Labour requirement

CLEM.Activities.LabourRequirement

Defines the amount and style of labour required for an activity.

This component is placed under an activity in order to specify that labour is required for the activity to occur. This component is one of the Companion components and so the measure used to determine labour allocation will be provided by the parent activity. This component specifies both the amount of labour required and who from the labour pool is able to perform the task. The Labour requirement needs at least one Labour filter group, and the arrangement of multiple Labour filter groups will determine the number of people required and priority order in which labour is assigned.

Some activities will require more than one person for the duration of the task.

You can provide multiple Labour requirement components below an activity if there are different rates of labour required for different groups.

You can also provide multiple Labour filter groups beneath the Labour requirement as a list. This will cause the simulation to try and obtain the number of filter groups worth of people from the available labour pool (Note, this may not be fully implemented and does not display in the Labour requirements report).

A shortfall in labour available will trigger the Insufficient resources available action specified in the parameters of the activity.

Harvesting a crop may take 3 people one day, which, while the same amount of time, is not the same as one person for three days. In the example below we see that this task requires two males and a female all requiring the amount of time determined by the settings of the Labour requirement. Each Filter group represents an individual and all will be assigned the same number of days. If the female was needed for fewer days, you would remove her from this list and add her to another Labour requirement with appropriate settings for the time needed.

There is no requirement that the multiple entries refer to the same type of labour. In the example provided the harvest activity requires two males and one female to perform the task. This does assume all people are required for the same amount of time. If say the female was needed for half the time of the two males, the female Filter group would be moved into a second Labour requirement with appropriate labour settings.

While more than one group of people can usually perform an activity, some are preferred. In small farming-systems often particular activities are performed by a particular family member or group of people. In considering changes to a farming system it is vital to consider the impacts of family labour and whether a family member has the capacity to do any extra work. One way of ensuring that the available labour is supplied to the requesting activity is to provide a prioritised list of people who can perform the task. The simulation will supply labour from the top of this list downwards. The Labour filter groups used can be defined to identify an individual or a group of people (e.g. all adult males). Depending of settings and whether the activity is set to perform with partial resources (see What to do when resources are limiting) a portion of the required labour can be assigned to individuals allowing labour further down the list to fill the shortfalls until all labour has been supplied. This is achieved by nesting Labour filter groups within each other, with each group representing the next best labour to perform the task.

It may take 3 days to harvest a crop and ideally this should be performed by an adult male (>30 years old). If there are no adult males available the task can be completed by a female (>30 years old) and finally by teenagers of any gender (>13 years old). This approach applies the same labour requirement to all levels and it is currently not possible to require additional time by one of the levels. Parameters in the Labour requirement can be set to either ensure all the labour is undertaken by a single person, or each step in the tree can fill any remaining shortfall from above.

 

The Labour requirement can contain a combination of multiple required and priority assigning of labour in that each person required can be determined from a priority list of filters.

There are three versions of this component: the standard version provided here, a simple version Labour requirement (simple) used for the Off farm labour activity and the Labour requirement (no unit size) that has no unit size and is used for the Crop task activity.

The following parameters are used to define this activity

This property will be required if the parent activity needs to identify particular labour allocation from the components provided. It will not be visible if no identification is required.

The number of days required for the number of units specified (or fixed if set as unit)

This represents the number of days of labour required to perform the activity for a given unit of measure. Unit of measure is generic as this will depend upon the parent activity and measure provided with wich to calculate labour (e.g. hectares harvested for crops, kilometres trucked for sales, amount processed for resource processing). Unless the unit specified is fixed this will not be the final value requested as the model will calculate the total days required based on the amount of work the activity determines needs to be done. This is based upon the number and type of unit specified.

This sets the number of units for each days labour required. This allows you to calculate labour based on grouped units.

For example, it may take 10 days per hectare to perform a crop-based task. You would set the days required to 10 and the unit of measure to per hectare. If there were 2 hectares this would require 20 days labour. Alternatively, your labour rate may be provided per 2 hectares worked, in which case you could provide the number of units as 2, the measure as per hectare, and the rate as 20 days, to provide the same outcome, but using different available inputs. Often providing inputs in the form available will reduce errors in manually performing conversions before parameterising the model.

As this Labour requirement component is applied to a variety of activities working with a range of resources we need to specify what units you would like to use to determine the total labour required. For example, a collecting manure activity may have the amount of labour calculated per kg carried, or per hectare collected. If an activity does not support the unit selected an error will be displayed during the simulation validation process.

The units currently available are:

  • fixed:Closed The supplied days labour required is used.
  • per hectare:  Labour is calculated based on the number of hectares the activity relates to.
  • per tree:  The number of trees used in the activity will determine the labour required.
  • per head:  The number of head of animal determines the labour needed. This is useful for feeding and breeding activities where the model knows the number of specific individuals the activity relates to.
  • per animal equivalent:  The number of adult equivalents (AE) determines the labour required. This is useful for activities such as trucking ruminants where less effort may be required for smaller individuals. The standard adult weight is supplied in the Ruminant type
  • per kg:  The kg of resource is used to determine the labour needed.
  • per unit:  This allows the user to set the size of the unit for each days labour required. For example it may take 1 day (days required) labour for every 1000 (number of units) kg (unit) carried.

If this option is selected labour will be allocated in whole unit blocks (or multi unit is specified above). For example, if labour was determined for every 10 kg carried and the activity required 15 kg to be carried, the activity would demand 1.5 units of labour and request 2 x 10 kg units worth of labour.

This section allows the user to dictate how individuals will be allocated from the available individuals. This is achieved by setting the minimum and maximum amount of labour for each individual and group of individuals. There are a range of ways these limits can be defined.

Minimum and maximum rates possible can be specified for groups and individuals. This style property determines the means of calculating the limits and the units the values are reported as.

This option will specify the maximum and minimum days required in the same units as the Days labour required property above.

This option will specify minimum and maximum days required as total days worked. These value include the combination of labour rate and the units multiplier. This approach is used when you know the maximum number of days in the moths that can be performed per individual for this task.

If 2 days labour was required per hectare and the crop was 5 ha, then 10 days total would be required to perform the task. If a maximum per individual was set to 8 days, then this would require two individuals (8 days and 2 days) to perform the task.

This approach will calculate the days required as a proportion of the Days labour required property above. This will also be proportion of the total days needed as the combination of labour rate and the units multiplier.

This style allows you to split a task across multiple people. If the minimum days per person was set to 0.25, the task would require 4 people to be completed with the amount needed per person determines by the total days needed divided by 4.

The maximum per group is the maximum allocation possible by each group. You can also use this property in several Labour requirement components to divide the total days needed (same value in each component) by groups using different proportions.

This option defines the minimum amount of labour worth assigning for the task. This is especially useful if using priority assignment of labour and a group down the tree has to supply a very small amount of remaining labour. This option can also be used to determine whether an activity is worth performing based on the labour demand.

The maximum per person can be set to restrict how much labour any person can supply to an activity. This allows a large amount of labour to be supplied by a number of people. This is especially true if an activity requires more time than is available in the time-step (month).

If using Proportion of days required style you could set this value to 0.25 and therefore require 4 people to perform the task.

No person can do more that the maximum amount and therefore fill a shortfall even if they had available labour.

This switch will allow any shortfall in labour to influence the activity. Not every activity will have the necessary code and processes to provide this functionality. This allows the model to simulate precursor models where labour shortfalls didn't influence a number of activities. Additional functionality is being built into the model to account for labour shortfall. For example, it would be useful to reduce the final amount of crop harvested if labour had been limiting during the planting and irrigation activities to grow the crop. It could be that a shortfall during planting will also reduce the requirement for irrigating and harvesting.

This switch will apply the labour requirement to all members of each top level (not nested) filter groups. For example, you may wish to account for school time for all family members less than 16 years old. Rather than add an uncertain number of filter groups you can check this check box during set up.

The following components are required to use define this component

The number and arrangement of Labour filter groups will determine the labour needed for the activity. See Description above

 

See also