Buy Some Stuff, Enslave Somebody

Years from now, when the story of our corporate age is told with the clarity of hindsight, I'm guessing one of the phrases scholars will keep coming back to is "plausible deniability." The tale will capture our era's wide disparities in wealth, and its almost universal indifference to the rampant mistreatment of workers from countries less fortunate than our own.

After all, when we buy a product -- a piece of fruit, a new suit, an iPod -- how many of us really comprehend what was required to bring that product to our tables, our backs, or our pockets? The expanding global economy demands that corporations seek out the cheapest possible labor to maximize profit, and stimulate growth and innovation. With free trade has come an explosion of global inequality that has left more than 2.8 billion people living on less than $2 a day. We in the wealthy West, living and dining off the fruits of their labor, can honestly say we are unaware of the devil's bargain we bought into. Or that if we do know, the problem is simply too great to comprehend and beyond our means to do anything about, save changing our lifestyles entirely. Best, in other words, not to think about it.

This kind of willful indifference, you might remember, is the line of defense Michael Jordan used to justify his sponsorship deal with Nike Inc. during the 1990s, when that corporation was coming under heavy fire from labor-rights groups for its use of underage, sweatshop labor in Indonesia. It's not my business, he argued; I just wear the shoes. Or take the case of fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, who agreed to create a line of affordable clothing for Target Corp. stores. Asked if he knew where his clothes were being manufactured, and by whom under what conditions, he responded, "I don't know. And I don't want to know."

So it will probably come as no surprise that when Jonathan Blum, vice president for public relations of Yum! Brands Inc. (parent of Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut, among others), learned his company had been doing business for years with a farming subcontractor in Florida that grossly underpaid its largely illegal work force, he said, "My gosh, I'm sorry, but I don't think it has anything to do with us." The subcontractor's workers picked tomatoes in what one observer termed "sweatshop-like conditions," without the right to organize, without access to basic rights, protections, or benefits. If celebrities like Jordan and Mizrahi can stand in front of a camera and claim reasonable unaccountability, why shouldn't a corporate mouthpiece like Blum do the same?

This is the world John Bowe stumbled into in 2001. Bowe, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and National Public Radio's "This American Life", was in North Carolina working on a book called Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs when he heard about a community group in South Florida that had uncovered a slavery ring in local orange groves. Fascinated, Bowe headed to the small town of Lake Placid, where rumors were spreading of a labor contractor in the orange-picking business named Ramiro Ramos. Nicknamed "El Diablo," Ramos had worked for some of the biggest names in the food-service industry, including Pepsico Inc.'s Tropicana, Coca-Cola Co.'s Minute Maid, McDonald's Corp., Wendy's International Inc., and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. He had become notorious for illegally hiring migrant workers from Mexico and using manipulation, financial coercion, deportation threats, and even violence (up to and including murder) to maintain a work force of essentially unpaid and terrified slave labor that had little or no recourse to the American legal system.

Shocked to learn that slavery still existed in the United States nearly 140 years after the ratification of the 13th Amendment, Bowe found himself staring at an enormous catalog of unanswered questions: How could this be happening in America? How common is it? How can people not know about it? Most sobering of all, "What did it mean that I was drinking someone else's misery for breakfast?"