AGRICULTURAL WORKER

An individual whose occupation is work in farming operations, primarily in such activities as cultivation and tillage of the soil and dairying. These operations also include any practices which are performed either by a farmer or on a farm, incidentally to, or in conjunction with such farming operations.
(adapted from Anglim, C.T., Labor, Employment and the Law, A Dictionary, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1997, p. 36)

"Agricultural workers and their families, whether on large-scale plantations or smallholdings or within peasant communities, face many disadvantages in terms of access to credit, markets, social services, labour protection and social security but, lacking voice and representation in local, national and international politics, are often overlooked in poverty reduction strategies."
[…]
"The share of wage employment in agriculture, especially the number of wage-dependent smallholders in agriculture, is continuing to increase in virtually all regions, and accounts for some 40 per cent of the world's agricultural workforce. Of the 450 million workers in agricultural wage employment, 20 to 30 per cent are women. Indigenous people and migrants form a significant part of this workforce."
(International Labour Organization (ILO), Working out of Poverty, Geneva, 2003, p. 33-34, visited 2009-05-26)

"Migrant farm workers are classified as independent contractors if they engaged in the harvesting of crops, if they could refuse to work for any particular landowner in preference for another, and if the details of the methods by which they conducted the harvest were not controlled by the landowner. In contrast, courts have found migrant workers to be employees rather than independent contractors when they were dependent on the grower for their continued employment and livelihood."
(Anglim, C.T., Labor, Employment and the Law, A Dictionary, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1997, p. 310)

The agricultural worker is a rural worker. In addition to agricultural work, rural employment also includes work related to extraction industries, such as mining and logging.

An agricultural worker is defined as "a person employed in a farming, ranching, orchard or agricultural operation and whose principal employment responsibilities consist of:

• Growing, raising, keeping, cultivating, propagating, harvesting or slaughtering the product of any of the above operations.
• Clearing, draining, irrigating or cultivating land.
• Operating or using farm machinery, equipment or materials for the above purposes.
• Direct selling of a product of any of the above operations if the sales are done at the operation and are only done during the normal harvest cycle for that product.
• The initial washing, cleaning, sorting, grading or packing of an unaltered product produced by the operation, or a similar product purchased from another operation during the normal harvest cycle for that product."

(Employment Standards Branch of the Government of British Columbia, Farm Workers Fact Sheet, 2003, visited 2009-06-26)

Categories of Agricultural Workers

Landowners

• Landowners running enterprises specialized in agricultural production. Certain small landowners in developing countries combine small-scale agriculture and cattle-raising.
• Unpaid family workers who share the income from production.
• Subsistence farmers, mainly found in developing countries, who own micro-holdings and work as temporary wage-labourers to supplement the insufficient earnings from their own production.
• Indigenous peoples owning a collective property of land who are mainly engaged in subsistence agriculture; in some cases they also work on a temporary basis in agricultural enterprises.

Tenants

• Sharecroppers and tenants who cultivate communally owned, state-owned or private properties, the former paying a share of the production as rent in kind or in money, the latter renting the land for a fixed annual rent.
• Cooperative workers who participate in collective economic enterprises for agricultural production.

Landless

• Permanent agricultural workers, not owning land, who are usually employed for wages on medium-sized and large enterprises.
• Specialized workers employed for specific tasks on farms, (tractor drivers, applicators of pesticides, etc.).
• Landless temporary and daily labourers who do not own land and move between agriculture and other complementary rural economic activities according to the availability of work, in very precarious conditions.
• Squatters, who occupy uncultivated land in state- and privately-owned latifundia, living more often than not in shacks and liable to expulsion.
• Migrant workers, temporarily engaged during harvesting periods, who come from other regions in the country or neighbouring countries.

The different categories of workers also vary within each country and, in certain cases, a single farmer may come under more than one category. For example, in developing countries, many smallholders supplement their subsistence farming income with wages earned by working on large commercial farms during harvesting periods.

In industrialized countries, most agricultural workers are small-scale landowners who operate farms with varying technical and financial means and produce for the domestic and/or the export market. In Europe, small and medium-sized landholdings are usually family farms, with a high level of productivity. They tend to employ seasonal workers at times of high demand for labour, particularly when they specialize in vegetable, fruit and grape production, where mechanization is not highly developed.
(International Labour Organisation (ILO), Safety and health in agriculture, 2000, visited 2009-05-26)