[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Ending Slavery and Sweatshops in Florida's Fields

Fri Apr 11 18:01:47 MDT 2008

Petitioning the King

by Elias Lawless

Dissident Voice (March 31 2008)

"Slavery, plain and simple". That´s how Chief Assistant US Attorney Doug
Malloy described the most recent instance of forced labor uncovered in
Florida agriculture.

An indictment released in January, for a case still under prosecution,
states that as recently as late November, crew leaders for a tomato
operation in Immokalee, Florida were holding a group of men against
their will - chaining them down, beating them, and locking them within a
U-haul truck. The accused face charges of indentured servitude and peonage.

The men were kept on a property five blocks from the office of the
Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a dynamic farmworker organization
that won the 2007 Anti-Slavery Award, given by London-based Anti-Slavery
International, the oldest human rights organization in the world.

The CIW has investigated, uncovered, and assisted federal officials in
the successful prosecution of six slavery cases over the last decade -
involving upwards of 1,000 people held against their will. And this case
may soon be the seventh.

The CIW is doubtlessly best known, however, for forcing McDonald's and
Yum Brands - the planet's largest fast food chain and restaurant
company, respectively - to confront human rights abuses in the fields
where they buy their tomatoes.

And so while 2008 marks the (curiously un-commemorated) bicentennial of
social movements triggering the US ban on the importation of enslaved
Africans, slavery clearly continues to thrive.

Why Does Slavery Still Flourish and
What's That Got To Do With My Whopper?

The impossibility of simply legislating an end to the practice of
enslavement is all the more evident when we consider modern corporate
power: we live in an era where the majority of the world's 100 largest
economies are corporations, not governments.

Corporate influence is unquestionably prominent in our lives. Large,
profit-seeking amalgams of capitalists exert unprecedented control over
our daily experience - from the quality of the water we drink and the
air we breathe, to our access to affordable and livable housing, and the
way in which our food is produced.

While the CIW focused attention primarily on tomato growers as a
solution to the violence and poverty they faced in the 1990s, their
targets today are the major multinational corporations that buy massive
volumes of tomatoes. After all, these corporations are profiting more
than anyone from the reprehensible conditions in Florida's fields,
including - in the most odious expression of the tomato industry´s
everyday exploitation - human enslavement.

An Oxfam Report dated March 2004, "Like Machines in the Fields: Workers
Without Rights in American Agriculture", documents that while growers
netted 41% of the retail price of tomatoes in 1990, by 2000 they were
barely receiving one quarter. By purchasing huge quantities of tomatoes,
fast food and grocery corporations wield tremendous power over small and
large growers alike.

Growers cannot prevent the rising costs of gas, tractors, fertilizers,
and so on; the one place they can control expenses is in how much they
pay tomato pickers. Accordingly, due to the squeeze imposed on growers
by multinational food corporations, tomato pickers' wages have remained
essentially stagnant for thirty years, despite inflation.

Precisely one year after the Oxfam report's release, and three years
after a CIW-led boycott, Taco Bell conceded to CIW demands for higher
wages and a supplier code of conduct. Never in the history of capitalism
had a multinational corporation agreed to pay extra money down its
supply chain to directly address the sub-poverty wages of workers at the
opposite end.

The Taco Bell precedent tolled for the entire fast food and restaurant
industry: a diverse movement of people of faith, workers, students, and
community groups urged McDonalds to the table last April, prompting even
further-reaching accords. Yum Brands (parent company of Pizza Hut, Long
John Silvers, KFC & Taco Bell) signed up all their companies shortly
thereafter.

Thrillingly perched at the threshold of a more modern, more humane
agricultural industry, the CIW looked to Florida-based neighbor Burger King.

But rather than partner with the CIW, whom FBI Director Robert Mueller
mailed a letter of appreciation for their crucial role in the
prosecution of multiple slavery cases, Burger King opted to instead join
with the leaders of the industry that has generated federal convictions
for forced labor, time and time again.

The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange - representing ninety percent of the
state's tomato growers - has temporarily halted the groundbreaking
penny-per-pound wage increase by threatening fines of $100,000 per
offense, for any grower that participates, according to an Associated
Press exposé.

The Radical Democracy of Petitioning The King

Until recently, corporate rule has enjoyed unilateral communication
about how they run things, with billions spent on advertising to shape
how we think of their products and agenda. While people have protested
governments for several centuries now, having learned to manifest
outrage in a way that impacts destructive state policies, we stand in
the incipient stages of discovering how to employ our collective voice
in requiring the same accountability of today's for-profit sovereigns.

The CIW recently launched a major petition drive to end modern-day
slavery and sweatshops in Florida´s fields. While petitions may appear
on the surface as a yawn-inducing riposte to injustice, the CIW's
campaign echoes a key strategy employed by abolitionist forebears in
England who used signature gathering to smash the slave trade there two
centuries back.

Just as Burger King - among other fast food and grocery corporations -
extracts extraordinary profit from the status quo of horrific labor
conditions in Florida agriculture, British Parliament in the 1700s
refused to end the slave trade due to the benefits they reaped from the
plantation system: tremendous wealth from exploited labor.

It was a petition campaign, exposing the overwhelmingly popular
rejection of the cruelty of slavery, that compelled British decision
makers to end it - an unauthorized people's referendum.

The British abolitionists, in their petition demanding an end to the
slave trade, obtained signatures from more people than were actually
eligible to vote for Parliament. Similarly, millions of people in the
United States - including those convicted of felonies, those under the
age of eighteen, and those who are not citizens - cannot lawfully vote
for political office, but they can and do purchase hamburgers.

While the state may not recognize the voices of these millions of people
in their elections, conversely, fast food chains cannot afford to ignore
them. Accordingly, the CIW´s petition campaign not only reflects a
radically democratic means of incorporating all those who wish to make
their voices count, it is also incredibly powerful because Burger King's
constituents are, in fact, their would-be consumers.

The CIW petition demands that Burger King and other industry leaders:

* Improve the wages and working conditions of the men and women who
harvest their tomatoes, and

* Support an industry-wide effort to end human rights violations and
modern-day slavery in all of Florida's fields.

Beyond a declaration of support for the demands, the petition serves as
an official registry of individuals pledging to boycott when CIW gives
the word, stating that those who sign are "prepared to stop patronizing
Burger King now, and other food industry leaders in the future, should
they fail to [heed the demands] ... "

In the words of CIW member Leonel Perez, "Slavery is not a problem
without a solution". Indeed, two centuries after initial steps to
abolish forced labor in US agriculture, it has become painfully obvious
that passing more laws to further criminalize slavery will not end its
practice - instead, we must develop an effective strategy to demolish
the possibility that Burger King and others can continue profiting from
the atrocious conditions that enable slavery to flourish.

Learn how to advance the CIW's petition drive in your community:
http://ciw-online.org/2008_Petitions/
_____

Elias Lawless is a member of the Austin, Texas affiliate of the
Student/Farmworker Alliance. This essay is written for the All Power to
the Imagination! Conference on Radical Theory and Practice in Sarasota,
Florida from April 4th to 6th 2008. Read other articles by Elias at
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/author/EliasLawless/, or visit Elias's
website: http://www.sfalliance.org/ .

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/03/ending-slavery-and-sweatshops-in-floridas-fields/

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