Supplemental Letter for reinstating October Labor Survey

United States Department of Agriculture
National Agricultural Statistics Service

TO:

Chris Marokov
Office of Management and Budget

FROM:

Kevin L. Barnes
Associate Administrator

SUBJECT:

OMB No. 0535-0109

KEVIN
BARNES

Digitally signed by KEVIN
BARNES
Date: 2020.12.07
12:56:16 -05'00'

Consistent with OMB No. 0535-0109, the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) was originally scheduled
to commence routine data collection for the Agricultural Labor Survey in October 2020. However, on September 30,
2020, USDA suspended data collection; OMB approved this suspension using emergency processing under OMB
number 0535-0269. That suspension notice was challenged in federal court; the court recently issued a preliminary
injunction ordering USDA to reinstate the data collection previously scheduled for October 2020. See United Farm
Workers v. Perdue, No. 20-cv-01452-DAD-JLT (E.D. Cal. Oct. 28, 2020). Pursuant to the court’s order, NASS will
now reinstate data collection for the July and October reference weeks. Completion of the survey and report is
expected to require nine weeks following the Federal Register publication of this notice. If the court’s order is
modified or dissolved in the future, NASS will publish a subsequent notice informing the public of that development
as well as NASS’s intentions regarding this information collection.
In summary, NASS is requesting a non-substantive change to OMB No. 0535-0109 to begin this previously
suspended data collection. NASS will use the same protocols approved for the previously planned October
collection. We note that there may be a difference in the quality of the data given the delayed start date (e.g., the
period covered by the survey is further from the collection date than usual). Although past cognitive research has
not explicitly investigated the recall issues on the Agricultural Labor Survey related to the reference dates, that
research suggests that recall may be less significant than respondents’ reliance on records when answering, and the
compatibility of those records with the survey questions. In addition, the change in data collection timing may
impact response rates, due to respondent availability and workloads in NASS’s data collection centers.

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