Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ponent of the survey in 2002 owing to budgetary constraints (Mark Aitken, USDA,
private communication, February 19, 2007).
The FLS asks employers to provide information about wage rates and the
numbers of field workers and livestock workers. The FLS provides annual average
wage data on directly hired farm workers in each of the 50 states.
The data generated by the FLS are clearly limited to employment in each of 4
months of the year. No effort is made to determine how many people are employed
year-round. However, respondents are asked to report the number of persons
whom they expect to employ for 150 days or more and the number expected to be
employed for less than 150 days.
Because the excellent sampling frame used for the survey (list and area frame)
was developed for use by other NASS surveys, the FLS does not incur special sam-
pling costs. In fact, it is an efficient data-gathering tool. Information is collected by
telephone and processed with other survey data gathered by NASS; thus, statisti-
cians and other resources are already shared.
The FLS provides excellent information on a regional and large-state basis that
can be combined with data from other sources, such as the Agricultural Census, to
estimate the numbers of farm workers in smaller geographic areas, such as counties.
The FLS also can be combined with DOL's National Agricultural Workers Survey
(NAWS) to make fine-grained estimates of the demographics of farm workers by
region and large state. Those estimates can even be made by season. The age, sex,
place of origin, migration patterns, housing patterns, education levels, and use of
social services can be estimated by combining the NAWS and the FLS.
Furthermore, the FLS is used to support various other government programs.
The NAWS itself uses FLS data to implement its sample and weight its results.
The NAWS, FLS, and Agricultural Census are being used in various configura-
tions, but always with a big role for the FLS, to allocate resources for the National
Farmworker Jobs Program, the Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Program, the
Legal Services Corporation migrant program, and the Migrant Health Program.
Other agencies, such as the 1992 Commission on Agricultural Workers and the
Congressional Budget Office, have used the FLS, usually in conjunction with other
data sources, to describe the farmworker population. The H2A agricultural guest
worker program uses the wage data from the FLS to set its adverse-effect wage rate
for the visiting workers. Moreover, estimates from those data sources are used by
farmworker programs and by state policymakers to design, implement, and obtain
resources for their activities.
Recently, the Congressional Research Service relied on the FLS to determine
that there was, as of 2006, no national shortage of hired farm laborers. Citing the
annual FLS reports for the period 1990-2006, the official report to Congress dem-
onstrated that hired farmworker employment varied only slightly throughout the
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