Half of the workers had 1997 incomes of less than $7,500, and half had family incomes of less than $10,000, which means that most individuals and families had incomes below the poverty line—$8,350 for an individual in 1997, and $12,800 for a family of three. About 20 percent of farm workers said that they or someone in their family received UI benefits within the past two years. Since 50 percent of farm workers are unauthorized, and 14 percent work year-round, this means that many of the 36 percent who would appear to be eligible for UI benefits received them. About 17 percent of those interviewed received benefits through means-tested programs: one-third of the legally authorized farm workers received means-tested benefits—the three most common assistance programs accessed were Medicaid , Food Stamps, and the Women, Infants and Children program.Labor markets match workers and jobs by performing recruitment, remuneration or motivation, and retention functions. These 3 R’s are handled in unique ways in agriculture. For example, farmers rarely place ads in newspapers to recruit workers, or send recruiters to high school or college campuses in search of workers. More typical is how one farmer described his recruitment strategy: ”when we need X amount of workers, we call up the contractor, and they supply the workers.” Agriculture has one of the highest percentage of jobs paid piece rate wages—a third or more—which makes careful screening of workers, and supervision to encourage fast work, less necessary. Finally, few farm employers have personnel systems aimed at forming long term relationships with seasonal workers. Instead,ebb and flow most farmers believe it is more efficient to work collectively to ensure an ample supply of workers.Recruitment matches workers and jobs.

In seasonal industries such as agriculture that require a large number of workers to fill seasonal jobs, a central clearinghouse for farmers to list vacancies and for workers seeking jobs should be the most efficient way to match hundreds of thousands of workers with a similar number of jobs. A clearinghouse could be operated by employers, unions , or the tax supported Employment Service . The logic of a job-worker clearinghouse to minimize uncertainty for growers and unemployment for workers is clear, but there are few examples of their successful operation in agriculture. Until the early 1970s, the Employment Service and employer associations were the major clearinghouses. However, DOL curtailed its farm job matching to settle lawsuits that charged the ES discriminated against farm workers by not telling them about  non-farm jobs . Many employer associations that served as clearinghouses disbanded after their workers voted for union representation in the 1970s. The UFW tried to become an alternative clearinghouse with union-run hiring halls in the 1970s, but farmers who did not have contracts requiring them to obtain workers via UFW-run hiring halls did not do so, and many workers objected to having to pay dues to the UFW before being sent to farm jobs. The UFW tried to operate hiring halls in the 1970s without the benefit of computers, and deployed those seeking jobs on the basis of their seniority with the UFW, which sometimes split families and workers who wanted to work together; with the loss of contracts in the 1980s, most of the UFW-run hiring halls closed. Today job-worker matching in California agriculture is decentralized, with farm labor contractors and other intermediaries assembling crews of workers to fill seasonal jobs. FLCs, for a fee, organize crews of workers and bring them to farms. FLCs in western agriculture originally were bilingual go-betweens. The Chinese workers who had been imported to build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s were barred from urban jobs, and a bilingual “head boy” both worked and arranged seasonal farm jobs for his 20 to 30 compatriots.

In the 1920s, FLCs became independent businesses whose profit was the wedge between what an employer pays to have a job done and what is paid to the worker. FLCs can often “drive the hardest kinds of bargain” with immigrant workers because they know the circumstances from which they come . Immigrant farm workers rarely complain about labor law violations and, even if they do, the general absence of written contracts makes it hard for often illiterate and non English speaking workers to provide the evidence needed for effective enforcement. Enforcement has not prevented widespread labor law violations. The key intermediary is a foreman or crew boss in charge of a crew of 20 to 40 workers. Smaller FLCs may have only one crew, but most California FLCs have multiple crews, and they make a foreman responsible for hiring and disciplining acrew. Most hiring is via networks, as the crew boss tells the crew that more workers are needed, and the workers currently in the crew inform their friends and relatives that a job is available. There is no need to spend money on help-wanted ads, and workers who are often grateful for the chance to tell friends and relatives about jobs tend to bring only “good” workers to join the crew. Once hired, the friend or relative who brought the new worker to the workplace is usually responsible for her: the experienced worker teaches the new hire how to work, the work rules, and other job related information. Crew bosses are often more than just employers. Especially when the workers are recent immigrants, the boss may be the worker’s banker, landlord, transportation service, restaurant, and check-cashing service. Crew bosses provide such services to workers to make money off them and because newly-arrived workers often need such services. Federal and state governments have enacted an ever-growing body of laws and regulations that attempt to regulate these sideline activities of farm employers such as crew bosses, but they are not widely enforced—it is not unusual for a worker to pay for rides to work as a condition of getting the job. In some “farm worker towns,” especially those along the U.S.Mexican border, workers are recruited in so-called day-haul labor markets. Workers begin to congregate in parking lots at 3 or 4 am, where contractors arrive with buses, posting on the bus the task and the wage.

The workers then board the bus that seems to offer prospects for the highest earnings. Some workers board the same bus every day, while others switch from bus to bus.The second function of labor markets is to remunerate or motivate workers. There are two major pay systems in which wages are used to motivate workers: hourly and piece rate. Employers pay hourly wages when they want slow and careful work, such as pruning trees and vines, when the employer can easily control the pace of the work, as when a crop such as broccoli is harvested by workers following a conveyor belt through the field whose speed is controlled by the driver/employer,greenhouse benches and when piece rate wages would yield low hourly earnings, as for early season fruit picking. Piece rates are common when it is hard to regulate the pace of work, as when workers climb trees to pick fruit , when quality is less important , and when an employer wants to keep labor costs constant with a diverse work force—it costs the employer $100 to have 1,000 pounds of table grapes picked if the piece rate is 10 cents a pound whether one fast picker or 3 slow pickers do the work. If workers are paid piece rate wages, employers must record the units of work and hours worked of each worker and, if a piece rate worker does not earn at least the minimum wage, the employer must provide “make up” pay, so the worker gets at least the minimum wage. As the minimum wage has risen, some farm employers have switched to hourly wages to reduce record keeping. The U.S. minimum wage has been $5.15 an hour since September 1, 1997; the California minimum wage has been $6.75 since January 1, 2002. Most farm employers pay the minimum wage or $0.50 or $1 an hour more, and increase their entry-level wage when the minimum wage rises. When reviewing farm wage data, it is important to remember that most data sources report earnings, which is what workers who are employed under a variety of wage systems—hourly, piece rate and others—actually earn, not the wage rate that would be announced to a newly hired worker. Piece rate workers tend to earn more per hour, $8 to $10 versus $7 to $8, but most piece rate workers cannot sustain their typically faster pace of work for more than 6 to 7 hours a day, so that the weekly earnings of piece rate and hourly workers are similar because the hourly workers tend to be employed more hours. Average hourly earnings on California farms were almost 60 percent of average manufacturing worker earnings in the late 1970s, fell to 55 percent in the 1990s, and rose in the late 1990s with the state’s minimum wage increases. The cost of employing workers includes wages as well as mandatory and voluntary fringe benefits. Mandatory benefits are those that the employer must provide to workers—social security, unemployment and disability insurance, and workers compensation. Voluntary fringe benefits include health insurance, paid vacations and holidays, and extra pension benefits.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics computes the cost of wages and fringe benefits, and in March 2000 reported that the total cost of employing workers in the U.S. private sector was $21 an hour, including $15 an hour in wages and salaries and $6 an hour in benefits . The cost of mandatory fringe benefits was $1.67 an hour or nine percent of total compensation, and employers provided voluntary fringe benefits worth $4.33 or 19 percent of total compensation, including $1.42 an hour for paid leave and $1.36 for health and other insurance.Fringe benefits can be expensive for farm workers with low earnings, since benefits such as health insurance for workers and their families that cover off-the-job injuries and illnesses require monthly payments that are independent of earnings. A low-cost $160 a month or $1 an hour health insurance premium for a full time worker adds 16 percent to the cost of a worker earning $6 an hour and 7 percent to the cost of a $14 an hour worker.However, poor farm worker housing led to higher standards and, since farmers are not required to provide housing, many responded to tougher housing rules by closing their housing. Farm workers were thus pushed into cities and towns in agricultural areas, where they competed with other tenants for housing, sometimes living in rented houses or sheds that were no better than the on-farm housing that was closed. However, the cost of living in cities was usually more than what farmers charged—often $50 to $100 a week—and workers living away from the fields must usually pay for rides to work, which adds another $20 to $25 a week to their costs of working. The government, which used to regulate farmer-provided housing, today primarily makes grants and loans to provide subsidized housing for farm workers, often families with children. Alvardo and Luna found that 13 percent of SJV farm workers in 2001 lived in housing provided by their employers, and 50 percent lived with non-family members; they paid an average $238 a month in rent. Fewer than a third of the workers interviewed had a California drivers’ license, and 70 percent paid an average $5 a day for transportation from the city or town in which they lived to their farm job.The third key labor market function is retention—identifying and keeping the best workers, or encouraging the best seasonal workers to return next year. Most U.S. employers have formal evaluation systems under which supervisors evaluate each worker, and these evaluations are used to determine promotions and wage increases. Few farm employers have formal personnel systems. Instead, there are two methods of recruitment and worker evaluation that illustrate agricultural extremes in personnel practices. Some farmers, especially those who work closely with one or a few year round workers in dairies and similar operations, treat hired workers “as part of the family,” selecting workers carefully and providing them with housing near the farmer’s home . The other extreme is exemplified by a grower who hires a crew of workers through a contractor or a foreman, and never deals directly with workers.