Rationalizing the Farm Labor Market: The Case for Supplemental Wage Payments.

The article focuses on labor market that presents a paradox that relates to a very large, almost ominous, problem over which the whole society is beginning to brood. Simply put, researchers now have a swelling pool of unused unskilled workers for whom there is a shrinking need. Yet, the labor demand that agriculture has most difficulty filling is that for unskilled or low-skilled workers. Add to this the fact that some of the most difficult and least desired physical work left in the U.S. is the stooped labor on farms, and that this work remains the least rewarding to the worker. Poverty caused by low earnings and underemployment is but one aspect of the farm workers' plight. There is also the fact that the relative educational disadvantage of the farm laborer has increased since 1940. The educational attainment of male farm laborers did not increase from 1940 to 1950 or from 1950 to 1959, periods during which there were marked increases for other workers. Much of the unemployment experienced by the farm worker is due to the lack of education that would enable him to qualify for off-season employment. The high positive relationship known to exist between the educational level of parents and the educational attainment of children plus low annual earnings forecast that children from farm labor families will not go to school as much as other children, and thus the cycle of poverty encoils an unborn generation. An evaluation of the impact "automation" has had, and probably will continue to have, on the society can be seen in agriculture--if the tag-name "automation" can be used to designate all forms of technological progression, including mechanization and improved resource allocations, as well as the more sophisticated electronic control and computation devices.