Undeclared work in agriculture: characteristics, estimation methods, and underlying causes

TL;DR

This paper explores hidden agricultural labor in Italy, its characteristics, and the challenges in estimating and addressing it.

Contribution

The paper identifies unique features of undeclared agricultural work and highlights gaps in understanding individual-level motivations.

Findings

Undeclared agricultural work is marked by non-standard employment, exploitation, and poor working conditions.

Indirect methods are commonly used to estimate undeclared work due to its hidden nature.

Current research lacks exploration of non-economic motivations behind undeclared work.

Abstract

Undeclared work is widespread in the agricultural labor market and very often linked to the exploitation of agricultural workers. Trying to estimate the phenomenon is rather difficult, given its hidden nature. Scholars have developed different methodologies to do this, using direct and indirect approaches. This paper aims to identify the peculiarities of undeclared work in the specific context of agriculture and the methodologies used by previous studies to assess its extent. Finally, the existing literature is analyzed to identify the reasons behind the spread of the phenomenon taking Italy as a case study. It has been observed that agriculture is mainly characterized by non-standard employment, illegal intermediation and exploitation, poor working and housing conditions, outsourced immigrant workforce, exploitation of immigrant workers, non-visibility and marginality of rural areas and a high incidence of work-related deaths. Furthermore, specific reasons seem to have a crucial influence for its widespread at the macro level. To define these aspects of undeclared work in agriculture, indirect methods have been preferred so far. Indeed, results suggest that insufficient effort has been made to understand the reasons of this phenomenon at the individual level. In particular, the extant body of literature on UW is notably deficient in addressing behavioral motivations beyond economic ones. Thus, further studies are needed to better know the phenomenon and, hopefully, to support the development more effective and efficient policies to prevent it.

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