From an article in Gourmet magazine:
Lucas’s “room” turned out to be the back of a box truck in the junk-strewn yard, shared with two or three other workers. It lacked running water and a toilet, so occupants urinated and defecated in a corner. For that, Navarrete docked Lucas’s pay by $20 a week. According to court papers, he also charged Lucas for two meager meals a day: eggs, beans, rice, tortillas, and, occasionally, some sort of meat. Cold showers from a garden hose in the backyard were $5 each. Everything had a price. Lucas was soon $300 in debt. After a month of ten-hour workdays, he figured he should have paid that debt off.
But when Lucas—slightly built and standing less than five and a half feet tall—inquired about the balance, Navarrete threatened to beat him should he ever try to leave. Instead of providing an accounting, Navarrete took Lucas’s paychecks, cashed them, and randomly doled out pocket money, $20 some weeks, other weeks $50. Over the years, Navarrete and members of his extended family deprived Lucas of $55,000.
Taking a day off was not an option. If Lucas became ill or was too exhausted to work, he was kicked in the head, beaten, and locked in the back of the truck. Other members of Navarrete’s dozen-man crew were slashed with knives, tied to posts, and shackled in chains. On November 18, 2007, Lucas was again locked inside the truck. As dawn broke, he noticed a faint light shining through a hole in the roof. Jumping up, he secured a hand hold and punched himself through. He was free.
What happened at Navarrete’s home would have been horrific enough if it were an isolated case. Unfortunately, involuntary servitude—slavery—is alive and well in Florida. Since 1997, law-enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women in seven different cases. And those are only the instances that resulted in convictions. Frightened, undocumented, mistrustful of the police, and speaking little or no English, most slaves refuse to testify, which means their captors cannot be tried.
The article also discusses tomato pickers who, although not enslaved, are nonetheless working in terrible conditions for extremely low pay. Workers have been able to make some progress by organizing:
Even though the CIW has been responsible for bringing police attention to a half dozen slavery prosecutions, Benitez feels that slavery will persist until overall conditions for field workers improve. The group has made progress on that front by securing better pay. Between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, the rate for a basket of tomatoes remained 40 cents—meaning that workers’ real wages dropped as inflation rose. Work stoppages, demonstrations, and a hunger strike helped raise it to 45 cents on average, but the packers complained that competition for customers prevented them from paying more. One grower refused to enter a dialogue with CIW hunger strikers because, in his words, “a tractor doesn’t tell the farmer how to run the farm.” The CIW decided to try an end run around the growers by going directly to the biggest customers and asking them to pay one cent more per pound directly to the workers. Small change to supermarket chains and fast-food corporations, but it would add about twenty dollars to the fifty a picker makes on a good day, the difference between barely scraping by and earning a livable wage.
The Campaign for Fair Food, as it is called, first took aim at Yum! Brands, owner of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s, and A&W. After four years of pressure, Yum! agreed to the one-cent raise in 2005 and, importantly, pledged to make sure that no worker who picked its tomatoes was being exploited. McDonald’s came aboard in 2007, and in 2008 Burger King, Whole Foods Market, and Subway followed, with more expected to join up this year. But the program faces a major obstacle. Claiming that the farmers are not party to the arrangement, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, an agricultural cooperative that represents some 90 percent of the state’s producers, has refused to be a conduit for the raise, citing legal concerns.
The entire article is well worth reading. It ends with advice for people purchasing tomatoes; you should buy at Whole Foods if you can (they’ve made an agreement with the CIW), or if you shop elsewhere avoid tomatoes from Florida or Mexico.
Most of the comments following the article are reasonable, but one reader wrote:
I found your article “The price of tomatoes” by Barry Estabrook offensive. You are asking me to feel sorry for people who knowing broke our laws to send money home to Mexico. ARE YOU CRAZY?
Curtsy: Boing Boing.
This is one of the many reasons I eat locally… but damn, do I miss tomatoes through winter. Then again, the fleshy red squash-balls they sell at the grocery store don’t really count as tomatoes.
I’ve seen that very same comment on this blog, so it isn’t surprising.
One of the reasons I hold the stance on immigration I do is that I can’t get mad at someone for trying to do what he or she can to best support their family. If Canada was as much richer than America as America is richer than Mexico, Michele Malkin and Lou Dobbs would be fighting over who got to sneak across the Roseau River first.
Yes, these migrant workers “broke the law.” But they didn’t hold people in bondage, steal from them, and beat them senseless. All they did is come to this country and work hard. I’ll be damned if I think the slaves are the problem and the slaveholders are decent folk simply because the latter are “American.”
For once, there’s an advantage to living in New Jersey: we grow pretty good tomatoes here.
Jeff, one irony here is that the particular slaveholders discussed, the Navarretes, were themselves undocumented immigrants. That doesn’t make me feel any sympathy for them — they got something like 15 years in prison, which doesn’t seem long enough — but it does complicate the picture a little. But in the end, the solution is the same: reforming the system.
(And the really big bosses — the farmers and food buyers who are above the Navarretes on the economic chain — are Americans.)
I’m all for deporting illegal aliens, but that doesn’t justify what was done to them. These “employers” should be investigated and if appropriate prosecuted for their actions.
Your position makes it much easier to do this sort of thing.
Immokalee FL, represented by the great Connie Mack and now his son, since the Reagan Revolution. And you thought conservatives only supported slave labor in the Marianas?
Which factory farmers recieve the most farm subsidies? They sure ain’t passing that on to their ‘contract’ employees.
Spud, where I get most of my produce from, has a commitment to fair trade also. I will gladly pay a little more so that I’m not supporting situations like the one you’re talking about. (It’s all good stuff, too, and delivered right to your door. Highly recommended if you’re in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver BC, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.)
The people who are really in a tough spot are the ones who are too broke to afford an extra few dollars for anything and/or don’t have access to anything that isn’t grown by slave labor. That’s why changing industry practice is much more important than what individuals do.
For 5 years I ran the winter camporee for my local Scout Council. It actually bothered me quite a bit that the cases of hot cocoa that I would mix up and run all over camp for the kids was reputedly picked (or about 1/2 of it IIRC) by slave labor, or in nearly such conditions (WIki here). I never could come up with an alternative that I thought the kids would drink. Keeping the kids drinking during below-freezing weather for a whole day of high physical activity was essential, though.
What’s the word on other fruits and vegetables from Florida? Should they be avoided or not until a targeted boycott is started (or not at all because the pickers are already organized)?
I knew this was a reasonably common occurrence in other countries, and in states with a common border with Mexico, but I am would not have pegged it to occur in Florida for some reason.
Jake, deterring slavery has a lot to do with the criminal code that gets applied by slavers. A goal of deporting illegal immigrants isn’t what makes slavery happen.