The Well-Being of U.S. Farm Workers: Employee Benefits, Public Assistance, and Long-Term Effects*

Abstract

Nonstandard work relationships between workers and employers have developed in the United States and many other industrialized countries, resulting in a movement away from traditional long-term relationships. Increasingly common nonstandard work relationships include temporary, leased, and outsourced self-employment (Dorman 1998). For many, these jobs represent a form of (Dorman 2000) which can result in low economic returns to workers and high individual and social costs, such as poor health and the costs of providing public services. Not only do jobs at the bottom of the employment ladder lack employee benefits but the work-related costs not borne by the employer are shifted to the employee or potentially to the public. Hired farmworkers in the United States have a long history of precarious nonstandard employment. Farmworker jobs have shortand long-term positive and negative attributes that can influence worker well-being. The short-run perspective accounts for the farmworker's immediate well-being-a balance of the positive economic attributes of work, the nonmonetary conditions of