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A Status Report on Employment & Housing Director & Professor, JSRI Research Associate, JSRI The first research report of the Julian Samora Research Institute, published in 1989, began by noting that: Michigan's food and fiber system constitutes the second most important industry in the state. More than one in five state jobs stems from agriculture. A critical part of Michigan's farm economy is the availability, timeliness and professional skills of migrant and seasonal farmworkers. According to a USDA report, Michigan is the fifth most agriculturally dependent state on farmworkers in the United States. Since that report, the symbiotic relationship between agriculture and farm labor has been much the same and indications are that migrant and seasonal farmworkers continue to face many of the same problems in agriculture that they experienced a decade ago: uncertain demand for jobs, problems in finding housing and accommodations for families with children, uncertain incomes and related poverty. Nationally, an average of 848,000 persons 15 years of age and older did hired farmwork each week in 1 992'. Hired farmworkers were more likely to be male, Hispanic, younger, less educated, and never married. They continued to have lower median weekly earnings ($200) than all wage and salary workers ($380), and their earnings appeared to fall farther behind all wage and salary workers between 1990 and 1992. The Pacific region (Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington) employed 26 percent of all U.S. hired farmworkers. To a lesser degree, states in the midwest showed similar patterns of employment. Part of the reason for such conditions may be the immigrant content of farm labor. After a protracted political struggle, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1 986 recognized agriculture's history of growing dependence on immigrant workers. A separate legalization program called SAWS (for Seasonal Agricultural Workers) assured the legal status for most immigrants to work on farms. With IRCA, close to two million Mexican immigrants were legalized as SAWs. A Profile of Hired Farmworkers 1992 Annual Averages. By Jack L. Runyan. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Agriculture and Rural Economy Division. Agricultural Economic Report No. 693, September 1994. Given that Michigan's agriculture is composed of many SAWs and Mexican-American workers, this Statistical Brief addresses the issue of how many laborers work in agriculture today and the prevailing trends with regard to employment, housing, wages, and the regional distribution of workers and commodities on farms. More detail and background information can be obtained by Institute Research Report #1, November 1 989, by Refugio 1. Rochin, Anne M. Santiago, and Karla S. Dickey. For this report, the authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful information provided by Manuel F. Gonzalez, Director of the Migrant Services Division, Michigan Department of Social Services, and Marv Johansen, Chief of Shelter Environment Section, Division of Environmental Health, Michigan Department of Public Health. Hardcopy Price: $0.00
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