摘要：An average of 875,000 persons 15 years of age and older did hired farmworkeach week as their primary job in 1998. An additional 63,000 people did hiredfarmwork each week as their secondary job. Hired farmworkers were more like-ly than the typical U.S. wage and salary worker to be male, Hispanic, younger,less educated, never married, and not U.S. citizens. The West (42 percent) andSouth (31.4 percent) census regions accounted for almost three-fourths of thehired farmworkers. The rate of unemployment in the hired farm labor force(11.8 percent) was more than double that (4.5 percent) for all wage and salaryworkers. Hired farmworkers were also more likely to be paid less than the mini-mum wage, and to be low-wage workers. Consequently, their median weeklyearnings continued to be much lower than those of all wage and salary workers.However, hired farmworkers' real median weekly earnings increased 4 percentbetween 1990 and 1998, while earnings for all wage and salary workersincreased only 2 percent. This report examines regional and structural patternsof farm labor use, and demographic and employment characteristics of hiredfarmworkers, using data from the 1997 Census of Agriculture and the 1998Current Population Survey (CPS) earnings microdata file.
关键词：Hired farmworkers; annual averages; demographic characteristics;hours worked; median weekly earnings
