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although migrant farmworkers are a significant part of the us and world economies, they have been understudied and are not integrated into the business and work-family literature. Migrant farmworkers are at the core of the $28 billion fruit and vegetable industry in the United States, 85 percent of which is hand-harvested or cultivated. Migrant jobs often include both picking fruits and vegetables and their processing, grad- ing, and packaging (National Center for Farmworker Health, Inc. 2012). A migrant farmworker is defined as an individual who spends at least half of his or her employment time working in agriculture on a seasonal basis, and who has been so employed within the last 24 months (Larson 2006).
The large-scale migration of workers with their families is a global phenomenon that has seen dramatic growth over recent de- cades. The migrant work force that comes to the United States from Mexico is equivalent to the size of one-eighth of the entire Mexican work force (Cuellar 2002). Although migrant jobs are highly undesir- able and underpaid, their loss could result in a US farmworker short- age and hurt the world food supply as well as the Mexican economy (Martin and Martin 1994). This is a global issue: according to the Inter- national Labor Organization (2014), there are currently approximately 175 million migrants around the world, roughly half of them workers.
The Geneseo Migrant Center (n.d.) provides a demographic snap- shot of migrant farmworkers in the United States-81 percent of all farmworkers are foreign-born, with 77 percent of all farmworkers hav- ing been born in Mexico and five out of six farmworkers being native Spanish speakers. The number of Mexican and other Latino farmwork- ers throughout the United States has grown in recent years, due in part to programs like the H-2A guest worker plan. The H-2A temporary agricultural program establishes a means for agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring nonimmigrant foreign workers to the United States to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature (Department of Labor). The average farmworker's age is only 31 years, since it is difficult for older workers to perform such physically demanding labor, and 80 percent of farmworkers are men, who often must leave their...