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Between 100,000 and 200,000 mostly Mexican laborers are estimated to work in North Carolina’s fields
each season. Many return year after year, and around 300,000 farmworkers have settled out of the migrant
stream and made our state their permanent home.
Farmworkers are routinely subjected to substandard housing, pesticide exposure, dangerous and
exhausting work, inadequate wages, frequent housing and labor violations, intimidation, job loss if violations
are reported, language and educational barriers, lack of transportation, and extreme isolation. The poverty
and injustice that farmworkers endure are not merely the problems of an invisible group of transient
unknowns, but of individuals with names and identities who feed our nation through their toil.
Did you know?
- As of 1998, 81% of US farmworkers are foreign-born. This number represents a 10% increase from 1989. Of foreign-born workers, 96% are from Mexico. (National Agricultural Workers Survey, USDOL, March 2000)
- As laborers earning the lowest annual income of all workers in the United States, farmworkers on average earn
between $5,000 and $7,500 a year. (National Agricultural Workers Survey, USDOL, April 1997)
- 85% of the fruits and vegetables you eat are hand-harvested by farmworkers. (National Center for Farmworker Health)
- Farmworkers don’t get a fair shake. Of every US food income dollar, 71% goes to corporate food processors,
23% goes to farmers, and 6% goes to farmworkers. (Agriculture Council of America and Paul Lilly, North Carolina State University)
- If farmworker wages were increased by 50%, fresh fruits and vegetables would cost you $3.85 more per year. (Edward Taylor, The Urban Institute, 1997)
- An estimated 60% of migrant students drop out of school, down from 90% in the 1970s. (Children of La Frontera, ERIC)
- Nationally, only 6% of farmworkers have health insurance. In North Carolina, most employers are not even requiredto provide Workers Compensation to their farm laborers. (National Agricultural Workers Survey, USDOL, April 1997)
- A prominently-hung banner at the headquarters of the North Carolina Growers’ Association, our state’s largest
farm labor contractor, warns more than 10,000 farmworkers about the agency mandated by the federal government
to protect their rights: “Legal Services wants to destroy the [program that brought you here]. Don’t be puppets of Legal
Services. Don’t believe what they tell you. Legal Services are using you to further their cause, which is to destroy
the H2A Program..."
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