[Peace-discuss] US Senate hearing on slavery in US

[Ricky Baldwin]

Ending Slavery for Pennies

The exploitation of farmworkers should not be tolerated in Florida. It should not be
tolerated anywhere in the United States. There are many social problems that are
extremely difficult to solve. This is not one of them. – Eric Schlosser, investigative
reporter and author of Fast Food Nation 

Yesterday, at a packed Senate hearing on working conditions for tomato workers, Senator
Bernie Sanders asked Detective Charlie Frost, investigator for the human trafficking
unit at the Collier County Sheriff's Office, "Do you believe that there is human
trafficking happening in Florida agriculture as we speak right now?" 
"It's probably occurring right now while we sit here," Frost said. "Almost assuredly
it's going on right now." 

"Detective, would you agree that in these slavery cases, there are people higher up the
economic chain who are complicit and who benefit financially from what goes on?"
Sanders asked. "[And if so,] do you believe we need to change the law to prevent the
growers from shielding themselves from responsibility?" 

"They isolate themselves from what is occurring, and they benefit from what's going
on," Frost said. "We have to do something. We have to hold them accountable. This is
occurring in their backyard, this is occurring in our fields, this is occurring in our
country." 

Not a single Republican committee member was on hand to hear this or any of the other
testimony that described slavery in the US in 2008; worker conditions that are – as
Eric Schlosser put it – "like something you might encounter in the year 1868, not
2008"; or the loopholes in labor laws which allow systemic exploitation to continue.
The "party of Lincoln" was simply MIA, while Sen. Sanders was joined by his Democratic
colleagues, Senators Edward Kennedy, Richard Durbin, and Sherrod Brown.
 
Mary Bauer, Director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Law Poverty
Center, testified that "for every [slavery] case we hear about, there are hundreds of
other cases with similar kinds of power relationships
 less dramatic but still
incredibly oppressive circumstances that in effect amount to forced labor that are
extremely common, and in fact close to the norm in many industries
. I do not believe
that the American people would be comfortable if they knew how their food is being
produced. They would not want to eat food that had been produced in this way." 

The hearing revealed that even when multibillion-dollar corporations like McDonald's
and Yum! Brands (whose subsidiaries include Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John
Silver's and A&W) attempt to do the right thing – and pay the workers more – powerful
agribusiness interests have stood in the way. These corporations agreed to supplement
the workers at a rate of an additional penny per pound for the tomatoes they purchase.
Doesn't sound like much – and it isn't for the corporations – but it would result in
about a 75 percent salary increase for workers who a 2001 US Department of Labor report
described as "a labor force in significant economic distress
 [with] low wages,
sub-poverty annual earnings, [and] significant periods of un- and underemployment." 

As some growers began to implement the Yum/McDonald's agreement – an extra paycheck cut
to the farmworkers by the buyers, not the growers, mind you – the Florida Tomato
Growers Exchange (FTGE), representing 90 percent of the state's growers, said any
members who adopted this policy would be fined $100,000 per worker benefiting from the
agreement. 
Reginald Brown, Executive Vice President of the FTGE, was at the hearing trying,
desperately, to justify opposition to the agreement as stemming from legal concerns. 

Sen. Sanders entered into the record a letter from 26 legal professors specializing in
labor law, including antitrust dimensions of labor standards, writing that "the
ostensible legal concerns of the Growers Exchange are utterly without merit." (In fact,
the experts concluded, the only real antitrust issue might be several growers agreeing
amongst themselves to reject the deal.) He noted that McDonald's and Yum! Brands also
entered letters into the record stating that there are no legal problems with the extra
penny deal and that they want it implemented. 

"I gather that McDonald's and Yum have some money to hire some pretty good attorneys,"
Sen. Sanders told Brown. "You might want to reconsider the attorneys you are using and
rethink this issue." 

Then Brown argued that it wasn't just the legal argument, but also that buyers would
look to Mexico for cheaper tomatoes (even though it's the buyers who are offering to
pay the extra penny). Brown said that the "tomato industry will go away, and Florida's
economy will suffer." 

It was as if Brown were acting out the very analogy that Lucas Benitez – a former
tomato worker, co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), and recipient of
the 2003 RFK Human Rights Award – drew in his testimony between the opposition
farmworkers rights advocates face today and that which confronted abolitionists 200
years ago. (These early 19th century abolitionists were the predecessors to those who
later founded The Nation in 1865.) 

"Exactly 200 years ago, near this very spot, men in your position voted to outlaw the
importation of slaves into the United States," Benitez testified through a translator.
"That little known act did not end slavery, but it was an important step toward the
eventual abolition of a brutal institution. At the time, passing that piece of
legislation was complex, controversial and courageous. Those who supported the status
quo argued that most slaves were happy with their lot, that they were certainly better
off than where they came from, and that the economic collapse of US agriculture would
surely follow." 

Indeed, it's not too much of a stretch to view Brown and his cohorts as 21st century
George Wallaces or Bull Connors, standing in the way of the progress of human rights in
our own nation. Brown boasted of the workers who continue to return to the fields; of
the "entry level job" tomato picking represents on the way towards achieving the
American dream; of the "shock" that FTGE felt in response to the slavery cases – cases
Schlosser pointed out were never uncovered by the growers who work with the labor
contractors, but by CIW – in the relatively small town of Immokalee; and, time and
again, Brown pointed to Socially Accountable Farm Employers (SAFE) – "an independent
third party" that is auditing growers to make sure workers are treated with respect and
paid fair wages. But Sanders revealed that two of the five members of the SAFE Board of
Directors are Brown himself and Mike Stuart, President of the Florida Fruit and
Vegetable Association (FFVA). FFVA lists helping growers meet their labor needs while
keeping costs down as one of its key responsibilities. Further, neither Brown nor
Stuart reveal their positions in the industry on the SAFE website. 

It's in this environment that a worker picks an average of two tons of tomatoes a day
for about $50, or $10,000-$12,500 annually (a Department of Labor figure inflated by
including supervisory personnel); where much if not all of their salaries go towards
paying for trailers where 8-10 workers live together; where complaints are met with
threats, beatings or worse. And when these workers – whether US citizens or immigrants,
and witnesses testified that these issues apply to both – are enslaved, or forced into
debt-servitude, or beaten, or sexually harassed, or not paid, or having their families
back home threatened, their access to help is far more limited than that of other
workers. Bauer noted that they have no right to organize; no overtime pay; no federal
minimum wage law on smaller farms or in short harvest seasons; exemptions to child
labor laws; and state health and safety laws that exclude farmworkers. She said this
isn't a Florida-only problem, it's the widespread result of "agriculture
exceptionalism." 

Schlosser said that as recently as the 1950's Florida police would prosecute
African-Americans under vagrancy laws and send them to the fields to work off the
fines. 
Both Senators Kennedy and Sanders said this is just the beginning of investigating
these injustices. In his concluding statement, Sen. Sanders said a GAO audit of wage
and hour records of the growers is needed; agriculture workers need to be covered under
both the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act; changes need to
be made to the federal trafficking statutes to address growers and others who are
avoiding prosecution by remaining willfully blind to the abuses around them; anti-trust
implications of the FTGE activities need to be examined; and "we need to make sure that
slavery, servitude and other abuses in the Florida tomato industry continue to receive
the attention both in and outside Congress that they deserve so that it is stopped once
and for all." 

As for Benitez, he's been a part of this struggle for decades. He recalled during a
1997 worker hunger strike a grower saying that they would never meet the workers'
single demand for dialogue. "‘Let me put it to you like this,'" the grower said. "‘The
tractor doesn't tell the farmer how to run a farm.'" Benitez continued, "That's how
they've always seen us, just another tool and nothing more. But we aren't alone
anymore. Today there are millions of consumers with us willing to use their buying
power to eliminate the exploitation behind the food they buy. And a new dawn for social
responsibility in the agriculture industry is on its way. With the help of Congress and
with the faith that the complicated will be made clear under the purifying light of
human rights, today, just as it was 200 years ago, we will witness the dawn of that new
day." 
 
This article was co-authored by Greg Kaufmann, a freelance writer residing in his
disenfranchised hometown of Washington, DC. 
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=311097



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