Program Scoring and Rationale - Agriculture Forestry and Fishing Research at NIOSH - page 160

NIOSH refers to as priority populations for the period 1997-2006, the cumulative
adjusted budget devoted to child safety was slightly more than $14 million, for
fishing safety $2.4 million, for logging safety $0.2 million, and for “migrant and
minority” populations an estimated $2.1 million (NIOSH Response to Question #5,
2007, see Appendix C). NIOSH has yet to allocate substantial resources that are
consistent with the task force's recommendations for hired farm workers.
NIOSH has not accurately identified the hired farm workforce and continues
to refer to this population as migrant and seasonal farm workers. Federal defini-
tions of this population for the purpose of providing funds for education, health
services, and legal services limits the eligible population to crop workers, but also
includes food-processing workers. Furthermore, NIOSH has stated that “farm
workers provide a good example of a population of non-English speaking, low-
literacy immigrant workers who migrate between a series of temporary jobs” (Fine,
1996). That definition of the hired labor force is obsolete and unhelpful: although
many hired farm workers are non-English speakers, some do speak English; 42
percent of hired farm workers migrate to find work, but most do not migrate
(U.S. DOL, 2005); and many hired farm workers are immigrants, but quite a few
are not. Moreover, large numbers of hired farm laborers work in livestock produc-
tion, excluded from the current “migrant and seasonal” definitions. The basis of
the inaccurate characterization of the hired workforce is federal legislation that
funds services to address needs of “migrant and seasonal” workers, and cannot be
attributed to NIOSH alone.
CONCLUSION
The AFF Program has conducted decent work but many opportunities for im-
provement remain, including the setting of priorities with stakeholder input and a
focus on research of utmost importance to and impact on AFF worker safety and
health. The new challenge is to create a cohesive program that establishes strategic
goals with the input of stakeholders so that researchers will understand the issues
facing AFF workers, conduct surveillance of all subpopulations of AFF workers,
and create a research-to-practice stream of information that will have an impact
on the stakeholder communities. Successful implementation of the research-to-
practice component of the AFF Program will need to include participatory involve-
ment at the ground level to provide data to answer stakeholder questions, identify
how stakeholders access information, and create a continuous discussion with
stakeholders. Given the programmatic gaps and challenges, the committee offers
suggestions and more formal recommendations in Chapters 11 and 12 to build on
the efforts of the AFF Program to date and to improve the entire system of NIOSH
research and knowledge transfer activities.