations that restricted farm workers in Mexico from entering the United States to file SAW applications and obtain temporary work authorization, and by spot shortages of labor to perform early season tasks. Agriculture took a regular place on the nightly news, and government agencies prepared to cope with crisis. The INS convened a public meeting in Irvine to promote an exchange of informed views and suggestions among representative of grower, labor, and federal organizations. The most pessimistic scenarios were not nearly realized. Transitional niles and offices were set up to facilitate the entrance of pending SAW applicants from Mexico. The temporary relaxation of documentation standards for proving work eligibility eased the employment of SAW applicants from either side of the border.

Harvests progressed through the summer and fall with little abnormality. In our 1987 survey, only thirty respondents specified major business adjustments to IRCA that they had already made or contemplated. Most common were reducing the labor intensity of operations by using more machines or changing the mix of crops produced, and reducing the size of the business or leaving agriculture entirely. Six years later, it is widely reported that more people arc looking for agricultural jobs than are needed to fill them in most regions most of the time. The overall supply of labor available to farms incalifornia has been expanded by the !RCA legalization of more than a half-million agricultural workers, continued legal as well as illegal immigration, and the loss of employment opportunities in other parts of the state economy. Real earnings of hired farm workers have eroded, and employment by farm labor contractors has increased. What has IRCA wrought, from the farm operator’s perspective? Above all, much more employment paperwork. Fully three-quarters of respondents agree strongly that the law has had this effect, and another 21 percent agree somewhat . More than four of five say that there seems to be less hiring of undocumented farm workers, and a similar proportion that their labor costs have increased because of the immigration reform law. The meaning of these responses, however, is uncertain. Not all “documented” workers have legitimate papers, and higher costs may be less attributable to workers raising their asking prices than to various non-wage expenses, such as for compliance reporting and workers’ compensation insurance. A large majority of respondents sees a reduction in questioning of workers by Border Patrol officers, presumably because resources have been shifted to auditing employers. Smaller but nevertheless substantial shares of the survey sample report that lRCA has made it more difficult to find high quality workers or sufficient numbers of workers, and almost half that they have had to make some adjustment in their recruiting efforts. These views on the impact of the 1986 law are quite comparable across different business size classes.While not specifically attributing change in the labor market to immigration reform, more than a quarter of farm operators regard it generally harder now than it was in 1986 to recruit as many capable production workers as they need, far more than see it as easier <table G-4L Though this tendency to find recruitment more difficult now exists in every commodity group, it is most pronounced among producers of animal commodities, grapes, non-edibles, and “other” crops, and it is rather weak among vegetable producers.