A Suggestion to Pick Up Farm Workers : Agriculture: Professor urges farmers to organize job banks and share temporary employees to ease layoff problem.

A college professor has urged farmers to organize employee job banks to improve the lot of their workers.

Bert Mason, who runs the Center for Agricultural Business at Fresno State University, said the idea would be to share employees wherever possible.

That way, workers wouldn’t get laid off so often, which is a constant problem in agriculture. Mason said a survey he and Fresno State Prof. Andrew Alvarado conducted indicates Central California farm workers hold jobs less than five months out of the year, on average.

“There’s significant unemployment among the farm worker population,” Mason said.

Growers would need fewer workers overall and wouldn’t have to provide as much housing, Mason told the national Commission on Agricultural Workers, which is studying effects of the 1986 Amnesty Act on farms and farm workers.

Mason offered other bits of advice on ways growers can improve their relationships with workers.

One recommendation was simply to “train supervisors better.”

Mason also cautioned that the trend to get workers through labor contractors who then handle the reams of paperwork can lead to farmers showing “less interest in your work force.”

He told the commission that statistics show California’s farm labor force is concentrated among a relatively few large-scale growers and in a small number of labor-intensive crops, such as fruit and vegetables.

“A lot of workers don’t work much, earning less than $1,000 a year,” he added. “The puzzle is, who are these people?”

The commission took testimony for two days in Visalia as part of a process of recommending changes in the agricultural provisions of the Amnesty Act. Another California hearing will be held in Imperial Valley in early December and a third either in Sacramento or Monterey next spring.