The human face of harvest work : citrus harvesting in Central Queensland

Census information indicates that composition of the Australian agricultural workforce has recently been changing such that farm employees are becoming more numerically significant. However, their contributions to the work, their origins and their styles of living have hardly ever been a subject of research interest. Part of a wider study of paid farm worker life and beliefs, this research concentrates on ethnographic data from a case study of mandarin harvest workers at two irrigated farming sites in Central Queensland, Australia. A variety of age/interest categories contribute to this workforce – in general, young and ambitious workers aim to maximise economic returns from their picking; older workers are more concerned with work satisfaction and lifestyle issues. This analysis demonstrates the efficacy of examining agricultural labour in class terms; but disaggregation of this commodity-specific class fraction demonstrates too that policy prescriptions need to be informed by close knowledge of the composition and needs of this important workforce.