ABSTRACT
The work structure and organization of coffee farms is informal and highly flexible, which easily allows for large numbers of migrants without prior migration experience to enter into this unrestricted labour market. Coffee farms often do not bother hiring or firing harvesters; the workers simply walk on and walk off the farm. The managers of large coffee farms (over 50 ha) and medium-size farms (below 50 ha) stated that they did not have a list of their harvesters and could only estimate a rough number of people harvesting coffee at any given time. Because of the piece-rate wage structure, the number of workers and their individual (unobservable) productivity become irrelevant. One of the managers at a large farm stated that the number of harvesters during any given time during the season fluctuated between 500 and 1,000. He explained that:
The coffee work is really loose, the people come and go, and there is no control of how many people are working or not. Since they are not on the payroll, I don’t have any way of knowing when they come and go.
