These diagrams illustrate the
correlation between employment and wages between the years of 2005 and
2011. The top set of graphs,
illustrating Yakima County’s employment as a percent of the workforce
highlights the extreme fluctuation of workers during the year. Assuming that the baseline agricultural
workforce from January to December are permanent employees working in the
manufacturing and processing sector of agriculture, then the summer months add
an equal amount of temporary workers for the cherry and apple harvests. One interesting observation is that the
economic downturn didn’t affect the agricultural sector as much as other
sectors. The temporary workers continued
to increase, because as the US population continues to grow, the food
production needs to grow as well.
However, the permanent workforce likely shrunk, because less people were
employed in the 2009 winter months than the 2008 winter months.
The bottom half of the diagram represents the quarterly wages paid to the
workers. Looking at agriculture, there
isn’t a direct relationship between the worker increase and the wage
increase. This implies that, despite the
average numbers over the course of the year, the temporary summer workers are
paid a fair amount less than the permanent workers. This makes sense, because temporary workers are
paid by the amount harvested. As more
temporary workers enter the workforce for a given acreage of farmland, the
overall value becomes more distributed, generating less wealth per farmworker.
This illustrates a need for housing that accommodates both the permanent
and temporary worker with the necessary adjustments to accommodate for the
varying farmworker incomes.
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