Polish Farm Labour Force from the Perspective of Agricultural Worker Cooperatives

Abstract

The paper focuses on comparisons of the size of the labour force between cooperatives and other legal forms of enterprises in agricultural area. Precisely, the purpose of the paper is to analyse differences between cooperatives and other enterprises in the agricultural sector in the context of employment. An empirical analysis is done on the example of Polish agricultural production cooperatives (APC) and other farming entities. The paper brings answers to the following research questions: Do the agricultural cooperatives provide more employment than other farming entities? What was the level of employment in agricultural cooperatives and other farming entities and what will it be? How does the level of employment influence the profitability of agricultural cooperatives and other farming entities?The conclusions are made on the basis of an analysis of the “List of the 300 best agricultural enterprises” prepared by the Institute of Agricultural and Food Economics – the National Research Institute in Poland. The analysis includes the following types of agricultural enterprises: agricultural production cooperatives, government-owned companies, individual farms, private companies and other farming entities. The time range of this research covers the years 2009–2015. The comparisons are made using analysis of variance, extrapolation method and correlation analysis.The main finding is that there are no clear and significant differences between agricultural production cooperatives and other farming entities in terms of the level of employment, its impact on the overall profitability and partially on increase thereof. However, some of the entities are able to create a lot of jobs. Moreover, they can increase the return on sales by increasing the level of employment and maintain the existing jobs even in the time of a crisis.