[News] Slavery in the Fields

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

Apri1 10, 2008


Disposable Workers in the U. S. in Economy


Slavery in the Fields

By ELIZABETH SCHULTE

José Vasquez couldn't stand any more.

On November 19, he and two other workers escaped 
through a ventilation hatch in the box trailer 
where they had been locked up for the night. For 
more than a year, the three immigrants and a 
dozen more were forced to work for the Navarrete 
family picking tomatoes in Immokalee, Fla.

They were made to pay $20 for "housing"--a locked 
van where they had to defecate in the corner--as 
well as $50 a week for food and $5 to take a 
shower in the backyard with a garden hose.

Earning just 45 cents for every bucket of 
tomatoes they picked in the blistering Florida 
sun for some 12 hours a day, the men were in 
perpetual debt to their captors. And the fear of 
deportation made defying the men who held them 
seem even more impossible. Any identifying 
documents they once had were locked away.

When investigators finally arrived a week later, 
they found the other workers bloody, bruised and 
beaten--a regular state of affairs, according to 
the workers. Mariano Lucas, one of the workers 
who escaped, told investigators he tried to take 
a day off a few weeks previously, and was beaten 
until he bled. One man had badly swollen wrists 
from being chained with his hands behind his back every night.

There's only one way to describe this abuse, 
according to Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Doug 
Molloy: "Slavery, plain and simple."

No one disputes that slavery--abolished 150 years 
ago in the U.S.--is one of the ugliest chapters 
in American history. Yet just under the surface 
of the modern-day image of the U.S. as a beacon 
of democracy is an ugly secret: that slavery 
still thrives for thousands of workers.

Under the modern slave system, workers aren't 
bought and sold on the open market, as they once 
were in the U.S. South--but rather they were 
smuggled into the country and forced to work, all 
just beneath the radar of government officials and the public.

Last year's incident at Immokalee marked the 
seventh farm labor operation to be prosecuted for 
servitude in Florida--involving well over 1,000 
workers and more than a dozen employers--in the past decade.

In 2004, for example, Ramiro and Juan Ramos were 
sentenced to 15 years each in federal prison on 
slavery and firearms charges. They threatened the 
700 farmworkers under their control with death if 
they tried to leave, and pistol-whipped passenger 
van service drivers who gave rides to farmworkers leaving the area.

By and large, though, it's these small-time 
extortionists who are punished for modern-day 
slavery in America--while the big corporations 
who ultimately profit from slave-like labor stand above the fray.

And profit they do. "The food sector (food, 
groceries, food processing, and restaurant 
businesses together) is worth about a trillion 
dollars a year in the U.S. and is second only to 
pharmaceuticals in profitability," writes 
journalist John Bowe in his book Nobodies: Modern 
American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy.

"Considering that the American public gives some 
$47 billion per year in direct subsidies to 
agricultural producers and billions more in tax 
breaks, research allocations to university, 
marketing initiatives...it is blind idiocy or 
willful deceit to say the money just isn't there."

Through activism on the part of farmworkers 
themselves and a fierce and creative public 
boycott campaign, the Coalition of Immokalee 
Workers (CIW) last year forced McDonald's, the 
world's biggest restaurant chain, and Yum!, which 
owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, to pay pickers 
another penny per pound of tomatoes.

Today, Burger King, which also buys its tomatoes 
in Immokalee, is refusing to follow suit. Burger 
King's intransigence was backed up by the Florida 
Tomato Growers Exchange, which last year 
threatened a $100,000 fine for any grower who 
agrees to an extra penny per pound for pickers' wages.

As Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, 
pointed out in the New York Times, "Telling 
Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes 
and provide a decent wage to migrant workers 
would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it 
would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year...

"In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs 
executives exceeded $200 million--more than twice 
as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato 
pickers in southern Florida earned that year."

The fast-food giant's excuse? The CIW "has gone 
after us because we are a known brand," 
complained Burger King vice president Steve 
Grover. "At the end of the day, we don't employ 
the farmworkers, so how can we pay them?"

This is how the big guys keep their hands clean 
of the dirty work of paying sub-minimum 
wages--and enslaving other human beings.

In some cases, slave-like conditions are 
perfectly legal, since labor laws almost always 
favor the employer, particularly in the agricultural industry.

Speaking of the U.S. bracero program from 1942 to 
1964, under which millions of Mexican workers 
were imported and contracted out to U.S. growers 
and ranchers, even the U.S. Department of Labor 
officer in charge of the program, Lee Williams, 
described it as a system of "legalized slavery."

When the program was shut down, migrant workers 
could still be brought into the U.S. under the 
H-2 program, or the guest-worker system--under 
which workers are only provided with a visa when 
they have an employer, therefore keeping them at the mercy of emloyers.

As a 2007 report from the Southern Poverty Law 
Center (SPLC), Close to Slavery: Guest Worker 
Programs in the U.S., states, "Under the current 
system, called the H-2 program, employers brought 
about 121,000 guest workers into the U.S. in 
2005--approximately 32,000 for agricultural work 
and another 89,000 for jobs in forestry, seafood 
processing, landscaping, construction and other non-agricultural industries.

"These workers, though, are not treated like 
'guests.' Rather, they are systematically 
exploited and abused. Unlike U.S. citizens, guest 
workers do not enjoy the most fundamental 
protection of a competitive labor market--the 
ability to change jobs if they are mistreated. 
Instead, they are bound to the employers who 
'import' them. If guest workers complain about 
abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting or other retaliation."

When their work visas expire, H-2 employees must 
leave the U.S.--making them, in the words of the 
SPLC, "the disposable workers of the U.S. economy."

Often, workers are recruited overseas, with 
recruiters' fees ranging anywhere from $500 to 
$10,000 for travel visas and other costs. Add to 
this exorbitant interest rates, sometimes as high 
as 20 percent a month, and it's obvious that 
workers are arriving in the U.S. with debts they 
can't possibly pay off with jobs that pay very 
little, typically less than the federal minimum wage.

In some cases, recruiters threaten to harm to the 
families of the workers if payments are missed. 
The workers are trapped in a terrifying downward spiral.

Nelson Ramirez, a forestry worker from Guatemala, 
described to the SPLC what happened when he 
signed up to work for Eller and Sons Trees in 
2001. A labor recruiter required that his wife 
sign a paper agreeing to be responsible if he were to break his contract.

"I didn't understand exactly what this threat 
meant, but knew that my wife would have to sign 
if I was going to get the visa," Ramirez said. 
"The work was very hard, but I worried about 
leaving, because my wife signed this form to get me the job."

Abuse of workers--including human trafficking and 
slavery conditions--have been reported in a 
surprising variety of jobs. Among the cases 
documented in a 2007 report from the California 
Alliance to Combat Trafficking and Slavery (CA 
ACTS) Task Force were 48 Thai welders hired 
through Kota Manpower of Thailand and Los Angeles 
and forced live in squalor, working for little or no pay.

In September 2004, Nena Jimeno Ruiz was lured to 
LA from the Philippines under false pretenses, 
forced to work 18-hour days at the home of an 
executive at Sony Pictures, sleep on a dog bed 
and threatened with never seeing her family again if she complained.

In 2001, Victoria Island Farms settled a civil 
lawsuit that resulted in the payment of back 
wages to workers who were forced to harvest 
asparagus in substandard conditions for virtually 
no pay. Hired by a farm labor contractor, the 
workers, recruited mostly from Mexico, were 
powerless to stop huge deductions for 
transportation and other "debts" that the 
employer took from their weekly paychecks.

The U.S. State Department estimates that 
approximately 80 percent of people trafficked 
from other countries are women and girls, and up 
to 50 percent are minors. Members of "Lideres 
Campesinas," an agricultural worker women's 
organization based in Pomona, Calif., told the CA 
ACTS Task Force that foremen often prey on 
immigrant women, abuse them and sexually assault 
them. The women say that if they complained, they 
would be deported, and their families in their 
home countries would be victimized.

Immigrants are the most vulnerable to these 
attacks on their basic freedoms--and the least 
protected by the U.S. government.

Typically, law enforcement officials are charged 
with protecting the rights of those being 
abused--and they are the least capable of 
handling the job. On the contrary, they are more 
likely to be viewed--for good reason--as the 
enemies of undocumented immigrants, making them 
the last people workers would seek out for help.

In the end, undocumented workers are the ones treated like criminals.

The U.S. government is ill-equipped and 
apparently uninterested in seeking out these 
all-too-common incidents of abuse. At best, it 
turns the other way when abuses occur; more 
often, it is part of the problem, as the threat 
of deportation hangs heavy over the heads of workers too afraid to seek help.

If we are going to abolish modern-day slavery, we 
have to look to the struggles from below that won workers' rights in the past.

The Immokalee workers are modeling their struggle 
against slavery in the Florida fields on the 
first abolitionist movement, with a national 
petition drive marking the bicentennial of the 
U.S. ban on importing slaves and a vow to stop modern-day slavery.

And in Pascagoula, 100 immigrant guest workers 
from India took a page from the civil rights 
movement when they walked out over the slave-like 
conditions at a Signal International shipyard on 
March 6--holding signs the read "I Am a Man" like 
those carried by striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968.

"We need to change this system to one that helps 
the employees who are suffering, not the 
employers," said Signal worker Sabulal Vijayan.

Elizabeth Schulte writes for the 
<http://www.socialistworker.org/>Socialist Worker.




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