Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
E
Methods for Identifying the Agriculture,
Forestry, and Fishing Workforce Population
DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN EMPLOYMENT
AND WORKFORCE POPULATION
Efforts to measures the size of a population at occupational risk are often based
on a determination of “employment” in the economic sector of interest. It is usu-
ally assumed that that term refers to the number of people who are self-employed
or are employed by others. It is implicit that those people do not change their
employment status throughout all or most of the calendar year. Thus, measures of
employment are sometimes thought of as more or less equivalent to determinations
of the number of people actually working.
However, the agriculture, forestry, and fishing (AFF) sector is unusual in three
respects. First, many workers are employed for only a portion of the year. Second,
there is a high rate of turnover of hired and contract workers; a great many workers
are known either to enter or to leave the AFF sector workforce in the course of a
year. Fully 16 percent of the nation's hired crop-farm workers in 2001-2002 were
determined to have been immigrant “newcomers”, that is, foreign-born persons
who had been working in the United States for less than a year when interviewed
by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). 1 Presumably, the newcomers replaced
people who had left crop-farm employment. Third, the AFF labor force includes
1 United States Department of Labor. Office of Assistant Secretary for Policy. Office of Program-
matic Policy, Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 00-0. A Demographic
and Employment Profile of United States Farm Workers , Research Report No. 9, March 2005, p. 8.
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