[Marxism] Slavery in the Union

[Greg McDonald]

Published on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 by The Nation

Slavery in the Union

by Katrina vanden Heuvel

“We must ensure that all life is treated with the dignity it  
deserves,” President Bush declared during his final State of the  
Union address. He then segued into a call to ban human cloning. He  
didn’t talk about dignity in terms of ravaged pensions, working  
longer hours for lower wages, and the loss of healthcare and other  
benefits. He didn’t talk about dignity in terms of the rise in  
poverty - 37 million Americans, one in eight citizens now living  
below the poverty line in the wealthiest nation in the world. And he  
certainly didn’t talk about dignity when it comes to migrant workers  
in Immokalee, Florida where - as Senator Bernie Sanders told me just  
days before Bush’s SOTU - “the norm is a disaster, and the extreme is  
slavery.”

These farmworkers pick the tomatoes many Americans eat at McDonald’s,  
Taco Bell, Burger King and other fast food chains. They are paid 45  
cents for a 32-pound bucket of tomatoes. It’s grueling work, as Fast  
Food Nation author Eric Schlosser noted recently in a New York Times  
op-ed

: “During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two  
tons of tomatoes.” For that two tons the worker can expect about $50,  
and annual wages of $10,000-$14,000. Wages have been stagnant for  
more than two decades. Two weeks ago, six people were indicted on  
slavery charges for beating workers, chaining and locking them inside  
U-haul trucks, and threatening physical harm if the workers left  
their jobs. This is far from a rare occurrence, as the Miami Herald  
wrote, “… farm crew slavery stories and the brutal exploitation of  
undocumented workers have long since lost their shock value in Florida.”

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) - a community-based worker  
organization - has “exposed a half-dozen slavery cases” that helped  
trigger the freeing of more than 1,000 workers, and also advocated  
for better wages, living conditions, respect from the industry, and  
an end to indentured servitude. CIW recently scored critical  
victories in negotiating a penny-per-pound surcharge - so workers  
would now receive about 77 cents per 32-pound bucket - with  
McDonald’s and Yum! Brands (owner of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC). The  
corporations - not the tomato growers - would pay the 40 percent  
salary increase. Astonishingly, Burger King has refused to go along  
with the deal (tell Burger King to pony up) - it would cost them less  
than $300,000 annually and the corporation took in $2.23 billion in  
revenues in 2007. Not to mention three private equity firms control  
most of Burger King’s stock, including Goldman Sachs. In 2006 Goldman  
Sachs’ top 12 execs took home bonuses exceeding $200 million - “more  
than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers  
in southern Florida earned that year,” according to Schlosser.) Even  
more outrageous is the response of the Florida Tomato Growers  
Exchange, representing 90 percent of the state’s growers. The group  
has said it will fine any member $100,000 for accepting the extra  
penny per pound for worker wages.

It’s no surprise that Bush has failed to use the bully pulpit to call  
out slavery and excessive greed in our nation. It’s also no surprise  
that Sen. Sanders is once again taking a leading role in serving as  
the conscience of the Senate. Two weeks before the State of the Union  
address, Sanders, along with Schlosser, went to Immokalee to meet  
with CIW and witness the working and living conditions firsthand. In  
letters co-signed by Senators Edward Kennedy, Richard Durbin, and  
Sherrod Brown, he urged both Burger King and the Florida Tomato  
Growers Exchange to support the penny-per-pound deal. He’s also  
working with Kennedy to hold hearings on this issue in the Senate  
Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee chaired by Kennedy. I  
spoke with the Senator about his experiences down in Immokalee, and  
why this is such an important issue for our country. If President  
Bush truly wants to use his final year in office to ensure that all  
life is treated with dignity, he should head on over to Sen. Sanders  
office and get involved.

Here, then, is what Senator Sanders shared with me:

“It was really stunning - the likes of which I have never seen in my  
life. I’ve long been interested in workers issues. But when we talk  
about the race to the bottom here in the United States I would say  
that Immokalee, Florida is the bottom. I think those are workers who  
are more ruthlessly exploited and treated with more contempt than any  
group of workers that I’ve ever seen and I suspect exist in the US.

What I observed is…

Full: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=277332