An obvious reason for purchasing FLC and CH services is to improve stability of direct farm employment by reducing seasonal personnel transactions with people moving through task assignments that are by nature temporary.Entirely eliminating turnover in a business, however, is rarely either desirable or achievable. The farmer’s decision to extend a job offer and the worker’s to accept it mark the formal beginning of an employment relationship. Employers and employees make many more decisions, often less explicit, about whether to continue their exchange. Either party can opt to terminate the relationship, the farmer by laying off or firing, the worker by quitting. When both farmer and worker want to continue the employment, neither is deprived by the other of gelling his or her way. Likewise, there is a harmony of interests when both want to end the employment, and turnover serves them mutually in such cases. In two other types of circumstance that lead to turnover, however, employers or employees-sometimes both–end up having to accept what they do not want. The farmer who would rather end the employment despite a worker’s desire to stay faces two uncomfortable alternatives: to fire the worker, thus risking personal as well as legal costs , or to retain the worker in order to avoid such liability. The worker who leaves despite a farmers desire to continue employment is subject to nowhere near the same legal jeopardy,commercial racks but this turnover often has some inconveniences for the departing employee as well as the managers and coworkers who remain. How stable is the direct employment by farm businesses in the survey? An indicator of within-year turnover is shown in the first row of tables D-3 and D-4. The number of different people employed at any time in ]992 exceeded the maximum number of people on a given payroll, on average, by more than one-third.
The ratio of total employees to peak employment was largest in grapes firms and smallest in nuts. Fairly consistent across businesses’ payroll ranges, this ratio was somewhat below average join the very largest operations and slightly below in the very smallest. Retention of employees from year to year was substantial in all crop classifications. Half or more of a farm’s ]992 employees had previously worked for the same business in 80 percent of cases, three quarters or more in 63 percent of cases. Among farms that were in business before 1987, an impressive 56 percent had 1992 work forces comprised in majority by workers who had stayed for five years or more. By these measures, stability from 1991 to 1992 was greatest in the animal products, vegetables, and nonedible crops sectors, and in the larger payroll ranges. Stability was significantly lower in farms organized as family partnerships than as sole proprietorships, non-family partnerships, or corporations. The longer term stability was somewhat higher than average in “other” crops and in smaller payroll ranges.In 1987-88, farmers helped farm workers to apply for legalization under the SAW program for a few reasons: simply caring about the welfare of those people who had worked for, and in many cases alongside them over time; understanding that the more legal workers there were, the better able all employers would be in the long run to comply with the new law; and expecting that their assistance might improve relations on the farm and be reciprocated by greater loyalty and workforce stability. Our 1987 survey found a high level of employer involvement in legalizing alien workers. Letters or documents to verify past employment qualifying workers for the program were the type of assistance by far most commonly provided, by 78 percent of farm employers overall. Other help that farmers had given included information about the IRCA legalization programs, copies of INS application forms, personal assistance in completing forms, money to pay application fees, transportation to legalization offices, and referrals to qualified designated entities .
One said he gave workers “whatever they need.” Some commented, however, that they felt betrayed by workers moving on soon after their applications for legal status were filed. Respondents in the present stIrn’y who had any employees in 1986 estimate that 40 percent of them participated in the SAW program, and that more than half of these legalized workers are still employed at the same farm. Though grape producers had the highest proportion of their workers legalized through this program, they report the lowest retention rate of SAWs . Larger firms, many of which had assigned or hired extra clerical staff to assist workers applying for legalization, tend to have higher proportions of both workers legalized and SAWs retained through 1992 ‘ Nearly one-third of respondents say that they assumed a contractor was licensed unlesstold otherwise, and a similar share accepted a contractor’s word to that effect. Three percent called DOL, which maintains records on federal registration but not state licensing. Nearly 26 percent of respondents overall say that they did not verify contractor legitimacy by either of the two most reliable methods, seeing the license and calling D1R. Larger farm operations are generally more inclined to so verify “by the book” . The farms with greatest labor expense are considerably more likely than those in all other size groups to have inspected the license or called D1R and least likely to have relied on assumption or contractor assertion. About one-fifth of respondents specify other means, most commonly checking with the contractor’s insurance carrier, for having gained assurance that FLCs were licensed. Many mention having required contractors to give them copies of insurance certificates and licenses, some having asked other growers for whom the contractor had worked, and a few having depended on FLCs’ reputations in the community or information from grower associations and packing houses. Is there need for an accessible source of reliable third-party referrals to and information about FLCs in the market? Such a service could be heavily used. More than three-fifths of farm operators say that, if they were looking to hire a labor contractor, they would definitely or probably call a toll-free number to find names of local contractors with experience in specific crops.
More than two-thirds say they would call to check the current kgitimacy of an FLC thot they were about to hire. Anticipated use of this kind of source is extremely high in the Dessert and lowest in the Central and South Coosts WJ percent and 52 percent), possibly indicative of regional differences in creation and dissolution of FLC businesses, common knowledge about them, and stability of grower-FLC relations.Even if they contract for non-employee labor and take pains to retain employees once hired, nearly all farm operators need to find new workers periodically. They recruit through multiple channels, often capitalizing on the flow of information through friendship and kinship networks of current employees. Word-of-mouth is the primary form of advertising. Job seekers who become aware of possible openings may first approach crew foremen or field supervisors about employment, sometimes accompanied by a relative or friend working for the company. Those without a personal introduction can become “walk in” recruits by showing up at the work site, company office, or known pick-up points in the morning. The methods that farmers most commonly used in 1992 to find new production employees were asking current employees for referrals. accepting walk-ins, and delegating the responsibility to foremen or supervisors cited walk-in, and merely seven percent worker referral as their main method. A greater proportion of smaller businesses, conversely, found most ncw hires through worker referral. This mode of recruitment, while used by roughly comparable shares in all size groups,greenhouse rolling benches was much more commonly regarded as the main method in the group of farms with smallest payrolls. Use of the EDD employment service and advertisements on radio or in newspapers vary directly with payroll size. Million-dollar payroll farms made by far the greatest usc of EDD. The present findings about recruitment are quite consistent with our 1987 grower survey results. Large majorities of the sample had reported using walk-in and referrals from supervisors, other employees, and grower acquaintances 111 either 1986 or 1987. Written advertisement, visit to worker homes, and EDD referral were each used in either year by less than one-fifth of employers. Reliance on walk-in, though the leading source of workers in 1986 and 1987 , declined somewhat in the latter year. Current survey respondents show the same trend, twice as many reducing as expanding their use of walk-ins from 1986 to 1992 . To lesser extents they indicate net increases in use of foreman and worker referral over this period. The larger numbers in the two columns furthest right in table E-4 are not nearly as profound as they may appear, because the shares of respondents reporting more and less usage of a recruitment method are calculated relative to only those who both used that method in 1992 and had been in business in 1986.Under a system created by the agner-Pcyser Act of 1933, the U.s. Department of Labor funds EDD to operate a public employment service that helps employers and workers find one another.
The number of agricultural placements through this service increased somewhat after fiscal year 1986, but EDD has remained a minor player in matching farm employers and workers.They were trying to fill some 24 job openings per farm and ended up hiring, on average, almost that many people referred by EDD. Some businesses actually hired more workers than they had initially sought; average hires exceeded job openings in the Central and South Coast regions. Farmers in the North Coast and Desert regions had extremely low rates of ES use <table E-5, and those with large payrolls much higher than average use . Satisfaction with EDD staff tends to be highest in the South Coast among regions with more than two users, and in the lowest-payroll group. Nearly nine of ten farm operators overall, however, report having placed no job orders whatever. Seven in ten of those who used the employment service are very or basically satisfied with how EDD staff responded to their job orders. The number of respondents who wrote in comments about the employment service, however, exceeded by half the number of those who used the service in 1992. Listed verbatim in Appendix 4 are the comments that 146 respondents took the time to write on their questionnaires. Most of them express strong disinclination to recruit through ES, based on past frustration. A recurring theme is that applicants referred by EDD arc better able to work the welfare and mandatory benefits systems than to use field tools. Many say that department staff do not assess applicant abilities well enough either to screen them from jobs for which they are grossly unqualified or to provide employers with good mfom1ation about what the applicant can do. Some respondents mention logistical problems with the ES system–paperwork, referral delays, and lack of staff followup. One is most positive about help from EDD in recaling workers from seasonal layoff. But the predominant theme is that the department does little to facilitate good matching of workers and farm jobs.Federal and state laws prohibit employment discrimination based on several personal attributes that have no bearing on performance in most jobs. “Selection validity,” the relationship of hiring criteria to on-the-job performance, is what gets called into question when illegal discrimination is charged. A farmer may not, for example, select for the highest level of education or the largest biceps available, regardless of what the duties are in a job to be filled. Doing so can be just as illegally discriminatory as hiring only people born in Canada, or with black hair, or related to left-handed irrigators from Chowchilla. But employers have good reason and rights to discriminate among applicants and screen them with respect to job-related knowledge, ability, and skill, in order to fill jobs with persons most likely to perform them well.A criterion on which all managers are legally required to discriminate when hiring is eligibility for employment in the United States. Few survey respondents, most of whom arc in the small payroll groups, say that they give no consideration to documented eligibility in filling production jobs .