PULSE / Featured Cause
Of course, slavery doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The main reason why slavery has been so prevalent in the agricultural industry is because the normal, day-to-day situation – even for the vast majority of workers who are “free” to come and go as they please – is so degraded. When the norm is sub-poverty wages, lack of basic labor rights, lack of the right to complain about your working conditions, and systematic powerlessness, that creates a climate – a fertile soil, if you will – in which it’s possible for something like actual slavery to take root. Slavery is at the extreme end of a continuum of abuses. How have these circumstances become the norm? One has to look at where
the tomatoes are going, who is buying them, and how. This is where we also find the most direct and promising route to finally transforming the conditions in the fields: the large corporations that dominate the food industry. Farm workers toil at the very bottom of a food supply chain that is more and
more top-heavy every day. This unprecedented consolidation of market power at the top of the retail food industry has created an unrelenting downward pressure on prices – and therefore on wages and working conditions – at the bottom. And the bottom of the “bottom” in the food supply chain is the person picking fruit in the fields. When you couple these purchasing practices on the part of mega corporations like Publix and Trader Joe’s with a sort of “Las Vegas” mentality -what happens in Florida’s fields stays in Florida’s fields-then you have a recipe for poverty and unchecked human rights abuses. The corporate food industry has done business this way for decades, intervening constantly to ensure the low- est price and particular quality and delivery schedule for produce, but not being concerned with how the people who are harvesting the produce are treated.
What role does the Coalition of Immokalee Workers play in eradicating slavery and bringing justice to the forces responsible for these human rights violations? The CIW’s Anti-Slavery Campaign is a worker-based approach to eliminat-
ing modern-day slavery in the agricultural industry. The CIW helps to fight this crime by uncovering, investigating, and assisting in the federal prosecution of slavery rings preying on hundreds of farm workers. The Anti-Slavery Campaign has resulted in freedom for more than a thou-
sand tomato and orange pickers held in debt bondage, historic sentences for vari- ous agricultural employers, the development of a successful model of communi- ty-government cooperation, and the growth of an expanding base of aware and committed worker activists. The CIW employs a unique combination of outreach, investigation, and worker-to-worker counseling in order to combat already exist- ing slavery operations on a case-by-case basis. At the same time, the CIW believes that the ultimate solution to modern-
prompting one Department of Justice prosecutor to call Florida’s fields, “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” In one particularly brutal case that happened here, two farm labor supervisors were sentenced to 12 years each in federal prison in late 2008 on charges of conspiracy, holding workers in in- voluntary servitude, and peonage. They had employed doz- ens of tomato pickers in Florida and South Carolina, often working in fields a short drive away from the ritzy stores and white sand beaches of Naples. As stated in the DOJ press release on their sentencing, “[the employers] pleaded guilty to beating, threatening, restraining, and locking workers in trucks to force them to work as agricultural laborers... [They] were accused of paying the workers minimal wages and driv- ing the workers into debt, while simultaneously threatening physical harm if the workers left their employment before their debts had been repaid to the [supervisors].”
What are some of the conditions in this region’s agri- cultural industry that allow modern day slavery to ex- ist?
day slavery in agri-business lies on the “demand side” of the U.S. produce market – the major food-buying corporations that profit from the artificially-low cost of U.S. produce picked by workers in a sweatshop environment and, in the worst cases, true slavery conditions. Ultimately, those modern mega corporations must leverage their vast resources and market influence as major produce buyers to clean up slavery and other labor abuses occurring in their supply chains. Both aspects of the Anti-Slavery Campaign – the day-to-day investigative
efforts and the longer-term work to eliminate the market conditions that allow modern-day slavery to flourish – operate on the common principle that the most effective weapon against forced labor is an aware worker community engaged in the defense of its own labor rights. The anti-slavery efforts of the CIW and its members have gained nation-
al and international recognition, including the 2000 National Organization for Women (NOW) Woman of Courage Award; the 2003 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award; a 2005 letter of commendation from F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller; the 2007 Anti-Slavery Award from Anti-Slavery International of London; and the 2010 U.S. Department of State’s “Hero Acting to End Modern-Day Slavery Award” by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in recognition of “perseverance against slav- ery operations in the U.S. agricultural industry” and “determination to eliminate forced labor in supply chains.”
What are the main obstacles to ending slavery and human rights violations in SW Florida’s fields? Corporations like Publix and Trader Joe’s have a “business as usual” attitude and a lack of commitment to more stringent, verifiable, enforceable mechanisms such as those outlined in the CIW’s “Fair Food Code of Conduct”. This is a stan-
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