Migrant labor

Migrant labor in South Carolina involves farmwork done by individuals whose principal employment is seasonal agriculture and who travel and live in temporary housing. South Carolina lies on the easternmost of three traditional streams of migrant farmworkers who harvest much of the nation’s crops each year. As of the early twenty-first century, from early summer through fall, about fourteen thousand migrant workers could be found in all parts of South Carolina but in greatest concentrations in the lowcountry and in Clarendon and Sumter Counties (vegetables), the Ridge area and Spartanburg County (peaches), and the Pee Dee (tobacco).

From 1980 to 2000 major changes occurred in migrant farm labor in South Carolina. The traditional mix of African American and white workers in the eastern stream and in South Carolina was replaced by a large preponderance of Latinos, mostly Mexicans. In 2001 ninety percent of the clients seen at clinics operated by the S.C. Migrant Health program were Latinos. That same year it was estimated that in South Carolina as well as nationally, approximately half of farmworkers were undocumented immigrants, up from just seven percent in 1989. Large numbers of workers from Mexico who came here as migrant workers “settled in” and established permanent residency. They engaged in farmwork during the harvest period and did manual or factory labor–mostly food processing–during the rest of year, joining a large number of rural white and African American South Carolinians as “seasonal farm workers.” In the early twenty-first century South Carolina growers, following national trends, were beginning to participate more heavily (an estimated nine percent of workers in 2002) in the H2A or “guestworker” program, a federal program that imported Mexican nationals who returned home after the harvest season. While the program offered certain wage and other living benefits to workers, many farmworker advocates were opposed to the guestworker program because workers were not allowed to engage in collective bargaining and might not leave the employ of the contracting grower. South Carolina’s laws protecting the health and legal rights of migrant and seasonal farmworkers were among the weakest in the nation. Farmworker labor unions, active even in neighboring states such as North Carolina, were not active in South Carolina.

South Carolina. Migrant Farm Workers Commission. South Carolina Migrant Services. Columbia: South Carolina Migrant Farm Workers Commission, 1998.