U.S. Domestic Workers' Willingness to Accept Agricultural Field Jobs Before and During COVID-19

Worker shortages in US agricultural field jobs are widespread. Since US domestic workers typically forgo agricultural field jobs, their participation could potentially alleviate the labor shortfalls. We used an attribute-based discrete choice experiment administered before and during COVID-19 to evaluate US domestic workers' willingness to accept agricultural field jobs and determine domestic workers' valuation for non-pecuniary benefits. Results indicate that before the pandemic, domestic workers have an average reservation wage of \$23.57 per hour, which is substantially larger (\$9.58 or 68\%) than the 2019 national average wage rate of \$13.99 for field work, but similar to the national average non-farm wage rate of \$23.51 per hour. This partially explains why a minority of field workers are born in the United States. However, non-pecuniary benefits for insurance, housing, food allowance, and transportation notably increase domestic workers' willingness to accept agricultural field jobs by reducing mean reservation wage. Respondents' willingness to accept agricultural field work increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for respondents with previous field-work experience, those that prefer domestically produced food, and those who believe food is a national security issue. Respondents that lost employment or income due to the pandemic had the lowest mean WTA of \$17.16 and \$18.79 without any additional non-pecuniary benefits. The results generally suggest that the non-pecuniary benefits clearly increase domestic workers willingness to accept agricultural field jobs. Hence, it is possible to entice domestic workers to work in agricultural fields, with a combination of reasonable wages and mix of non-pecuniary benefits.