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people who are willing to work on their farms.
Even with the high demand and shortage of available workers, those who work for wages are not becoming rich. Wage rates differ according to the area, season, task performed, length of the working day, gender and age. Daily wages in the study area over the course of a year ranged from SYP 70 to 280 (about US$ 1.60 to 6.60). Children are usually paid half the wage given to adults for hand-harvesting and the full wage for weeding.
Despite the low rates of remune ation, the poorer inhabitants of vi-lages in drier areas, particularly those with little land or irrigation water of their own, need the income from wage work to secure basic necessities. Usually the men work in non-agricultural activities where the wages are higher--many households have long-term migrants in Syrian cities and abroad, particularly in Lebanon, Jordan and the Gulf States. The women hire themselves out as agricultural workers. In traditional Arabic culture, a family gains prestige if the women stay at home attending to domestic duties, but, as one woman put it, "We use the money from working in the fields to buy bread, and if we have no work we have no bread." In communities where bread is symbolic of life itself this means that the households are very poor, even by regional standards.
Agricultural workers are organized into working groups which, between them, control the labor market. The working groups vary in size according to region and to the labor demand, increasing in periods of peak demand. Unless the place of work is very far away they will travel by truck to work in the early morning and return to their village each afternoon (the average distances recorded in the survey were between 50 and 100 km). The farmers no longer feed them. The groups are usually made up of young and middle-aged women and children aged 9 to 13, with a few men hired for specific tasks. Women perform the more intensive, labor-demanding work, such as weeding, planting and harvesting, where groups of 15 to 40 women are needed. For example, for hand-weeding spring potatoes, 200 women-hours are needed per hectare. Men do more of the heavy work and machine work. When a work group is planting potatoes, for example, a man drives the tractor, while four women sit on the planting machine behind and feed seed potatoes into it.
Individual workers are hired through a labor contractor called, variously, a ra'is warsha ("work-group head"), dallal (lit. "broker") or mu'alim (lit. "boss"). A farmer who needs to hire a work group to perform a particular task on his farm, such as
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