ARE FARMWORKERS RICH?

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In his response to my letter in Thursday's Crimson (Oct. 24), Peter Ferrara claims that the figure of $10.90 I cite as the median daily earnings of a full-time farmworker includes only base pay and not piece work. This is simply not true. The figure comes from the Department of Agriculture's booklet, "The Hired Farm Working Force of 1970," which Mr. Ferrara will find in the Business School library. It includes base pay, piece work, and all other forms of cash payment, and is an average only over the days the worker can find employment. The same publication also shows that fully 25 per cent of all full-time farmworkers (those working in the fields at least 150 days a year) earn less than $5.00 a day.

If Mr. Ferrara is still under the impression that farmworkers are somehow rich, and Baker Library is too far for him to walk, he will find in Littauer another Department of Agriculture publication, "Income of Farm Wageworker Households in 1971." There he will discover that, for families whose head performs agricultural labor at least 150 days a year, median total family income is only slightly over $4000 a year, of 40 per cent of the national median for all families. He will find that only 16 per cent of such families (and these include skilled machine operators as well as field workers) make over $7500 a year, while over 25 per cent have a total income of less than $3000 a year.

If Mr. Ferrara intends to write further articles or responses, I would appreciate it if he would check original sources before accusing others of falsifying statistics. Steven Carlip '75