“And for big chunks of the season, they’re making less than minimum wage. “In sweet potatoes, you get a lot of the folks who are working for the bucket,” Flores said.
The law says their hourly pay can never dip below the legal minimum wage, but employers don't always comply, said Flores.
Instead they’re paid a piece rate, meaning compensation is based on the volume they’re able to haul each day. Like tobacco pickers, sweet potato harvesters often don’t receive a standard hourly wage. “Sweet potatoes are definitely one of the biggest labor-intensive crops in the state, second probably only to tobacco,” Justin Flores, vice president of the agricultural workers’ union FLOC (Farm Labor Organizing Committee), told Al Jazeera America. Any given Thanksgiving feast is likely to include at least a portion of that crop, harvested by low-wage workers under grueling conditions. Nearly half of the United States’ crop hails from here, especially the coastal plain region. Welcome to North Carolina, where the state vegetable is the sweet potato and the state minimum wage is $7.25. But the work - crouch to fill the bucket, run it back to the truck, repeat over and over until the day is done - is backbreaking.
#BITTER HARVEST MEANING FULL#
One full bucket earns a worker about $0.40 or $0.50. Sometimes they work as few as five hours a day sometimes, as many as 12. Thousands of agricultural laborers trudge through the fields, filling buckets with the tubers and hauling them back to waiting trucks.
The sweet potato harvest starts in mid-September and can extend as late as mid-November.
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