Agricultural Workers and Social Insurance

Abstract

O NLY a little more than six years ago, the very phrase had a strange and unfamiliar sound to American ears. Before August 1935, no system of social insurance other than workmen's compensation existed in this country. Today, it is estimated that 40 million workers were employed at some time during 1941 in jobs covered by the Federal system of old-age and survivors insurance. Most of them are also protected by state programs of unemployment compensation. is now a household word. But it is a word which still has no reality for many millions who work for a living-among them the farm laborer, the sharecropper, the tenant farmer, and the independent farm operator. These people have no social insurance protection against the economic consequences of old age, unemployment, and death. Why? Not because they don't need it. Their need for social insurance is at least as great, and in many respects greater, than the need of many groups already protected. No, the chief reason why agricultural labor has so far been denied protection is fear of the difficulties that would accompany efforts to administer a social insurance covering this group. When the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, there were many who said that the old-age and survivors insurance program would not work. It is impractical, they said, to pay variable benefits related to individual and regional differences in earnings. It is impossible to collect contributions and obtain wage reports for millions of men and women scattered all over the United States, working for hundreds of thousands of small employers as well as for large corporations. It is inconceivable, they said, that there can be maintained complete and accurate records of individual earnings, over each individual's working lifetime. Notwithstanding these predictions, nearly 60 million individual earnings accounts have been established and are being maintained. Without counting 1941 returns, approximately 117 billion dollars in wages have been reported by employers since the program began. Of this total, 99.5 per cent has been definitely identified and