Nation of birth, prohibited as a basis for screening and as a topic of pre-employment inquiry, is nevertheless considered in 12 percent of farm businesses, least of all by the largest employers. What else do farmers look for in prospective production employees? Respondents overwhelmingly confirm the importance of criteria listed in the questionnaire, 95 percent or more citing as major 0rIninor factors: reliability in coming to and staying at work on schedule, skills of the kind needed to carry out job tasks, previous experience in similar work, and compatibility with other employees. Most common of th<i considerations written in by farm operators is pirsonal honesty. Others they specify range from such general characteristics as attitude, physical appearance, health, and willingness to learn, to factors that arc more clearly job-specific, such as ability to understand instructions in English, possession of a driver’s license, and tolerance of bee stings. The classical basic standard is also on the list: “… is a walking body.” It is one thing to value a characteristic and another to determine whether applicants possess it. Systematic approaches to employee selection depend on information with which to rate applicants on criteria directly related to requirements of the job. Casual approaches arc not designed to sort workers carefully according to qualifications, so the information requirements–and the costs of meeting themfor such methods are less. How much information to obtain about job applicants, through which sources to get it, and in what order to tap the sources arc cost-benefit issues faced in every selection process. A combination of sources is needed to develop full information on criteria relevant to most jobs. The ability to follow written instructions, for example, may be established through completion of an application form, the knowledge and physical skill to correctly prune vines through a practical test or demonstration, the mathematical skill to calibrate chemical dilution through a written test, a willingness to work long and irregular hours through an interview,greenhouse bench top and abstinence from use of drugs through a medical exam. How accurate is the adage that farmers arc more careful choosing spark plugs to put in their tractors than drivers to put on them?
To what extent is information from various sources used in deciding whether workers have the qualifications that farm employers want? The most heavily used sources, utilized by about 90 percent of respondents, are the direct interview and comments from foremen or other employees Hable E-7; response that source is used “a lot” is classified in the table as “major”; responses that source is used “some” or “a little” are classified “minor”. Despite its widespread use, the traditional interview is notoriously fertile ground for interviewer biases to reduce the validity of results for forecasting future job performance, but interviews that are carefully structured can yield quite objective evaluations. The present survey provides no basis for knowing how respondents design this or any of the other selection information tools. Written applications can deliver large amounts of information abou1 workers cheaply and in reasonably comparable form, and statements on applications are often useful to discuss in subsequent interviews. The use of this tool in agriculture appears to be limited, however, by the non-cognitive nature of much production work, substantial illiteracy in the farm workforce, traditions of casual infield hiring, and delegation of considerable screening authority to foremen. Only half of the farm operators overall use written applications. Rates of use are significantly higher in larger firms. Although nearly all farmers say that they consider skills in hiring for production jobs, less than two thirds report using short-term trials or practical tests to assess applicants and one-third use written tests. Farmers fluent in the language spoken by most of their workers imply or directly suggest that staff of the service should more carefully assess workers before referring them to prospective employers. Although objective information about applicant skills and knowledge would be used by a broad range of survey respondents, more than a third say that they would never call for such assessment, even if provided free of user fees . A like proportion , however, would be Inclined to use this kind of service in more than half of their hires into production jobs. Anticipated utilization is generally greater among farms with larger payrolls and in vegetable and nut businesses.In today’s agricultural workplace, at least as much as in other types, personnel management is fraught with interpersonal, technical, and legal complexities. Few farm operators go it alone. Most either hire or contract with professionals to assist in parts of the personnel function. The professionals that most farmers depend on are payroll accountants or bookkeepers and attorneys . Services of employee and supervisory trainers, personnel specialists and consuItants. employee relations assistants, and recruiters are also used by substantial shares of survey respondents .
Nearly all of the attorneys and most of the personnel specialists arc contracted as outside providers, while professionals of other types are mainly hired as farm staff. The propensity to retain each type is significantly greater among farms with larger payrolls and among those in which production employees are or ever have ever been represented by a union.Good job performance by workers depends on their knowing what they arc expected to do, having the ability to do it, and making efforts to apply that ability. None of these elements is sufficient by itself to get anything done. Farm managers communicate their expectations to workers before and during the period of employment. Uyproviding information, explicit training, and on-the-job learning situations, they may also help develop workers’ abilities. Traditionally orientation to farm jobs has been handled in casual style, often by crew supervisors who merely introduce a new hire to crew members and the work flow. Workers entering farm businesses through kinship and friendship networks arrive somewhat oriented to their jobs and working conditions. For these newcomers espetially, continuing orientation and integration into the workforce tends to center on social and familial relationships. Frequently overlooked as a vehicle for worker onentation arc the recruitment and selection processes, which are mostly geared to providling information for the farm employer to use in hiring decisions. Through procedural steps they undergo on the way to getting hired, applicants too acquire informatio nand form impressions that affect their decisions about how to perform on the job and whether to accept an employment offer in the first place. Indeed, people may select themselves out of the running for lack of interest or qualification, based on what they comprehend in advance about the job content and performance expectations. No matter how thorough the selection and orientation of workers, there is always more to get across about what to do, why to do it, and how to do it, as well as about the terms of employment under which the work is to be done. Some employee training, such as in injury and illness prevention,cannabis dry rack is specifically required by law, but most comes about Simply as a matter of operational necessity. Even where workers are selected for their previously demonstrated proficiency in certain tasks, managers have to put some time into describing and encouraging adherence to their farms’ performance standards.
Where hiring is based more on such “character attributes” as honesty, loyalty, integrity, responsibility, and learning potential, the employer takes on the more basic chore of helping workers to develop specific skills on the job. Some managers find further that they have to ease workers out of Objectionable techniques or work habits that were learned elsewhere. How do farm employees get to know about their jobs, the farm operation, personnel policies, and others’ perceptions of their work? Workers in the vast majority of respondent businesses obtain their information through verbal instructions from supervisors and tailgate meetings at the work site . Other means by which farm operators inform workers are: written rules that are either posted or distributed , group orientations , staff meetings held indoors , employee handbooks , written job descriptions , structured performance evaluations , video tapes C7 percent, and audio tapes . These latter eight vehicles, requiring advance preparation and characteristic of structured personnel management, are all significantly more common in the larger farm businesses. Sale proprietorships, even within the large-size groups, are much less likely than farms organized in other forms to use written job descriptions, and non-family partnerships are more likely to have written work rules. Direct communications are integral to hiring and training employees, assigning and coordinating work, and handling all other aspects of employee relations. Hardly any farmers tum biological material and processes into marketable product by themselves, and many do not even themselves supervise all the hired employees who perform production work. A language difference between employer and production worker, if not sheer organizational size, may necessitate an intermediate level of supervisory employees.Spanish is normally spoken by most production workers on more than three-quarters of California farms <table F-3). English is the only other language mainly used in more than a handful of farm businesses, most commonly in the Sacramento Valley and “other” counties regions. Very few respondents report that workers speak either Mixtec, Portuguese, or Punjabi , and not one specifies Hmong or Tagalog. Predictably, farmers arc most fluent in their employees’ main language in regions where English is more commonly spoken by workers, but many arc also able to function to some degree in Spanish, In nearly two-thirds of all farm businesses, and in a majority of even those where most workers speak Spanish, the operator is able to communicate instructions in the workers’ main language. Farmers unable to speak adequately with workers usually communicate through hired foremen or crew leaders . Some are aided by non-supervisory workers, farmer family members, friends, and neighbors.Understanding the work assigned and having the ability to perform it do not get tasks done unless accompanied by an exertion of effort. And when other things arc equal, peopkput effort into what brings them more pay. Just because money is a valued incentive, however, docs not mean that it always stimulates effort in the directions that employers want. The ways in which farmers structure and administer compensation have great influence on what employees expect to gain from different kinds of effort and hence how they apply themselves. Workers respond to not only the wage rate bu/also the pay basis, generally units of production or units of time for which a compensation system pays. “Incentive pay” directly links current compensation to desired performance. Piecework, compensated at a fixed cash multiple of units produced, is the most common but by no means the only incentive plan in agriculture, Several problems limit its use. Before the work begins in earnest, rate-setting games may interfere with farmer-worker relations. Once regular work does begin, the rush to produce in quantity, which pays, can lead to the neglect of quality, which does not. In cohesive work groups, fear of rates slipping or slower performers losing their jobs may defeat the system, as workers informally establish and work toward a “safe” level of individual production that is well below their average capacity. Where there is no such brake on the incentive effect of piece rates, there is sometimes concern about the effects of overexertion on health and safety as well as on longer term performance. The technology of many farm operations precludes the use of such incentive pay. lt might have been appropriate, for instance, to pay milkers by the gallon in an era of smaller dairies and no machines. The volume of milk production today, though, is less directly attributable to the efforts of designated milkers. Mechanized and even machine-aided harvest systems in field crops and vegetables give workers much less control 01 work pace and hence output quantity than they had under lormer methods. In general, output-based incentive plans are better suited where: output is easily measurable, employees have a high degree 01 control over output, delays in work process are largely caused by humans, the technology is stable, and workers on individual plans or crews on group plans work independently 01 others. On what basis do larmers calculate pay lor most of their production employees?