Living Wage Considerations in the Right-to-Work State of South Carolina
Ann Kingsolver, University of South Carolina
Abstract
In a time of economic crisis, when unemploy-
ment and food insecurity have increased dramatically
in South Carolina, is a living wage movement more or
less likely? This article does not investigate this ques-
tion ethnographically, but discusses the conditions for
a living wage movement in this southern U.S. state,
including the right-to-work legislation and logics that
frame understandings and policies regarding em-
ployment and economic well-being in the state.
Interpretive and political economic anthropological
perspectives are employed in this analysis.
Keywords: living wage, right to work, neolib-
eral logic, South Carolina, unemployment
Living with the Economic Crisis in South Carolina
The economic crisis came earlier for many South
Carolinians than for a lot of U.S. residents. The per-
centage of the population living in poverty is higher
than the national average, so there was not much of a
safety cushion when interest rates went up sharply
several years ago for payday and title loans and fed-
eral bankruptcy legislation was changed, making it
harder for families to make payments for medical and
other debts (Kingsolver 2008). By the time the stock
market was shaken by the mortgage crisis in 2008,
many South Carolinians had already been paying
grocery, utility, and rent bills on credit cards for sev-
eral years. For many residents there just were not
enough notches on the collective belt to enable further
tightening. According to the Food Research and Ac-
tion Center (2008), in 2007, over 20 percent of children
under 18 in South Carolina were living in poverty.
That same year, according to feedingamerica.org, 13.1
percent of all South Carolina households were food
insecure, and 22 percent of African American house-
holds in the state were experiencing food insecurity;
those figures are in comparison with 11 percent of all
households nationally in 2007 being without food
security. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of un-
insured children in South Carolina rose by 76 percent;
the number of uninsured children nationally in that
same period fell by 2.8 percent (U.S. Census Bureau
annual figures, compared by AFL-CIO 2009). From
2007 to 2009, unemployment in South Carolina rose,
along with food insecurity; by the beginning of 2009,
South Carolina’s unemployment rate was second only
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to Michigan’s in the U.S. Between January 2008 and
January 2009, there was an increase of 142 percent in
South Carolina families seeking food assistance from
the state’s Harvest Hope food bank (The Harvest
2009). The students in an anthropology course I was
teaching on globalization in the spring of 2009 re-
sponded to a story about a couple jailed in the state
because their child died of hunger. Trying to figure
out how someone without a car, telephone, or access
to the Internet would be able to navigate the steps
necessary to gain food assistance, the students con-
cluded that it was challenging to find that
information, even with all the resources available to
them at a university.
Food insecurity, and its disproportionate dis-
tribution among racialized identities, is just one
indicator of the structural violence (Galtung 1969;
Farmer 2003) that has compounded the effects of the
economic crisis in South Carolina, and nationally. I
have not chosen South Carolina as the basis of this
discussion because it is somehow an exception to U.S.
patterns; many people all across the U.S. are experi-
encing unemployment, food insecurity, and structural
violence. But South Carolina is one of the states
having no formal living wage ordinance in any mu-
nicipality or county, and because of that I believe it is
an interesting context for asking the question of whe-
ther a living wage movement is more or less likely
under the current conditions of economic crisis.
Across the U.S., over 30 million people are living
in jurisdictions with some form of legislated living
wage, minimally applied to workers on public con-
tracts, and over 100 cities and counties have passed
living wage ordinances (Luce 2004:219–221). In South
Carolina, as is the case nationally, as job and food se-
curity have worsened, the need to implement a living
wage appears stronger to some and weaker to others.
It depends on the logic one uses to assess and address
economic circumstances. According to neoliberal lo-
gic, with financial capital as the bottom line, raising
minimum wage to a living wage – with which work-
ers are able to afford housing, health care, child care, a
sufficient food supply, basic utilities, and to begin
saving to contend with emergency expenses – would
depress the business climate and make economic
conditions worse. According to a logic valorizing so-
cial capital as the bottom line, making the minimum
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 Anthropology of Work Review
wage a living wage would enable workers to contrib-
ute more to the economy and increase the well-being
of everyone in the state. These logics have long been
in active conflict in development and state policy (cf.
Sen 1992; Kingsolver 2001; Karjanen this issue). As
Luce (2004:6) put it:
Indeed, one of the major shifts in public policy
over the last generation has been the complete
integration of the drive for profit into the priori-
ties of the state, manifested most clearly in the
pursuit of a friendly business climate by every
level of government. This focus on probusiness
policy means that governments may be lax about,
or even ignore or resist enforcement, of pro-
worker legislation. As the case of living wage im-
plementation demonstrates, getting proworker
laws enforced means challenging that status quo
and attempting to build a new logic of economic
development prioritizing human needs over the
quest for profit.
Luce found, in her study following living wage ordi-
nances in California, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and
Connecticut, among others, that even when a living
wage movement is successful in getting such ordi-
nances passed, they are sometimes repealed and often
are not enforced because those in positions of gov-
ernment oversight are mostly aligned with business
interests. She argues that civil society oversight – e.g.,
from unions and church-related organizations – is
necessary not only to start living wage campaigns, but
to see that living wages are actually paid to workers
over time (Luce 2004:7). In South Carolina, unions
and churches are the two sites of the most activity to-
ward organizing a living wage movement, and, as
with civil rights and other legislation, it is likely that
nongovernmental organizations would need to con-
tinue to be involved with implementation, as Luce
argues, should any living wage ordinances pass in the
state.
Labor unions have, of course, been key in bring-
ing about discussions in the public sphere of whether
there should be a minimum wage for workers, what it
should be, and how it should change over time in re-
lation to the cost of living and other indicators. The
next section of this article provides a brief summary of
the role of unions in the national living wage cam-
paign, over a century old now, and the dueling logics
behind the right-to-work legislation that was imple-
mented not only in South Carolina, but in 21 other
states. Right-to-work legislation discourages labor
union organization and activities in a state’s work-
places. It may be surprising to some, given its right-to-
work status, that South Carolina has a rising number
of union members as union membership falls nation-
ally. Labor unions may be one route to a pan-
Volume XXXI, Number 1 & 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
organization living wage movement in the state. The
section after the one on the labor movement and right-
to-work legislation follows the two competing logics
(pro-profit and pro-worker) as they inform the inter-
pretation and use of economic statistics: specifically,
unemployment figures in South Carolina and average
income figures for Beaufort County, South Carolina.
Finally, the attempts to legislate a living wage and
responses to the 2009 minimum wage increase are
discussed, with reflections on the future of a living
wage movement in South Carolina and other regions
in which there are no existing living wage ordinances.
‘‘A Mule Hitched to a Plow Has a Right to Work’’
Although living wage ordinances have only
been passed in cities and counties across the U.S. over
the past two decades, discussions of a living wage
date back more than a century. Samuel Gompers, the
long-time (and controversial) president of the Ameri-
can Federation of Labor, argued for a living wage in
1898, defining it as ‘‘sufficient to maintain an average-
sized family in a manner consistent with whatever the
contemporary local civilization recognizes as indis-
pensable to physical and mental health, or as required
by the rational self-respect of human beings’’ (Glick-
man 1997:3). This is consistent with the 1998
International NGO Living Wage Summit formula for
a living wage:
Average family size/average number of adult
wage earnerscost of nutrition1clothing1health
care1education1water1child care1transporta-
tion1(housing1energy/average number of adult
wage earners)1savings (10% of income) 5 living
wage. (Indian NGOs 2006)
The social context, however, was quite different in the
U.S. in the late nineteenth century.
After the emancipation of enslaved workers,
there was a larger wage labor force in the nation. The
economy, particularly in southern states, was shifting
from agricultural to industrial, and plantation capi-
talists who had profited from their land and the
ownership of labor were supplanted by industrial
capitalists who had to factor wages into their produc-
tion (see Cook and Watson 1985). Glickman (1997)
describes a debate within the U.S. labor movement
after the Civil War: wage labor was equated with
slavery and some wanted to move away from wages
entirely, organizing economic life in new ways, but
others saw the potential to work wage standards into
a larger plan for improved conditions for workers:
The living wage, proponents held, should offer to
wage earners in the postwar years what indepen-
dent proprietorship had promised in the antebellum
era: the ability to support families, to maintain
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 Anthropology of Work Review
self-respect, and to have both the means and the
leisure to participate in the civic life of the nation.
(Glickman 1997:3)
In South Carolina during this period, some Euro-
American legislators felt threatened by a free African
American majority in the state, and the political power
African American voters had during Reconstruction.
The Euro-American minority came up with a plan to
offer free land to northern European immigrants who
had at least $6,000 in capital so that the ‘‘slavocracy,’’
as Cook and Watson (1985) call it, having lost its con-
trol of the state, could be bolstered in its racialized
control of capital and labor.
The view that capital-as-land needed to be
replaced by capital-as-labor (increased through immi-
gration) was expressed by the Commissioner of Agri-
culture of South Carolina (1880) in his first annual
report:
The question of whether we desire or require im-
migration is no longer debatable. To keep pace
with the progress of the world, we must have our
waste lands settled, our idle resources developed,
our streams running machinery. We can never
induce capital until we have the population. . . .
An emigrant agent located in New York says,
now is the time for the South to act. This State can
easily double her population, increase her wealth
300 per cent, reduce taxes and pay off her debt. . . .
He regards every able-bodied man worth $1,000
to the State.
As noted, in 1880, there was a Commissioner of Agri-
culture, Commerce and Immigration of the State of
South Carolina, since immigration was integral to the
government’s economic development plan. By the
early twentieth century, however, this strategy had
shifted, since there was a substantial southward mi-
gration within the U.S. to work in the newly
industrialized textile industry in South Carolina, with
transplanted workers joining the state’s resident
workforce. Federal restrictions on immigration were
causing labor shortages in northeastern garment fac-
tories, so capitalists moved many factories south,
where there was little, or weak, labor legislation. By
1913, the name of the abovementioned office had
changed to the Commissioner of Agriculture, Com-
merce, and Industries of the State of South Carolina,
reflecting the change in emphasis from immigration
to industry in the state.
There began to be more legislative attention to
labor, reflecting national discussions. In a 1913 letter
to the state government from the head of the new La-
bor Division of the South Carolina Department of
Agriculture, Commerce, and Industries, there was a
request ‘‘to provide for workmen’s compensation and
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insurance in manufacturing plants, upon the line of
the Wisconsin Compensation Act, thus caring for
the human machine’’ (Commissioner of Agriculture,
Commerce, and Industries 1913:7). The suggested
workers’ compensation laws are still a contentious
notion in South Carolina politics today; in 1913, they
were modeled on legislation from the populist state of
Wisconsin. Note, however, the industrial-age refer-
ence to caring for the human machine that does not
sound too far removed from the slavocracy’s attention
to the welfare of their human capital motivated by
profit margins, rather than human rights. Other sug-
gestions made by the Labor Division in that 1913
letter included the passage of an enforceable work-
week limit in factories to 60 hours, and a child labor
law prohibiting children under 13 from working in
textile mills, mines, and factories. South Carolina was
definitely involved in a national discussion of labor
conditions and compensation.
Through the first half of the twentieth century,
workers were increasingly represented politically by
labor unions in the ongoing debates over how and
whether to legislate working conditions and wages.
After the Great Steel Strike of 1919, for example,
President Wilson tried to call a post-war industrial
conference bringing together labor leadership and
business management ‘‘to find an answer to wide-
spread labor unrest’’ (Gall 1988:5), but those efforts
failed and management – organized in the form of the
National Association of Manufacturers – often influ-
enced state policies. The acrimony between labor and
management organizations came to the forefront in
the 1951 U.S. presidential campaign, won by Eisen-
hower. The debate was about whether to amend the
Taft-Hartley Act to close a loophole in it, or to exploit
that loophole in the interest of ‘‘States’ Rights’’ – a
rhetoric often used in the 1950s and 1960s to support a
number of positions counter to federal mandates.
South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, for exam-
ple, took a states’ rights position in opposing civil
rights legislation, arguing that state law should be
able to supercede federal law.
The wording of two sections of the Taft-Hartley
Act, when taken together, allowed states to legislate
against required union membership in workplaces but
not for it. Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act said
that ‘‘state legislation with regard to union security
which is more restrictive than the Taft-Hartley Act
provisions shall prevail over the latter,’’ and section
8(a)3 said that closed shop contracts were illegal un-
der federal law, but union shop contracts – requiring
workers to join unions within 30 days of their being
hired – were legal (Congress of Industrial Organiza-
tions 1954:13). What state-level legislators realized
they could do because of these provisions in the fed-
eral law was to legislate against union security or
32
 Anthropology of Work Review
forced union membership, depending on one’s
perspective, in certain industries. Because of the
loopholes in the Taft-Hartley Act, it was possible for
states to pass legislation that would prohibit union
shops even if managers and voters, together, voted to
have a union shop; conversely, legislation more sup-
portive of labor organization than the federal law
allowed could not be passed. As the CIO described it
in 1954:
That is precisely how the ‘‘States’ rights’’ provision
now found in the Taft-Hartley Act, operates: it
gives States the right to supercede the federal Act if
they pass anti-union security legislation; but if they
pass pro-union security legislation, then the federal
laws override this state legislation as to businesses
affecting interstate commerce.
Twenty-two of the fifty United States currently have
right-to-work laws in place; one of them is South
Carolina. The wording ‘‘right to work’’ and ‘‘forced-
unionism’’ on the 2001 map of right-to-work states
published by the National Right to Work Committee
reflects the entrenched differences in logic regarding
the best way to promote business and/or worker
interests.
In a pamphlet called ‘‘A Right or a Wrong? The
so-called ‘Right to Work’ Bill’’ printed in South Caro-
lina by the Allied Printing Trades Council for South
Carolina’s United Textile Workers in 1954, arguments
made by those promoting right-to-work legislation
that unions were hurting industry were countered
with the figure cited from the Federal Reserve Review
that a thousand new industries had come to South
Carolina since 1946, and the claim that fewer than 1
percent of hours had been lost due to work stoppages
across South Carolina in the past two years. The
pamphlet raised questions about the term ‘‘right to
work’’:
First of all the proposed law is not properly
named. It is NOT a ‘‘right to work’’ law, but it
has been given this name by BIG BUSINESS
throughout the United States to mislead the pub-
lic. But, even if it WERE a right to work, which it
is not, it would mean nothing to labor. Slaves in
the old south had a right to work. A MULE HIT-
CHED TO A PLOW HAS A RIGHT TO WORK.
Work for WHOM?? Work for how MUCH??
Work under WHAT conditions? BIG BUSINESS,
let’s talk SENSE to the people of SOUTH CARO-
LINA [caps in original].
As the CIO (1954) argued, the right-to-work debate
was less about what happened with workers in each
state considering the legislation than it was a states’
rights discussion at the federal level. The CIO report
(1954:162) concluded:
Volume XXXI, Number 1 & 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
There is no indication from available data to sup-
port the view that ‘‘right to work’’ laws aid
economic development or reduce the incidence of
strikes. These laws are nothing other than politi-
cal moves designed to maintain low wage
structures by hampering trade-union growth and
free collective bargaining.
In reality, ‘‘right to work’’ laws aid no one –
neither workers, business, nor the community –
other than a very small group of low-wage, anti-
union employers.
The logics of social welfare vs. the welfare of capital
continued to be at loggerheads, and some significant
advantages for the interests of capital were won with
elections in the 1950s.
Here is a summary of South Carolina’s right-to-
work law passed in 1954, to demonstrate that the
right-to-work movement was concerned, above all,
with suppressing union activity:
1) It is the public policy of the state that individu-
als’ right to work shall not be denied because
they do or do not belong to a union.
2) Any agreement between an employer and a labor
union to make union membership a condition of
employment shall be illegal and a conspiracy.
3) It is illegal for employers to require employees
to either pay union dues, become a member of a
union, or refrain from membership in a union.
4) Union dues cannot be taken out of a worker’s
salary by ticking a box – a worker has to file a
form requesting that union dues be taken out
of the paycheck.
5) It is illegal ‘‘to engage in picketing by force or
violence or in such number or manner as to ob-
struct or interfere, or constitute a threat to
obstruct or interfere, with free ingress to, and
egress from, any place of employment or
free use of roads, streets, highways, sidewalks,
railways, or other public ways of travel, trans-
portation or conveyance.’’ (South Carolina Code
Title 41. Labor and Employment, Chapter 7.
Right to Work, reproduced on the National
Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation web-
site, http://www.nrtw.org)
That last provision was probably used in the prose-
cution of the Charleston Five, those who were
arrested from among a group of unarmed longshore-
men who were picketing in the road when they were
fired upon by a newly constituted counterterrorist
police unit (see Erem and Durrenberger 2008). This
happened in 2000, and the longshoremen were pro-
testing the use of non-union labor to unload a
Norwegian freighter that had come into the Charles-
ton, South Carolina, harbor. The district attorney
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 Anthropology of Work Review
called the Charleston Five ‘‘terrorists’’ during their
trial, and according to Erem and Durrenberger (2008),
pressure on the shipping lines from unionized dock-
workers in Spain and additional demonstration of
transnational labor solidarity was a strong factor in
the release of the Charleston Five. The longshore-
men’s union is probably the strongest union in South
Carolina, a state with 78,000 union members in 2007,
but there are other unions with strong membership. A
union inspector in a poultry plant near the capitol in
Columbia, South Carolina, said that if the plant were
not unionized, conditions would be even worse; at
nonunionized plants in Georgia, the inspector said,
workers are issued adult diapers when starting the
job and are told that there will be no toilet breaks
during their shifts. Even though the poultry plant in
Columbia is unionized, working conditions are so
poor that when undocumented workers were recently
laid off after an ICE raid at a poultry plant in Green-
ville, South Carolina, sparking rumors of a similar
raid in Columbia, the management – according to a
legal aid worker – recruited prison labor because the
shifts could not otherwise be staffed. It is not the case,
then, that states with right-to-work laws have no un-
ion membership; anti-union activity in those states is,
however, more strongly sanctioned by the state.
The aspects of unionization mentioned in South
Carolina’s 1954 Right to Work law are still being
debated nationally, as with the recent proposal of
the Employee Free Choice Act, supported officially by
the American Anthropological Association. The Em-
ployee Free Choice Act would allow employees to
form unions the first time they vote, rather than going
through a two-stage voting process and getting ha-
rassed or fired by anti-union employers before the
second vote. The AAA policy brief on the Employee
Free Choice Act cites researchers who found that one
in five employees known to favor unions are fired by
their employers.
One can find figures to support positions that
unions do or do not represent workers’ interests, and
positions that workers in right-to-work states are
faring better or worse because of right to work legis-
lation. James Bennett (1997:71–73), for example,
argues that figures emphasized by labor unions
showing that workers in right-to-work states earn less
than those without such laws are not taking into ac-
count the fact that workers in right-to-work states
tend to pay fewer taxes than other workers and have a
lower cost of living and more buying power. He titles
a section of his article ‘‘Asking the right question: the
purchasing power of money income’’ (Bennett
1997:72). The ‘‘right question’’ and the right figures
are a matter of the logic or lens through which one
is looking, of course, and that’s where interpretive
cultural anthropology can be of use, in placing argu-
Volume XXXI, Number 1 & 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ments within the context of their logics. Examples of
this are provided in the next section.
Seeing Unemployment and Income Figures through
the Lenses of Neoliberal or Living Wage Logic
The United Textile Workers asked the questions
in 1954, ‘‘Work for whom . . . for how much . . . under
what conditions?’’ One of the logics framing answers
to those questions is the human welfare logic of the
living wage movement, taken up in the final section.
Another is neoliberal capitalist logic, through which
the unregulated market is seen to bring well-being
and equality for workers (see Friedman 1962). Despite
having taken its knocks recently, there are still very
strong proponents of this logic. One of them is South
Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who took what
appeared to be a states’ rights position in refusing
to accept the federal stimulus package in 2009. His
subscription to neoliberal capitalist logic was demon-
strated in his 2009 State of the State address:
Given the economic times in which we live, and
given the global competition that we’re in for
jobs, capital and way of life, we need to do things
each year to make our business climate more
competitive. . . . We’ve proposed doing what
anyone should do during financially hard times,
namely, be very careful on the spending side, and
try to improve our state’s economic climate on the
tax side. Lasting jobs and economic growth will
never come from a government bailout. They will
come from a tax and regulatory structure that re-
wards hard work, savings, and enterprise.’’
(Sanford 2009)
The tax structure he proposed was a phasing out of
corporate income taxes completely, and a reduction in
the individual income tax from 7 percent to a flat tax
of 3.65 percent. Through lowering taxes, he saw the
possibility of economic recovery.
The neoliberal capitalist lenses through which
Governor Sanford viewed the South Carolina econ-
omy were apparently so strong that when South
Carolina’s unemployment commission reported a
dramatic rise in unemployment in the state, he ques-
tioned the commission and the figures rather than the
state’s economy. The revenue used to pay unemploy-
ment benefits in South Carolina is taken from payroll
taxes. With massive layoffs and fewer new hires,
payroll taxes had suddenly decreased in the state
in 2009. The Employment Security commissioners
had to take out federal loans of over $360 million
dollars to continue paying unemployment benefits to
South Carolinians. That sparked a conflict with the
governor.
South Carolina’s unemployment rate in early
2009 was 10.4 percent, second only to Michigan’s
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 Anthropology of Work Review
unemployment rate nationally. The unemployment
rate in 2009 was higher in South Carolina than it had
been in 25 years (Associated Press 2009). The Em-
ployment Security commissioners, in news releases,
reminded the public that unemployment figures only
include those who are able to collect unemployment
benefits – when that period ends, or when people stop
looking for jobs, they go off the unemployment rolls.
The actual number of unemployed people in the state
and nation in 2009 was much higher than the reported
figures.
Governor Sanford tied the release of unemploy-
ment checks to the unemployed to a promise from the
South Carolina Employment Security Commission
to collect data differently. In a letter to the commis-
sioners, he said that he would not release the
unemployment checks until they provided him with
the ‘‘age, gender, race, county of residence and em-
ployment, education, industry, and occupation’’ of
each person filing for unemployment benefits, along
with ‘‘the specific reason for losing their jobs, whether
it’s lack of skills, absenteeism, plant closings or tem-
porary work’’ (Kittle 2009a). The governor went on to
say in that letter to the commissioners, ‘‘If I don’t re-
ceive the information enumerated below, I will be
forced to relieve you from your positions in the hope
that the next round of commissioners could be more
responsive.’’ He stated that the commission was ‘‘out
of control’’ (Kittle 2009a). My interpretation of this
conflict, as an interpretive and political economic an-
thropologist, is that the governor could not question
the efficacy of the free market economy, given his
neoliberal capitalist logic, so he questioned both the
unemployment figures and the commission reporting
the numbers.1
Commissioner Washington countered Governor
Sanford’s statement that the Employment Security
Commission was ‘‘out of control,’’ saying ‘‘the agency
is working on getting the governor most of the infor-
mation he’s asking for, but won’t be able to provide
all of it because of federal privacy laws.’’ He also
pointed out that neither the commissioners, the gov-
ernor, nor the workers of South Carolina could have
anticipated how quickly and how seriously employ-
ment would drop in South Carolina in just a few
weeks. He said, ‘‘No one has ever questioned my in-
tegrity, and the governor has done that’’ (Kittle
2009b). The commission’s reporting is grounded in a
human welfare logic, given the mandate to provide
for the needs of those facing homelessness and food
insecurity without some form of assistance from the
state.
The different logics continue to play out in how
unemployment is explained and addressed in South
Carolina. In the 2009 state senate, there was a pro-
posed bill that would dissolve the South Carolina
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Employment Security Commission, giving the em-
ployees no right to grieve if fired, making the
commissioners governor appointees, and changing
the name of the agency from the Employment Secu-
rity Commission to the Department of Workforce.
That alternative wording would appear to reflect
neoliberal logic in its emphasis on the interests of the
owners of capital (providing a constant, affordable
labor force).
Another example of the interpretation of the
welfare of South Carolinians and the state’s economy
has to do with the reporting of average income in
Beaufort County, the county that includes the resort
community of Hilton Head and the communities of
service workers commuting to the resort island. Far-
rigan and Glassmeier (n.d.) – in a project related to the
Living Wage Calculator Project at Pennsylvania State
University – demonstrated how average income and
other figures can obscure extreme disparities, and
even prevent those most marginalized from gaining
access to services to which they are entitled because it
appears that poverty is not a problem in their region.
As discussed earlier in this article, structural violence
has compounding effects. Farrigan and Glassmeier
(n.d.:3) explained their reason for going beyond an
examination of the average income figures for Beau-
fort County, South Carolina, in this way:
It can be argued that standard indicators of an
area’s economic health not only underestimate
the number of individuals experiencing hardship,
but also the degree of their hardship relative to
the remainder of the population. Therefore, a
better measure of economic health is needed, one
that not only provides a more accurate represen-
tation of labor market conditions, but also the
ability of individuals to meet their basic needs
relative to those conditions. One such measure
follows by way of estimation of a living wage and
its comparison to the wage structure and em-
ployment opportunity in Beaufort County.
In their careful study, using federal figures from the
2000 U.S. Census, Farrigan and Glasmeier found that
the non-white unemployment rate in Beaufort County
was 247 percent higher than that of the white popu-
lation. The county averages did not show this kind of
racialized disparities. In a separate study, the Con-
sortium for Latino Immigration Studies at the
University of South Carolina (2007) found that in
2005, in Beaufort and Jasper Counties, the overall
population living below poverty level was 11.4 per-
cent; by self-identified racialized categories, the
percentages of people living below poverty level
were: 16.4 percent of black residents; 18.9 percent of
Hispanic residents; and 8.9 percent of white residents.
In the neighboring counties of Allendale, Bamberg,
35
 Anthropology of Work Review
Barnwell, Calhoun, Hampton, and Orangeburg, the
disparities were even greater, with the corresponding
percentages of residents living below the poverty le-
vel in 2005 being 22.5 percent (overall), 31.4 percent
(black), 56.8 percent (Hispanic), and 9.5 percent
(white). Note that these poverty rates were experi-
enced before the current economic crisis; they have
worsened.
In Beaufort County, Farrigan and Glassmeier
(n.d.) found that federal poverty rates underestimated
basic needs by 94 percent, and that the federal mini-
mum wage only covered 40 percent of a household’s
basic needs, with rent alone taking up 27 percent of an
average family’s income. Service workers in a resort
county were hard-pressed to make ends meet. Far-
rigan and Glassmeier (n.d.) calculated a living wage,
after taxes, as food costs1child care costs1health in-
surance costs1housing costs1transportation costs1
other necessities (clothing, telephone service and
other utilities, etc.). They prepared their report on
Beaufort County, South Carolina, as part of the Living
Wage Project at Pennsylvania State University, which
runs the living wage calculator (www.livingwage.
geog.psu.edu) on which one can find specific mini-
mum and living wage figures, by occupation, for
states and cities across the U.S., along with location-
specific average monthly expenses for food, child
care, health care, housing, transportation, and aver-
age annual taxes. Farrigan and Glassmeier (n.d.)
found that Beaufort County had the highest per-capita
income in South Carolina, but that over 50 percent of
the jobs there did not pay a living wage (most of those
being in the service sector). The disparities re-
ported above were noted in their findings: in 2001, 70
percent of African American households with two
adults in Beaufort County earned less than a living
wage; that compared with 30 percent of white house-
holds with two adults earning less than a living wage.
When I studied materials from the Beaufort County
Chamber of Commerce, what they publicized was
the very high average county income. According to
the logic one uses, then, income figures can tell very
different stories.
Minimum and Living Wage Campaigns in South
Carolina
South Carolina is one of five states with no min-
imum wage law. Neighboring Georgia is one of six
states with laws setting the minimum wage lower than
the federal minimum wage, and neighboring North
Carolina is one of twelve states with legal minimum
wages set the same as the federal minimum wage rate.
Florida is one of 27 states with minimum wage laws
setting the rate higher than the federal minimum
wage (U.S. Department of Labor 2009). It is not pos-
sible, then, to characterize either the right to work or
Volume XXXI, Number 1 & 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
the absence of minimum wage legislation as a south-
ern U.S. issue – states across the nation are divided on
how to legislate adequate compensation. South Caro-
lina’s right-to-work status and the lack of a state
minimum wage law, however, make it an example
of the industrialization strategy of the New South –
attracting external capital to the region. In 2006, the
South Carolina Department of Commerce reported
firms from 26 nations operating in the state – 15 of
them European nations, along with Australia, Ber-
muda, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Japan, South
Korea, Mexico, South Africa, and Taiwan. Setting the
compensation for workers in South Carolina is not
only a local, or states’ rights, question; it needs to be
considered in the context of the global workforce.
A study of 22 countries during periods of eco-
nomic recession and growth showed that increasing
wages during a time of recession still tended to reduce
poverty (Steele 2000:3). This position is very conten-
tious, however, still depending on the logic one uses.
On the day of the increase in the U.S. federal mini-
mum wage to $7.25 an hour, July 24, 2009, I looked for
reactions in South Carolina for clues to whether there
might be increasing interest in a living wage move-
ment. Pete Wysocki, owner of the Rosewood Dairy
Bar in Columbia, South Carolina, told a news reporter
(WIS 2009) that 90 percent of his employees worked
for minimum wage, and that his only means of mak-
ing the higher payroll would be to cut the number of
hours each employee would be working per week.
One of his workers said, ‘‘I have to find another job,
I can’t live where I’m at and work here if my hours are
being cut; [I’ll] try to find something on the side to do
or maybe just get another full time job.’’ Wysocki said
that since his was an independent business, he could
not absorb the higher wages like a chain could: ‘‘Like
a McDonald’s, Burger King or Taco Bell, they have
unlimited resources, they can afford to increase the
wage.’’ Mary Graham, a Charleston Metro Chamber
of Commerce official, told another reporter (Wise
2009), ‘‘Another increase to business is just another
burden right now as they struggle to keep the jobs
they have. It’s another cost they will be absorbing
while they struggle to survive.’’ She also said, ‘‘We
oppose setting a federal or state minimum wage. We
feel they are both unnecessary. It’s just another man-
dated cost to business’’ (Wise 2009). According to
Wise, there are about 6,000 minimum wage workers
in South Carolina, but 60,000 work for below mini-
mum wage (e.g., for tips that are supposed to add up
to minimum wage, but do not). What about the Taco
Bell owners? Could they absorb the wage increase
more easily, as Wysocki argued? Thaddeus Foster is
the owner of approximately sixty Taco Bell franchises
in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. He
said workers would suffer from the increase. ‘‘Many
36
 Anthropology of Work Review
others will have their salaries frozen, lose hours or
even lose their jobs to support this small, entry-level
workforce. People raise prices, frankly, when this
happens. That’s one of the traditional responses. The
other, of course, is to cut hours and outright layoffs. . . .
Every customer at some level will pay more. Whether
it is grocery stores or retail shopping at the mall or
restaurants, every customer will pay more at some
level’’ (Halpern 2009). This resonates with the broader
neoliberal position on increasing the minimum wage,
as voiced by James Sherk (2007) of the Heritage
Foundation. He stated, ‘‘The minimum wage does not
reduce poverty, and it imposes substantial costs on
both the economy and disadvantaged workers.’’ Fos-
ter, the Taco Bell owner, hinted in his comments that
there would be strife between the small group of
minimum wage workers and the larger group of
higher earners who would be penalized to make the
payroll for the minimum wage earners. Gender could
be a factor in such friction as well, since – as Secretary
of Labor Hilda Solis noted in support of the minimum
wage increase (Deprez 2009) – two-thirds of mini-
mum wage workers are women. One South Carolina
woman, commenting on a news story about the min-
imum wage increase, stated that her wages would not
go up because her boss told her that the federal mini-
mum wage law did not need to be observed. One
could see how this might not be uncommon, given
that the state has no minimum wage law and the his-
tory of states’ rights objections to federal jurisdiction,
although the federal minimum wage law does apply in
South Carolina.
The argument about whether the rise in mini-
mum wages will increase spending and help the
economy or increase unemployment and hurt the
economy boils down to the same argument about
economic priorities. In the most recent session of the
South Carolina state senate (which is, incidentally, all-
male for the first time in 30 years), there was a bill
proposed that would have set a state minimum wage
that could be no lower than the federal minimum
wage, but there was no action on it, so the state re-
mains without a minimum wage law.
No cities in South Carolina have passed living
wage ordinances. The nearest entity that has done so
is Durham County, North Carolina, where Duke
University is; there is also a campaign underway in
Knoxville, Tennessee. The Living Wage Resource
Center (http://www.livingwagecampaign.org) re-
ports 122 living wage ordinances across the U.S. An
anthropological question taken up here is: what is
happening in the spaces between those dots on the
map? Is there a minimum wage or living wage cam-
paign active in South Carolina in these challenging
economic times, for example? What kind of support
might either have?
Volume XXXI, Number 1 & 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
I asked Donna Dewitt, the president of South
Carolina’s AFL-CIO, about any living wage cam-
paigns underway in the state, and she said:
There are a number of Central Labor Councils
(CLCs) around the country that have generated
living wage and fair wage campaigns. The AFL-
CIO state federations are usually involved in
those efforts. In South Carolina the only groups
that have engaged in preliminary efforts are the
Labor Party and the South Carolina Progressive
Network. I am involved in both organizations.
The Labor Party canvassed in Charleston during
the petition drive for ballot status and living wage
was a key issue. The Network has looked at con-
ducting some ballot initiatives around living and
fair wage. The SC AFL-CIO has worked to pro-
mote all of the efforts, including legislation that
has been introduced in the past. Unfortunately, it
is difficult to get a bill to a hearing.
So far, none of those bills has gotten out of committee
to a vote. The first one was House bill 4067, the Living
Wage Act, introduced in April 2003. It would have set
the living wage at $10/hour without health benefits,
or $8.50/hour with health benefits, to be adjusted
each July to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Consumer
Price Index for the southeastern region of the U.S. This
wage would have applied to any worker on a state
contract. The bill argued that ‘‘the State is not an in-
nocent bystander in the payment of subpoverty level
wages,’’ and that state contracts were a place to start
addressing this problem. The bill included language
prohibiting the harassment of anyone trying to get
employers to honor a living wage law, if passed, or
subcontracting through a third party to avoid paying
a living wage to anyone working for the state (in-
cluding, for example, school employees). Another
living wage bill, H 3659, was introduced in March
2005, with many of the same sponsors. It stated: ‘‘The
creation or promotion of jobs that pay subpoverty le-
vel wages is short-sighted economic and social policy.
These jobs do not lead to a self-sufficient work force or
support sustainable community development.’’ Both
bills, H 4067 and H 3659, died in the Labor, Com-
merce and Industry Committee, which one might
assume to be dominated (like the state government as
a whole) by neoliberal logic, which subscribes to a
different view of wages – keeping them relatively
low, along with a certain rate of unemployment, for a
positive business climate.
Conclusion: The Future of Living Wage Discussions
in a Context of Economic Crisis
It is clear that the state will not be the vanguard
in promoting a living wage, or even a minimum
wage, in South Carolina. Neoliberal logic would
37
 Anthropology of Work Review
advocate continuing to promote low-wage labor as an
economic strategy in the global economic climate. By
living wage logic, however, as advocated by Athreya
and Thys (1999):
Workers must be able not only to meet their basic
needs but to steadily improve their living condi-
tions. This is a moral position, and a pragmatic
one as well. All human beings have certain eco-
nomic rights: to food, shelter, medicine, educa-
tion. Additionally, the global economy cannot
sustain itself indefinitely on a shrinking base
of Western consumers. . . . Although we clearly
support grassroots campaigns geared toward de-
manding higher wages, as well as collective
bargaining efforts, both strategies must be linked
to broad, international enforcement mechanisms.
As we have seen in the case of the South Carolina
woman whose boss did not feel bound by the federal
minimum wage, legislated goals are not always prac-
ticed. In fact, as mentioned in the introduction, in the
case of living wage ordinances, Stephanie Luce (2004)
finds that they usually are not implemented because
enforcement is left to governing bodies often in dis-
agreement with living wage policies.
Renewed discussion about a living wage has
been going on in South Carolina for at least the past
decade, but it has been among a limited number of
residents and always framed within the competing
logics discussed throughout this article. Jim Daven-
port (1998:3) reported in an article for the State
newspaper called ‘‘Current Living Wage is Worthy of
Serious Discussion’’:
Many working folks support an increase because
the minimum wage never seems to be close to
what it takes to live on and support a family. Op-
ponents of increases say that few people depend
on the minimum wage for a living for very long
before their wages increase.
From the conversations I have had with people
in South Carolina about the probability of a living
wage campaign in these hard times, it does not sound
like there will be an ordinance in place anywhere in
the state soon. I agree with Luce (2004) that both
campaigns for, and oversight of, living wages will
most likely come not from governmental but from
nongovernmental entities: religious and labor organi-
zations, sometimes acting together, as in the South
Carolina Progressive Network mentioned by Donna
Dewitt. Government cannot be assumed to be associ-
ated steadily with a single logic, however, and anthro-
pologists – using our interpretive tools to disentangle
the very different logics framing a single issue – can
contribute to thinking beyond ‘‘red’’ and ‘‘blue’’ state
characterizations. As noted in this article, for example,
Volume XXXI, Number 1 & 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
union membership is going up in South Carolina as it
goes down nationally, which might be a surprising
fact about a right-to-work state for some readers, and
a group of state legislators have twice introduced liv-
ing wage bills. Given the increasing electoral partic-
ipation of those in demographic categories most likely
to occupy minimum wage jobs (young people and
women), South Carolina’s government positions on
minimum and living wages may change in the future.
The national significance of the competing logics
discussed in this article – with a checkered labor land-
scape of right-to-work and more unionized states –
was illustrated sharply in the fall of 2009 when Boeing
announced its decision to construct a new assembly
plant for the 787 aircraft in South Carolina instead of
in Washington state, where it already had a trained
workforce. That workforce was unionized, and Boe-
ing had been in negotiations with the International
Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers
about building the new 787 Dreamliner plant in Ev-
erett, Washington, until just before the announcement
to shift the location to North Charleston, South Caro-
lina. Hedgpeth (2009) and many other journalists saw
this as ‘‘signaling that major manufacturers are in-
creasingly willing to look for non-union workforces
during a time of economic stress.’’
As anthropologists of work know from long-
standing global research on this topic, the issue is not
as simple here as just lowering the cost of wages; the
real question is what costs get included on the ledger
as profits and benefits are calculated. Are fuel and
training costs associated with relocating a project of
this scale included? What about incentive packages
offered by states and municipalities to attract the
plant? Having studied the decision to locate the first
Toyota assembly plant in the U.S. in my home state of
Kentucky (Kingsolver 1991), I have seen that states
can often give more in donated construction costs and
tax incentives than they see in profits from ‘‘landing’’
such a large manufacturing plant, but that being per-
ceived as a winner in a competition for the plant has
symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977:177) beyond the
money spent or jobs gained.
Neoliberal capitalist logic is affirmed by a cor-
porate employer being free to choose its workforce
and location, and by a state appearing to have more of
a ‘‘business incentive’’ than regulatory function. In
the Boeing case, there were quite a few incentives of-
fered. ‘‘When Boeing announced in October that it
would locate the second Dreamliner assembly plant
in South Carolina, [SC] Senate Finance Committee
Chairman Hugh Leatherman estimated the state’s
costs for financial incentives in the deal would total
between $400 and $450 million’’ (Smith 2010). In his
October 28, 2009 speech on the floor of the South
Carolina senate to announce the Boeing decision,
38
 Anthropology of Work Review
Senator Leatherman said, ‘‘This sends a signal across
the nation and to the world that South Carolina has
the people and ability to compete for world-class
companies. We take a backseat to no one, and we all
pull together when it comes to being a business-
friendly state’’ (Journal of the Senate of the State of
South Carolina 2009). The Senator spoke about the
international contractors who would now be looking
at South Carolina more seriously as a business site; the
symbolic capital of landing Boeing was conveyed
clearly in his speech. Are ‘‘business friendly’’ and ‘‘la-
bor friendly’’ necessarily competing logics? They are
certainly different emphases, which were notable in the
coverage of the Boeing deal in the South Carolina and
Washington state press. The South Carolina govern-
ment borrowed $270 million to build the construction
plant, and both state and local governments gave tax
breaks to Boeing. For 30 years, for example, the new
Boeing plant in North Charleston will be taxed at the
rate of an individual homeowner in an owner-occupied
home, 4 percent, rather than at the rate paid by an in-
dustrial employer, 10.5 percent (Stech 2010).
It was somewhat difficult to find coverage of the
incentives offered to Boeing in the South Carolina
press, but here is an example of the ample coverage in
the Washington press of how much South Carolina
paid to cement the deal with Boeing: ‘‘Legislators
sweating a wrecked budget that threatens schools,
colleges and law enforcement cheered plans to bor-
row $270 million to build a new Boeing airliner as-
sembly line in North Charleston’’ (Davenport 2010).2
The difference between the representations of the
same event in the South Carolina State Senate’s own
journal and the Washington press reveals the differ-
ence in emphases and framing according to the logic
employed. As has been the case in previous economic
crises in the U.S., as anthropologists and historians
will note, there may be a constriction in the definition
of the interests of the national public, and of who gets
to define those interests. Whether a ‘‘right to work’’ or
‘‘living wage’’ logic guides state, national, and inter-
national decision making will continue to be followed
by anthropologists of work. Events like the Boeing
decision and the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision
on campaign financing appear to demonstrate the
ongoing dominance of neoliberal logic in this cultural
context.3
Notes
1 This article was written in mid-2009. Since then, the
governor of South Carolina faced impeachment consider-
ations related to a personal scandal in 2009 and the South
Carolina Employment Security Commission faced a
South Carolina Legislative Audit Council review and
proposed legislation in 2009 and 2010 to reform the com-
Volume XXXI, Number 1 & 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
mission and make it part of the governor’s cabinet rather
than its remaining an independent entity due, in part, to
concerns about how the commissioners handled the crisis
of 2008 and 2009. My focus here is not on the blame var-
ious parties in South Carolina have laid at each other’s
doors for mishandling the economic crisis; my focus is,
instead, on the logics such discourse reveals.
2 The Boeing plant is expected to create 3,800 new jobs in
South Carolina, and each of those jobs is estimated to have
cost $83,000 in incentives, including the $270 million bor-
rowed by the state for the construction bonds for the plant
(Smith 2010).
3 The 5–4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on January 21,
2010, on the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
case will lead to the removal of much of the regulation
limiting corporate spending on political advertising dur-
ing U.S. elections.
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DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1417.2010.01039.x
41