Another Appeal to Gov. Crist

There is a powerful opinion piece at The Naples Daily News by Jim Goodman, a W.K. Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow, who is an organic dairy farmer and farm activist encouraging local food production and fair prices for all farmers. His commentary, essentially a call to action for Governor Charlier Crist, touches on the work done by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers:

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) was formed in 1992 to organize the workers, help them defend their rights and rise above the daily abuse. Their community-organizing eventually led them to, as Sanders put it, the extreme, slavery — with evidence of more than 1,000 men and women held under conditions of modern-day slavery across the country since CIW was formed.

Initially the fight for worker rights was more a struggle for human rights — a struggle for the worker to be recognized as something other than merely a cog in the machinery of Florida agribusiness.

CIW started with a general work strike, then in 1997 a hunger strike asking for dialog with the growers. But, as one grower put it, “a tractor doesn’t tell the farmer how to run the farm.”

While the power of the growers seemed insurmountable there were other avenues to pursue. Starting at the top of the food industry seemed like a David versus Goliath task; yet the CIW saw promise, for indeed David had defeated Goliath. CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food targeted the corporate buyers of Florida tomatoes — Taco Bell (part of YUM Brands) and later McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway and Whole Foods.

Initially there was silence — no response from Taco Bell. A year later with still no response, a successful four-year national boycott was launched with the cooperation of organized labor, religious, student and non-profit groups. The demands: worker rights, zero tolerance for slavery and a penny more per pound of tomatoes passed directly to the workers. It was a groundbreaking victory.

While the ensuing campaigns were still met with resistance, the corporate targets reached agreement faster and with what appeared to be genuine support for worker justice. Yet the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange remains united in its rejection of worker justice.

The growers said (in 2007) they wanted to develop “more impactful, comprehensive” ways of improving the lives of the farm workers and their families. Still the workers wait. The growers claimed the penny per pound deals violated racketeering laws, laws I am sure they understand.

Clearly, the penny-a-pound campaign was a success with vast popular appeal nationwide. The agreements would nearly double the wages of the workers and cost the Florida tomato growers nothing, yet would allow the corporate buyers to develop a business model based on social consciousness and worker participation that could go a long way to ending slavery in South Florida.

The growers, by their refusal to participate in the program, deny the workers what would be their first wage increase in nearly 30 years. By denying the workers a fair wage, they also deny them fair working and living conditions, thereby endorsing the ongoing human rights abuses that allow slavery to exist.

One final question needs yet to be answered: What role will Crist play in all of this?

No Green Card? No Water!

The Naples Daily News is reporting that families in Immokalee have lost their sewer and water service because they could not show government-issued identification cards. A policy that Immokalee Water and Sewer District governors approved in October went into effect last week, costing some six families basic bathing and toilet access.

Jim Kean, a caseworker for Catholic Charities of Collier County’s Guadalupe Social Services sent an urgent e-mail to Collier Commissioner Jim Coletta on Thursday morning seeking help and calling the policy is “unjust, illogical, tilting toward racism and ethnic profiling, and a further marginalization of our farmworker families.”

A special district created by Florida legislators, the agency is independent of Collier County Commission. The governor appoints IWS board of directors. IWS Executive Director Eva Deyo acknowledged by e-mail on Thursday that the policy to terminate services to those who cannot produce a government issued ID was approved unanimously. Fred Thomas motioned to have IWS staff come up with a definition of what type of ID to require for services, authorized them to put locks on meters when needed without preceding the process by a final notice.

“Just send the cut-off list to the landowners,” states the Thomas motion, according to the printed minutes. Fellow directors Raymond Holland, Anne Goodnight, Everett Loukonen and Richard Rice unanimously seconded and approved Thomas’ motion.

When read the minutes by the Daily News, Coletta said, “Wow!” Thomas has often come before the commission to ask for charity toward the largely immigrant community, Coletta said. “And he’s chastising commissioners for not doing enough for poor people?” Coletta asked.

Coletta called Deyo on Thursday who told him the resolution was in reaction to federal identification laws.

“I suggested they call an emergency meeting,” Coletta said of IWS, but hadn’t received confirmation of that.

While he agrees the families should be given adequate notice, Coletta was not entirely critical of the new program.

While he agrees with Kean that it is unthinkable to deprive families of basic human rights such as water and sanitation, Coletta also said while that there’s a good deal of identity theft around the nation, and that is the likely reason for not accepting photo identification from potential IWS users if they are from other countries.

“They’re not trying to exclude a certain socio-economic group,” Coletta said.

However, he did question why under any program — Homeland Security or anti-identity theft — foreign photo identification is accepted throughout Collier if issued by, say, a European country, or Canada.

Gourmet Magazine Takes on Modern Slavery

Gourmet Magazine takes on slavery with an eye-opening piece about the working conditions faced by workers in the fields, which I discuss in the first chapter of my book Nobodies. This story deals extensively with the more recent Navarrete case:

Immokalee is the tomato capital of the United States. Between December and May, as much as 90 percent of the fresh domestic tomatoes we eat come from south Florida, and Immokalee is home to one of the area’s largest communities of farmworkers. According to Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney based in Fort Myers, Immokalee has another claim to fame: It is “ground zero for modern slavery.”

The beige stucco house at 209 South Seventh Street is remarkable only because it is in better repair than most Immokalee dwellings. For two and a half years, beginning in April 2005, Mariano Lucas Domingo, along with several other men, was held as a slave at that address. At first, the deal must have seemed reasonable. Lucas, a Guatemalan in his thirties, had slipped across the border to make money to send home for the care of an ailing parent. He expected to earn about $200 a week in the fields. Cesar Navarrete, then a 23-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, agreed to provide room and board at his family’s home on South Seventh Street and extend credit to cover the periods when there were no tomatoes to pick.

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. “Unlike victims of other crimes, slaves don’t report themselves,” said Molloy, who was one of the prosecutors on the Navarrete case. “They hide from us in plain sight.”

Tomatoes of Wrath

In Immokalee, Florida, immigrant workers turned towards Florida’s legislature to help in the fight against slavery by making use of props and miming to show scenes of a day in the life of a modern-day slave. That is, a scene from their lives.

“There are cases of modern day slavery happening in the fields and these cases of slavery have their roots in the conditions of exploitation that are the norm here in Florida,” said Meghan Cohorst, event coordinator with the Student Farm Worker Alliance. “You have conditions where workers haven’t gotten a wage increase in over 30 years, you have cases of violence in the fields, workers who are essentially treated not like human beings but like tools for the agriculture industry to use up and then throw away.”

Writing for the Tallahassee Democrat, Daphne Holden wrote:

We watched as the workers dramatized the latest modern-day slavery operation that was successfully prosecuted in Florida a few months ago. Two farmworkers cowered in a makeshift truck while another man pretended to roughly chain their hands together. When a cardboard sun arose, the man returned to unlock the workers’ chains and forced them into the “fields,” where they pretended to pick tomatoes. The farm boss gestured as if beating them when they slowed or stopped.

When their work day was over and the cardboard sun had set, the farm boss pushed the farmworkers back into the truck, and the drama repeated itself while speakers took turns at the nearby podium. The theater was moving and disturbing.

One of my 5-year-old twins commented, wide-eyed, “Mommy, they are getting chained up again and they can’t leave.” He knew it was a performance, yet like the rest of us he also knew that it was dramatizing a horrible reality — a reality that Gov. Crist, like his predecessors, has not even publicly acknowledged….

Gov. Crist should publicly acknowledge and condemn the existence of modern-day slavery, meet with the CIW and federal officials about solving the problem, pressure the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange to support the CIW’s agreements with more socially responsible corporations, and take action to abolish slavery in Florida.

Historic Presidential Race, But Slavery Persists in US

Erica Razook at Amnesty International has a genius piece about slavery following this historic election:

Surrounding the election of the first black President of the United States, much was made of the country overcoming its legacy of slavery, leading a reasonable person to conclude that slavery is actually history in the U.S.

But, from the agricultural fields of Florida flows a steady stream of reports of migrant workers being subjected to modern-day slavery – forced labor, beatings and withholding of pay included. (According to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), in the last 10 years, 7 federal trials on farm labor slavery were prosecuted in Florida, involving 1,000 workers.)

CIW, with the help of The Alliance for Fair Food, the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative and other allies in the human rights movement, has been battling not only the State of Florida to take a more pro-active role in labor rights protections, but also has been taking on some of the biggest fast food chains in the world, including Subway, McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Burger King, which buy the tomatoes and other products they harvest, for better wages and working conditions.

CIW signed agreements with some of the companies on wage and conditions issues, but a statement from a Florida Department of Agriculture spokesperson in December again set off alarms that the state was underplaying the significance of the ongoing abuses in the field.

The Coalition is now asking Florida Governor Charlie Crist to step up his involvement, and have a letter-writing action on their site.

Dear Gov. Crist, didn’t you get the election night memo? Slavery is out.

Join the CIW in asking the Governor to stand against slavery.

Will Crist Please Stand Up?

From a piece at The Nation:

[The Coalition of Immokalee Workers] has set its sights on Florida’s governor’s mansion, a place whose three straight occupants have spurned the CIW’s efforts to convince the state’s chief executive — who wields tremendous public and political influence over the state’s agricultural industry — to condemn these most egregious human rights violations. (Click here for details on the violations.)

The CIW is reaching out to Governor Charlie Crist to take the field in the fight against slavery. In the wake of the governor’s spokesman’s recent comments seeming to diminish the farm labor slavery problem, the CIW is calling on Gov. Crist to commit the full power of his office to combat modern-day slavery in Florida.

Add your voice to this anti-slavery call today by clicking here, where you can learn more about the petition campaign, send an email or fax to the governor, and forward the information to friends.

Waiting for Crist to Speak Up

The denial expressed by the Florida Department of Agriculture of the persistence and severity of slavery in the fields and the silence of Florida Governor Charlie Crist are disappointing.

The Navarrete case could not be a more a clear-cut example of modern slavery: the victims were literally locked up at night, abused and refused release. Usually, we see different forms of debt peonage and psychological coercion employed to keep workers under a bosses’ illicit control, but here, the mechanisms are laid almost laughably bare.

From a bulletin on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers website:

Since the late 1990’s, Florida’s fields have produced a steady stream of slavery prosecutions, and 2008 was no exception. But what made the slavery operation that came to light in the past year — resulting in the conviction of a family of farm bosses for holding workers against their will right here in Immokalee — stand out were the disturbing details of unmitigated brutality suffered by the workers, including being chained and locked inside U-Haul trucks at night, and beaten by their bosses during the day.

Even more disturbing, perhaps, was the dismissive reaction by a spokesperson for Florida’s Governor Crist when asked for comment on the case by a reporter from Ft. Myers. The spokesperson — Mr. Terence McElroy of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services — appeared to downplay the significance of forced labor in the state’s fields, not once, but twice. His statements provoked an immediate outcry by human rights, religious, labor, student, and community organizations and leaders across the country.

Among those troubled by Mr. McElroy’s statements — and the governor’s own silence and inaction — was the honorable Mary Robinson, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who wrote in a public statement:

“… Slavery persists when government leaders fail to take the necessary action to prevent it. Taking preventive action is a human rights obligation of local, state and national governments… I support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and others in urging Governor Crist to take immediate steps to combat modern-day slavery in Florida agriculture.”

As 2009 begins, Governor Crist has yet to speak on the subject of slavery in his state’s fields.

Join the CIW in asking the Governor to stand against slavery.

Denial and Silence in Florida

In an editorial on The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel writes about the fight being waged by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers against modern-day slavery:

Last Friday–just days after CIW’s visit–a Florida judge rendered his sentence on the state’s most recent slavery case. CIW had helped the Department of Justice investigate what Chief Assistant US Attorney Doug Molloy described as one of Southwest Florida’s “biggest, ugliest slavery cases ever.”

The Navarrete family had pleaded guilty to holding twelve men on their property from 2005 to 2007. They were beaten, chained and imprisoned in a truck, and forced to urinate and defecate in the corners. Two family members were sentenced to twelve years, and four were sentenced on lesser charges and will serve up to three years and ten months.

CIW worked with federal and local authorities during the prosecution and investigation as it has in seven Florida slavery cases over the past decade. Prior to escaping, the workers had listened to programming on labor rights on CIW’s multilingual radio station–Radio Conciencia–which encouraged them that they would be able to find help if they escaped. Some of the workers who then did escape made their way to CIW for assistance.

While it’s good to see some accountability for the practice of modern slavery, and the ongoing cooperation between CIW and prosecutors, the tolerance for slavery was all too evident in the wake of this trial. For one thing, Molloy told the Fort Myers News-Press, “We have a number of similar–and ongoing–investigations.” He also said, “It doesn’t help when people deny that [slavery] exists. That’s like throwing gasoline on the fire.”

But that’s exactly what seems to be happening when it comes to the state government. Republican Governor Charlie Crist has remained silent on the issue of slavery and this sentencing–including not returning calls from The Nation–and his press secretary suggested that a reporter contact Terence McElroy, spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services which oversees the states’ farms and labor contractors. McElroy seemed to dismiss the significance of the case and the existence of slavery, saying, “… You’re talking about maybe a case a year.” After a public outcry– including responses from former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, Amnesty International USA, Florida ACLU and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights–McElroy attempted to clarify his statement but only made matters worse, describing slavery as “quite a rarity when a case pops up.”

Read the entire piece here.

Tolerating a Little Slavery is Like Tolerating a Little Murder

Yesterday saw the sentencing of two members of the Navarrete family of Immokalee, involved in the seventh farm-labor operation to be prosecuted in federal court for slavery in Florida in the past 11 years and probably one of the clearest examples of slavery in the country.

But Florida Department of Agriculture spokesman Terence McElroy doesn’t seem to think there really is a problem. As he told The News-Press last week, “Of course, I say any instance is too many, and any legitimate grower certainly does not engage in that activity (slavery), but you’re talking about maybe a case a year.”

In an open letter to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, human-rights advocates—including the executive director of Amnesty International, the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. and members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers—wrote, “Tolerating a little modern-day slavery is like tolerating a little murder or accepting a little child abuse. … Mr. McElroy is quick to defend Florida growers who have, for too long, prospered through willful ignorance of conditions in their own fields.”

(Read the letter in PDF form!)

McElroy said the article did not accurately represent him and clarified via e-mail:

“Our department, all growers we know of and virtually everyone else in our industry abhors instances of forced labor — and advocate as tough a prosecution as possible for anyone violating the law,” McElroy wrote. “To a question (about) whether this was a common or accepted practice, I said that it certainly was not — and, in fact, is quite a rarity when a case pops up.”

Crist’s office didn’t respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comment, and Florida Department of Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson could not be reached.

Read the whole article here.

Join the CIW in asking the Governor to stand against slavery.

Slavery Lingers

The Fort Myers’s News-Press ran a piece about the persistence of slavery that highlights the work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

In recent years, The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has made headlines — as recently as last week — by convincing fast-food restaurants to increase pay for Florida tomato pickers.

Yet along with these efforts, the coalition pursues another part of its mission: ending slavery. This ancient scourge remains a modern problem, members say, pointing to the upcoming sentencing of four Navarrete family members who pleaded guilty in one of Southwest Florida’s “biggest, ugliest slavery cases ever,” according to Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy.

At the same time, the leader of the state’s largest tomato industry group denies knowledge of slavery in U.S. Senate hearings this spring and has reiterated those denials to The News-Press.

In his Senate testimony, Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, to which 90 percent of tomato growers belong, called charges growers have enslaved workers “false and defamatory.”

“Let me state unequivocally that Florida’s tomato growers abhor and condemn slavery,” Brown told the senators.

My response: “At this point, (the FTGE) is like a drunk out in the middle of the street screaming out to everyone that there is no problem. It’s just so obvious that there is a problem – you can’t say the same thing over and over again in the face of this reality.”

Under current law, growers can use crews provided by independent labor contractors, who must hold state licenses.

That allows growers to sidestep responsibility for abuses, said U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who sponsored the hearings. He intends to use his position on the Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee to change that.

“We need to end the loophole in current law that lets growers avoid responsibility for what happens in their fields – fields where workers are being enslaved,” Sanders said.

Besides my uncharacteristically succinct quotes, and a factual error (FL has over 100,000 farmworkers, not 10,000-30,000) I think this article does a great job of laying out the labor/slavery situation in FL. Read it all, here.