Developing Occupational and Family Resilience among US Migrant Farmworkers

although migrant farmworkers are a significant part of the us and world economies, they have been understudied and are not integrated into the business and work-family literature. Migrant farmworkers are at the core of the $28 billion fruit and vegetable industry in the United States, 85 percent of which is hand harvested or cultivated. Migrant jobs often include both picking fruits and vegetables and their processing, grading , and packaging (National Center for Farmworker Health, Inc. 2012). A migrant farmworker is defined as an individual who spends at least half of his or her employment time working in agriculture on a seasonal basis, and who has been so employed within the last 24 months (Larson 2006). The large-scale migration of workers with their families is a global phenomenon that has seen dramatic growth over recent decades. The migrant work force that comes to the United States from Mexico is equivalent to the size of one-eighth of the entire Mexican work force (Cuellar 2002). Although migrant jobs are highly undesirable and underpaid, their loss could result in a US farmworker shortage and hurt the world food supply as well as the Mexican economy (Martin and Martin 1994). This is a global issue: according to the Inter