Ending Slavery for Pennies

By Katrina vanden Heuvel and Greg Kaufman, TheNation.com. Posted April 21, 2008.

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

On April 15, 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.”

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Katrina vanden Heuvel has been The Nation’s editor since 1995 and publisher since 2005. Greg Kaufmann is a freelance writer residing in his disenfranchised hometown of Washington, DC.