Migrant Farmworkers - Those Who Would Be Saved

Every year, migrant farmworkers follow the Southeastern migrant stream from Florida to Delaware to harvest truck crops, crops that cannot be harvested by machine because they require human judgment in order to be picked when ripe. Many crops which end up in America's kitchens are harvested by migrant farmworkers: oranges picked in Florida; peaches from Georgia and South Carolina; tobacco, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, cabbage, squash, watermelons, and soy beans in eastern North Carolina; apples in northern North Carolina and Virginia; and mushrooms in Deleware. North Carolina is in the middle of this migrant stream and is the summer host for 30,000 to 60,000 migrant farmworkers per year. These migrant workers are an increasingly important part of the agricultural economy of North Carolina. North Carolina migrant and seasonal farmworkers ( those who live in a community year round but do not work full time at farming) harvested crops which represented almost $2 billion in agricultural production in 1980; yet in North Carolina, migrant farmworkers receive a lower average wage than migrant workers in any other state in the country. In his opening remarks to the Legislative Study Committee on Migrants (February 26, 1982), North Carolina's Commissioner of Labor, John C. Brooks, stated: "Without migrant farmworkers our crops would rot in the field, and our agricultural economy would be in a shambles." Even so, North Carolina does not have a very good track record concerning farmworkers' rights. In a 1979 report which focused on 20 agricultural states that employed migrants, Duke University Fellow Dr. Joshua S. Richert found that North Carolina was rated rock bottom as 20th among states which afforded legal protections to their farmworkers. The need for legal protection arises out of problems inherent in the crewleader system by which migrant farmworkers are hired. This system can easily lead to abuses concerning recruitment, wages, and the health and safety of the workers