Several transition metal dithiocarbamate complexes are useful in industry. Zinc dithiocarbamates are used to modify the crosslinking of certain polyolefins with sulfur, a process called vulcanization.  They are used as ligands for chelating metals.
Some dithiocarbamates, specifically ethylene bisdithiocarbamates (), in the form of complexes with manganese (maneb), zinc (zineb) or a combination of manganese and zinc (mancozeb), have been used extensively as fungicides in agriculture since the 1940s. In the United States they began to be registered for use in the late 1950s and early 1960s and were quickly put to work on sooty blotch and flyspeck. Many growers switched from captan to EBDCs for the longer residual period. Both captan and EBDCs were the primary treatments for SBFS in that country until the early 1990s when the US Environmental Protection Agency banned EBDCs within 77 days to harvest. This effectively made summer use impossible, reduced EBDC use overall, and radically increased SBFS.