结尾奴隶制为便士
星期二， 2008年4月22日
由 Katrina vanden Heuvel 并且 格雷戈·考夫曼 |
slave-like条件在农业产业将冲击多数美国人。 在4月15日，在被包装的 参议院听证会 在工作环境为蕃茄工作者， bernie · Sanders参议员 被要求的侦探查理霜，调查员为人的交易的单位在运煤船县警长的办公室， “您相信有人交易的发生在佛罗里达农业，因为我们现在讲话？”
“它大概发生，当我们这里时坐”，霜现在说。 “几乎确定地它现在继续”。
“探员，您同意在这些奴隶制案件，有complicit，并且从的人们更高经济链子什么财政有益于继续？” 沙磨机要求。 “[如果那样，]您相信我们需要从责任更改法律防止种植者保护自己？”
“他们隔绝自己从什么发生，并且他们受益于怎么回事”，霜认为。 “我们必须做某事。 我们必须拿着他们有责任。 这在他们的后院，这在我们的领域，这在我们的国家发生发生发生”。
不是一个唯一共和党委员会成员在手边将听见2008年在美国描述奴隶制的此或其中任一另一个证词; 是的工作者情况-，埃里克Schlosser投入了它- “象某事您在1868年，没有2008年″也许遇到; 或漏洞在允许系统开发继续的劳工法。 林肯“党”简单地是MIA，而参议员。 沙磨机由他的民主党同事， Sherrod布朗参议员爱德华·肯尼迪，理查Durbin和加入。
玛丽Bauer，移民正义项目的主任在南部的法律贫穷中心，作证“为我们审理的每个[奴隶制]案件，那里是数百其他案件以在许多产业实际上共计强制劳动是极端共同的和实际上紧挨准则….的相似的种类力量关系…较不剧烈，但仍然难以置信地压迫情况 我不相信美国人民会是舒适的，如果他们知道怎么他们的食物被生产。 他们不会想吃被生产了得这样的食物”。
既使当几百亿元的公司喜欢麦克唐纳和Yum，听力显露了那! 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.”
See More:World NewsHave Your Say: Ending Slavery for Pennies
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008at 2:21 amand is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Might I add that bio fuels are starving the people of this planet. There are other fuel sources beyond “oils” (plant or crude-based). No amount of arable land should be take out of food production. The world’s children should not be left to starve and parents should not have to worry about being able to afford measley amounts of dahl and rice or beans to try to keep their families alive.
Please halt bio-fuels. Feed the starving.
Protect the planet other ways. Be human.