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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of employer-provided health benefits (EPHBs) on labor supply decisions of documented and undocumented farm workers. By establishing a significant linkage between EPHB and farm work decisions, this study provides important implications for farm employment retention and the financial sustainability of farm businesses.

Using data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey, objective (actual) and subjective (expected) employment data are used as outcome variables analyzed under an ordered probit model, with the data pre-processed using the coarsened exact matching method to reduce endogeneity issues within the estimation.

Results confirm the influence of EPHB on farm workers’ decisions to remain employed on the farm as well as on the duration of their farm employment. Comparatively, EPHB significantly influences undocumented farm workers’ decisions on actual employment duration and subjective working expectations while documented workers seem to ascribe less importance to EPHB in their farm employment decisions.

This study provides important financial and business viability implications as the value of farm labor services retained through EPHB can translate to high opportunity losses, if ineffective. Alternative labor-saving strategies, such as mechanization, can only potentially lead to serious financial challenges for agribusiness firms, especially small-scale farm operations. This study emphasizes the need for more effective employment retention incentives for the sake of sustaining farm business viability.

This study presents empirical evidence on the important influence of EPHB on farm employment decisions, especially those made by undocumented farm workers, that have not been extensively explored in literature.

The purpose of this paper is to delineates workers’ labour turnover and considerations around work, in a context of informalisation of work, through a case study of temporary non-resident farm workers in the deciduous fruit sector in Ceres, South Africa.

The research design is a three-phase exploratory sequential mixed-methods strategy. Findings from 29 in-depth interviews were refined, verified and ranked in four focus groups. These informed grounded indicators in a survey of 200 farm workers employed in peak season and their 887 household members.

Considerations are informed by work-related insecurities, interpersonal workplace relationships and reproductive insecurity in the form of care of others, social linkages and residential insecurity, seemingly hierarchical. The least important considerations most thwart workers’ ability to complete fixed-term contracts and account for over 70 per cent of labour turnover in the form of resignations. In sum, workers experience constrained considerations around work arising from their material, social and economic conditions.

This is the first study on the labour turnover of farm workers in South Africa and the fifth globally. The research gives precedence to the voice of farm workers and is a thick description of workers’ considerations around work.

This chapter illustrates how labor is organized in a branch of export-grape production in the São Francisco valley, North East Brazil. It describes how Northern retailers' corporate strategy involves continually improving product quality, and how grape producers respond to evolving demands by attempting to increase the skill content of labor and labor productivity. Simultaneously, relatively militant rural trade unions organize agricultural workers in the region, often staging strikes, achieving significant gains for workers, and continually attempting to improve their position vis-à-vis capital. As a response, farms go to significant lengths to recruit, retain, and discipline workers they consider to be good and relatively uninfluenced by trade unions. It is argued that in order to better understand strategies of firms and developmental outcomes in new regions of export agriculture it is necessary to pursue a three-pronged investigation, focusing simultaneously.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive narrative review of the literature on migrant farm worker child and adolescent health. It highlights current health issues and suggests methods to improve research and clinical practices with this underserved and vulnerable population.

The methodology for this narrative review included a search of articles published between 2000 and 2012. From the primary search, 76 articles met the search criteria. A secondary search revealed three additional articles.

The various methodologies used in the current literature have limited rigorous analysis of the health of pediatric migrant populations. The findings highlight the complex factors that influence migrant pediatric health. Despite the many challenges migrant farm worker children and their families face, they exhibit enormous resilience and strengths that may help counterbalance these challenges. Study categories that emerged from the analysis include health perspectives and behaviors, occupational health, access to care, utilization and satisfaction with health services, health outcomes and health disparities, and oral health. This review provides a strong foundation from which to work toward improving migrant pediatric health.

This paper provides an original review of the unique health needs and the complex factors influencing the health of migrant farm worker children and adolescents. This will be of value to clinicians and researchers since migrant farm worker families are part of communities across the country. It offers public health professionals insight into services and programs that can improve the health and well-being of children, families, and communities.

This paper examines the exercise of Black employee voice in South Africa over the past 53 years. Black workers constitute almost 4 out of every 5 workers in the country and experienced racial oppression from the time of colonisation up to the end of apartheid in 1994. They are still congregated around the lower skilled occupations with low incomes and high unemployment levels.

The paper draws on the theory of voice, exit and loyalty of Albert Hirschman, but extends voice to include sabotage as this encapsulates the nature of employee voice from about 2007 onwards. It reflects a culture of insurgence that entered employment relations from about that time onwards, but was lurking below the surface well before then.

The exercise of employee voice has gone through five phases from 1963 to mid-2016 starting with a silent phase for the first ten years when it was hardly heard at all. However, as a Black trade union movement emerged after extensive strikes in Durban in 1973, employee voice grew stronger and stronger until it reached an insurgent phase.

The phases employee voice went through were heavily influenced by the socio-political situation in the country. The reason for the emergence of an insurgent phase was due to the failure of the ruling African National Congress government to deliver services and to alleviate the plight of the poor in South Africa, most of whom are Black. The failure was due to neo-patrimonialism and corruption practised by the ruling elite and politically connected. Protests by local communities escalated and became increasingly violent. This spilled over into the workplace. As a result many strikes turned violent and destructive, demonstrating voice exercised as sabotage and reflecting a culture of insurgence.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical and ideological foundations for a research agenda on the social economy in South Africa.

The paper combines relevant literature research and case study work in a selected geographical region in the Western Cape province of South Africa to meet its research aim.

The perspectives emanating from the case study research on the nature of the diversified forms of new capitalist expansion and entrepreneurial activity in the case study area and particularly the way in which the new developments impact on the working conditions of farm workers lead to the consolidation of the authors' option for a constructive research agenda in which the realities of new‐found economic opportunity and prevailing conditions of exclusion are both negotiated.

From the point of view of an ongoing research agenda, further empirical and literature research will be required to deepen the understanding of the socio‐economic dynamics in the case study area and in the process further refine the identified theoretical and ideological position.

The paper contributes towards defining the theoretical and ideological foundations of a research agenda on the social economy in South Africa. As such, the way in which binary positions are avoided in positioning this research agenda in relation to the mainstream capitalist economic system can be considered as provocative.

Which is the main characteristic of the French Mediterranean Agriculture (FMA)? The recognition of the multifunctionality of agriculture, supported by the institutions of the territorial development? Or the development of social dumping considered as a necessity by many institutions of the sector? To answer this question the analysis is based on three main sources of data: agricultural statistics, monographs and administrative reports. The results show that the structural diversity is still important in the FMA. A significant proportion of the farms have based their economic strategy on making the most of the multifunctionality of agriculture. Some have built real success stories. But this development path cannot guarantee the viability of a large range of holdings: the number of farm holdings in FMA has decreased by 27% since 2000 and 57% since 1988. Due to the specificities of the Mediterranean productions, the cost of labour is still considered as a major adjustment variable to secure farm income in the region. Many situations are reported where the situation of casual labour is concerning, in particular for migrant workers. However, the working conditions of temporary migrant workers remain invisible and the image of the multifunctional agriculture is put forward as a marketing asset by all types of actors. This image is misleading. It makes invisible, issues that are essential for the future. Thus, it generates knowledge gaps and leads to the depoliticization of debates on the development models of agriculture in masking the contradictions and the conflicts of interest that they generate.

Since the mid‐fifties, employment discrimination against minority groups and women has been a matter of considerable social and political concern in America. Numerous studies have found the prevalence of discrimination in the workplace towards blacks, females, and other minority groups. This had led the Congress to enact innovative anti‐discrimination legislation which has now reached universal coverage. The agencies administering this legislation have recently been given wide powers of enforcement. Moreover, the courts have interpreted the law in such a way that the guidelines favouring the increased utilisation of minority groups issued by these agencies have been upheld. This has had a dramatic impact on employer hiring and promotion procedures and practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of off-farm labor employments on household land rental behavior in rural China.

IV-Probit and IV-Tobit model are used to identify the estimate of interest.

The results indicate that households with more members participating in either migration or local off-farm work are more/less likely to rent out/in land. Moreover, the effect of migration on household land rental behavior is much larger than the effect of local off-farm work.

These results suggest that ensuring benefits of migrants in urban cities can automatically promote household land rental behavior in rural China.

The authors provide a rigorous and careful empirical analysis on the effect of off-farm employment on household land rental behavior and pay special attention to the endogeneity issue tackled using separable instruments.