Welcome to this website. Its main purpose is to make available to you the results of a recent research project on the upsurge Latino/a participation in the North Carolina economy. We start with our main findings and the downloadable reports and presentations that explain them. A map and graph follow to display the recent prominence of Latinos and Latinas in North Carolina's population and labor force. Background information about the project is at the end. We hope you will find the website useful. We invite your comments.
--Jeff Leiter and Don Tomaskovic-Devey, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, NC State University

Central Project Findings with Downloadable Reports and Presentations

We are pleased to make the findings from our research available via this website. Consistent with the outreach purpose of this research, all of our reports and presentations can be downloaded and shared with others for whom they might be useful. They are available to you in Adobe Acrobat PDF format and/or Powerpoint format. Adobe Acrobat Reader can be obtained free by clicking here. Powerpoint is a Microsoft program commonly available through their office application sets. We hope our work will be useful to you. We welcome your comments.

Note: We do ask that anyone using these materials acknowledges the source. An appropriate citation would be: Latinos in Low-Wage NC Jobs, Jeffrey Leiter and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, principal investigators (see http://sasw.chass.ncsu.edu/jeff/latinos/latino.htm). Items that have been published indicate the journal or magazine on their first page; we ask that you note the publication citation in any use you make of these published pieces.

Other Research Products Using Project Data

Latinos and Latinas in North Carolina--Graphic Displays of Their Prominence

This map of North Carolina is based on recently released 2000 Census of Population data. It shows the Latino/a population proportion in each of the state's 100 counties. The range is extreme, from less than 1% to over 15%. The highest proportions, designated in red on the map, are found in Montgomery County (10.4%), Lee County (11.7%), Chatham County (9.6%), Sampson County (10.8%), and Duplin County (15.1%). Because the recent census undercounted a higher proportion of Latinos/as than others, the proportions are likely higher than those reported here. To link to the U.S. Census Bureau's American FactFinder web service from which the data for this map were obtained, click here. If you would like to download this map (in gif format), click here.

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If you would like to download this chart in Powerpoint format, click here. For more details on the data used to generate these estimates, please read "Latino/a Employment Growth in North Carolina: Ethnic Displacement or Replacement" (also mentioned above), which you can download in pdf format by clicking here.

Background of the Project

History of the Project

This action research project grew out of the work of the Triangle Labor Group (TLG). The TLG brings together labor activists and advocates, state government officials, and academics in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina area, all with a strong interest in workers and the labor movement. TLG members decided to focus in part on the dramatic upsurge of Latino workers in North Carolina in the late 1990s. For labor activists, these immigrant workers represented both an organizing opportunity and the potential for job competition with long-term residents. For state government officials, especially those in the state Department of Labor, the rapid growth of the Latino segment of the labor force presents a difficult challenge especially in the areas of occupational safety and migrant worker housing. For academics, the Latino upsurge presents the chance to learn about and help deal with a dynamic element of the regions demography as the context for potential workplace and community conflict among groups. Having made the decision to focus on the Latino upsurge, sociologists at NC State University organized a combination of demographic analysis and semi-structured interviewing. The results of this research are available through this website.

Project Personnel

Two professors and three doctoral students, all from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at NC State University, provided most of the staffing for the project. Other people generously contributed their time and expertise. The main personnel were:

Support for the Project

We are pleased to acknowledge the support of several sponsors for this project. Their financial backing was indispensible. We are also grateful to the NC Employment Security Commission Labor Market Information Division and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for valuable data they provided. And we very much appreciate the invaluable help we received from Andy Simmons, Director of the Cabarrus County Human Relations Council, and Ruben Chirinos with Casa Multicultural in Duplin County.

Orienting Question of the Project

We have been particularly concerned with the emerging relationships between the Latino and African American communities. In areas where low wage employment opportunities are growing rapidly, Latinos may be replacing other workers who have left these jobs for other, preferrable jobs. This replacement process is the kind of upward mobility that has benefitted many immigrants in earlier stages of U.S. history. It should not create conflict between groups of workers, although it may stretch community resources thin. Where low-wage employment opportunities are not growing quickly, however, Latinos may be displacing other workers from these jobs. Displacement risks substantial conflict among groups ranging from competition for housing, social services, and the jobs themselves to inter-group violence.

We see the replacement-displacement processes in the context of local labor market organization. In those communities where workers have few options for work and mostly low wage jobs, they are quite dependent on individual employers. Where they are dependent on employers, their relations with others workers can be shaped by their employers. Conflict among groups of workers can serve to protect employers from concerted worker demands. Conflict among workers, therefore, is more likely where workers are powerless. Worker power, however, varies from place to place. It is determined by diverse factors: where the unemployment rate is high, local wage rates are low, the employment base is small, large numbers of jobs are controlled by a few large employers, and labor unions are largely absent, workers are likely to be very powerless. Conversely, where the unemployment rate is low, local wages are higher, the employment base is large, the largest employers do not control a large proportion of the jobs, and labor unions have a presence, workers are likely to be less powerless.

Data

How Did We Pick the Places to Collect Data?

The worker powerlessness consideration lead us to focus on two counties: Duplin and Cabarrus. The following table, based on 1997 data, shows the great contrast between the two.

CountyTotal EmploymentPercent of Employment by Top 10 EmployersUnion Presence (1=low 5=high)Average Weekly WageUnemployment Rate
Duplin2137033.3%1$374.334.3%
Cabarrus6074018.4%4$484.043.0%

Duplin County's small employment base, dominated by a few large employers, has traditionally given workers relatively few options. These factors along with labor union weakness is likely to lead to worker powerlessness in the face of employer demands and strategies. The currently low unemployment rate probably encourages employers to seek out Latinos as a new low-wage, cooperative labor force. Cabarrus County has a much larger employment base that is not dominated by a few large firms. The many options available to workers in Cabarrus County are augmented by the booming Charlotte metropolitan area. A reasonably strong labor union presence should join the worker options factor in giving workers more power to resist employer demands and strategies than in Duplin County. We would not anticipate as great a potential for Latinos and other workers to be set against one another. The difference in worker power is reflected in the difference in the average weekly wage. In general, displacement processes may be more powerful in Duplin County and replacement processes in Cabarrus County.

What Data Did We Collect?

We collected inteview data, and we analyzed government data.

Interview Data

Our research began with informal interviews. Starting with a few contacts, our field researcher, Katie Hyde, met with and interviewed informally about 50 people. They included county health service workers, social service providers, teachers and principals, community organizers, real estate agents, and police officers. Subsequently. we interviewed 28 workers and 9 employers in a more formal way. These interviews were not designed as a random sample; therefore, they cannot be used to make inferences to any larger population(s) but are useful rather for suggesting common processes and concerns. The workers interviewed included 10 Latinos(as), 12 African Americans, and 6 whites; 11 were male, and 17 were female. Most of the employers were human resource managers. They came from industries that currently employ many Latinos, including, poultry processing, pickle canning, warehousing, plastics moulding, textiles, and pig raising. Most of the interviews were collected in Duplin and Cabarrus Counties. All were transcribed.

Government Data

The only source of data on employment at the industry level in which occupation is classified by race and ethnicity is the EEO-1 Reports collected annually by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC made North Carolina data available to us for 1993-1997. EEO-1 reports must be filed for all workplaces with 100 or more employees or a contact from the federal government for $50,000 or more. The advantages of these data are the detailed breakdowns of employment and the comprehensivenss of the data collection (not a sample). The disadvantage is that small workplaces are omitted. For a study of Latino employment the latter is an important omission because many Latinos work in small workplaces, such as agricultural, landscaping, and construction establishments. For industries covered by the EEO-1 Reports, our comparative analyses of EEOC and Employment Security Commission data suggest that using the EEOC data does not distort the proportion Latino in the industry.