IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ags/ifaamr/316245.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Working conditions and labor flexibility in non-family farms: weather-based labor management by Japanese paddy rice corporations

Author

Listed:
  • Yagi, Hironori
  • Hayashi, Tsuneo

Abstract

Improving working conditions in agriculture is of great concern throughout the world. Just as in other industries, many young farm workers prefer to work as salaried employees, which has brought attention to non-family farms as providers of employment opportunities. However, in the presence of a strong need to flexibly respond to weather, there is still difficulty regarding whether workplaces without overworking can exist. This study is based on in-depth surveys of non-family rice farms in Fukui Prefecture, Japan. Our findings suggest that even in non-family farms, holiday-setting is done flexibly to account for weather, and systems that allow for harvesting at appropriate times are in place. During the busy farming period, in joint-stock farms, where multiple farmers invest together, full-time employees work overtime. In contrast, in community farms, many community residents take turns for working, which allows work to be done on time. A closer analysis of work records shows that, in either organizational structure, specific members need to overwork. Reasons behind this include issues with sunk costs in the form of monthly wages, lack of skills among part-time employees, and the communication costs of coordinating with many part-time employees.

Suggested Citation

  • Yagi, Hironori & Hayashi, Tsuneo, 2021. "Working conditions and labor flexibility in non-family farms: weather-based labor management by Japanese paddy rice corporations," International Food and Agribusiness Management Review, International Food and Agribusiness Management Association, vol. 24(2), February.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:ifaamr:316245
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.316245
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/316245/files/ifamr2021.0005.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.316245?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thomson, Kenneth J. & Davidova, Sophia, 2014. "Economic Aspects of Family Farming in the European Context," 88th Annual Conference, April 9-11, 2014, AgroParisTech, Paris, France 170354, Agricultural Economics Society.
    2. Takahashi, Daisuke, 2012. "Farmland Liquidization and Transaction Costs," Japanese Journal of Agricultural Economics (formerly Japanese Journal of Rural Economics), Agricultural Economics Society of Japan (AESJ), vol. 14, pages 1-19.
    3. Williamson, Oliver E, 1979. "Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractural Relations," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 22(2), pages 233-261, October.
    4. Allen, Douglas W & Lueck, Dean, 1998. "The Nature of the Farm," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 41(2), pages 343-386, October.
    5. Alfred Kleinknecht & Zenlin Kwee & Lilyana Budyanto, 2016. "Rigidities through flexibility: flexible labour and the rise of management bureaucracies," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 40(4), pages 1137-1147.
    6. Oliver E. Williamson, 2005. "The Economics of Governance," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(2), pages 1-18, May.
    7. Anonymous, 2014. "Introduction to the Issue," Journal of Wine Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(1), pages 1-2, May.
    8. Lillywhite, Jay M & Duffy, Michael, 2001. "A New Perspective on an Old Issue: Multifamily Farms and America's Farm Structure," Staff General Research Papers Archive 10344, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    9. Kawasaki, Kentaro, 2010. "The costs and benefits of land fragmentation of rice farms in Japan," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 54(4), pages 1-18.
    10. Laura Raynolds, 2014. "Fairtrade, certification, and labor: global and local tensions in improving conditions for agricultural workers," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 31(3), pages 499-511, September.
    11. Seung C. Ahn & Josef C. Brada & Jos� A. M�ndez, 2012. "Effort, Technology and the Efficiency of Agricultural Cooperatives," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(11), pages 1601-1616, November.
    12. Kentaro Kawasaki, 2010. "The costs and benefits of land fragmentation of rice farms in Japan ," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 54(4), pages 509-526, October.
    13. Erik Mathijs & Liesbet Vranken, 2001. "Human Capital, Gender and Organisation in Transition Agriculture: Measuring and Explaining the Technical Efficiency of Bulgarian and Hungarian Farms," Post-Communist Economies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(2), pages 171-187.
    14. Aurélie Darpeix & Céline Bignebat & Philippe Perrier-Cornet, 2014. "Demand for Seasonal Wage Labour in Agriculture: What Does Family Farming Hide?," Journal of Agricultural Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 65(1), pages 257-272, January.
    15. de Toro, A. & Hansson, P. -A., 2004. "Analysis of field machinery performance based on daily soil workability status using discrete event simulation or on average workday probability," Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 79(1), pages 109-129, January.
    16. Anonymous, 2014. "Introduction to the Issue," Journal of Wine Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(2), pages 109-110, August.
    17. Moreno-Pérez, Olga M. & Arnalte-Alegre, Eladio & Ortiz-Miranda, Dionisio, 2011. "Breaking down the growth of family farms: A case study of an intensive Mediterranean agriculture," Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 104(6), pages 500-511, July.
    18. O'Donoghue, Erik J. & Hoppe, robert A. & Banker, David E. & Ebel, Robert & Fuglie, Keith & Korb, Penni & Livingston, Michael & Nickerson, Cynthia & Sandretto, Carmen, 2011. "The Changing Organization of U.S. Farming," Economic Information Bulletin 291938, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    19. Yumei Liu & Wuyang Hu & Simon Jetté-Nantel & Zhihong Tian, 2014. "The Influence of Labor Price Change on Agricultural Machinery Usage in Chinese Agriculture," Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics/Revue canadienne d'agroeconomie, Canadian Agricultural Economics Society/Societe canadienne d'agroeconomie, vol. 62(2), pages 219-243, June.
    20. Linda Lobao & Curtis Stofferahn, 2008. "The community effects of industrialized farming: Social science research and challenges to corporate farming laws," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 25(2), pages 219-240, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hironori Yagi & Tsuneo Hayashi, 2021. "Machinery utilization and management organization in Japanese rice farms: Comparison of single‐family, multifamily, and community farms," Agribusiness, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 37(2), pages 393-408, April.
    2. Deininger, Klaus & Jin, Songqing & Liu, Yanyan & Singh, Sudhir, 2015. "Labor Market Performance and the Farm Size-Productivity Relationship in Rural India," 2015 Conference, August 9-14, 2015, Milan, Italy 212720, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    3. Do, Manh Hung & Nguyen, Trung Thanh & Grote, Ulrike, 2023. "Land consolidation, rice production, and agricultural transformation: Evidence from household panel data for Vietnam," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 157-173.
    4. CHEN, Helen S.Y., 2020. "Designing Sustainable Humanitarian Supply Chains," OSF Preprints m82ar, Center for Open Science.
    5. Jochen Wulf, 2020. "Development of an AHP hierarchy for managing omnichannel capabilities: a design science research approach," Business Research, Springer;German Academic Association for Business Research, vol. 13(1), pages 39-68, April.
    6. Maggie O’Neill & Ruth Penfold-Mounce & David Honeywell & Matt Coward-Gibbs & Harriet Crowder & Ivan Hill, 2021. "Creative Methodologies for a Mobile Criminology: Walking as Critical Pedagogy," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 26(2), pages 247-268, June.
    7. Getz, Donald & Page, Stephen J., 2016. "Progress and prospects for event tourism research," Tourism Management, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 593-631.
    8. Schipper, Burkhard C., 2021. "Discovery and equilibrium in games with unawareness," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 198(C).
    9. Kumar, Kaushalendra & Shukla, Ankita & Singh, Abhishek & Ram, Faujdar & Kowal, Paul, 2016. "Association between wealth and health among older adults in rural China and India," The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, Elsevier, vol. 7(C), pages 43-52.
    10. Urša Golob & Mark A. P. Davies & Joachim Kernstock & Shaun M. Powell, 2020. "Trending topics plus future challenges and opportunities in brand management," Journal of Brand Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 27(2), pages 123-129, March.
    11. Eunae Yoo & Elliot Rabinovich & Bin Gu, 2020. "The Growth of Follower Networks on Social Media Platforms for Humanitarian Operations," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 29(12), pages 2696-2715, December.
    12. Ya Sun & Gongyuan Wang & Haiying Feng, 2021. "Linguistic Studies on Social Media: A Bibliometric Analysis," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(3), pages 21582440211, September.
    13. Laure Latruffe & Laurent Piet, 2013. "Does land fragmentation affect farm performance? A case study from Brittany," Working Papers hal-01208908, HAL.
    14. Winskell, Kate & Sabben, Gaëlle, 2016. "Sexual stigma and symbolic violence experienced, enacted, and counteracted in young Africans’ writing about same-sex attraction," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 161(C), pages 143-150.
    15. Shisong Jiang, 2021. "“When Paradigms Are Out of Place”: Embracing Eclecticism in Legal Scholarship by Academic Turns," Laws, MDPI, vol. 10(4), pages 1-16, October.
    16. Jia, Lili, 2012. "Land fragmentation and off-farm labor supply in China," Studies on the Agricultural and Food Sector in Transition Economies, Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), volume 66, number 66.
    17. Florian Léon, 2022. "The elusive quest for high-growth firms in Africa: when other metrics of performance say nothing," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 58(1), pages 225-246, January.
    18. Houshmand Masoumi, 2021. "Residential Location Choice in Istanbul, Tehran, and Cairo: The Importance of Commuting to Work," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(10), pages 1-18, May.
    19. Zachary P Neal, 2017. "Well connected compared to what? Rethinking frames of reference in world city network research," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 49(12), pages 2859-2877, December.
    20. Tanja Lepistö & Tiina Mäkitalo-Keinonen & Tiina Valjakka, 0. "Opportunity recognition in a hub-governed network – insights from garage services," International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, Springer, vol. 0, pages 1-24.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:ifaamr:316245. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifamaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.