Self-Organizing Man

In case you missed the memo, involuntary servitude, a euphemism for slavery, is alive and well in ‘murka.

Factors combine to create, in South Florida, what a Justice Department official calls "ground zero for modern slavery." The area has seen six cases of involuntary servitude successfully prosecuted in the past six years. Describing local migrant-contractor power dynamics, Michael Baron, an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol who knows Florida well, told me, "Most of the time, these workers are housed miles from civilization, with no telephones or cars. They’re controllable. There’s no escape. If you do escape, what are you gonna do? Run seventeen miles to the nearest town, when you don’t even know where it is? And, if you have a brother or a cousin in the group, are you gonna leave them behind? You gonna escape with seventeen people? You’ll make tracks like a herd of elephants. Whoever’s got you, they’ll find you. And heaven help you when they do."

Employers agree to pay smuggler’s fee with the understanding that the workers will pay them back.
Easy, you say.  These workers pick tomatoes and watermelons and oranges.  Americans love orange and watercress salad!  What’s a barbecue without watermelon?!  What’s summer without a fresh mozzarella, basil and tomato salad?!  Given our consumption these guys should knock down that debt in record time.

[T]omato pickers are paid as little as forty cents per bucket. A filled bucket weighs thirty-two pounds. To earn fifty dollars in a day, an Immokalee [Florida] picker must harvest two tons of tomatoes, or a hundred and twentyfive buckets.

Orange- and grapefruit-picking pay slightly better, but the hours are longer. To get to the fruit, pickers must climb twelve-to-eighteen-foot-high ladders, propped on soggy soil, then reach deep into thorny branches, thrusting both hands among pesticide-coated leaves before twisting the fruit from its stem and rapidly stuffing it into a shoulder-slung moral, or pick sack. (Grove owners post guards in their fields to make sure that the workers do not harm the trees.) A full sack weighs about a hundred pounds; it takes ten sacks-about two thousand oranges-to fill a bano, a bin the size of a large wading pool. Each bin earns the worker a ficha, or token, redeemable for about seven dollars. An average worker in a decent field can fill six, seven, maybe eight bins a day. After a rain, though, or in an aging field with overgrown trees, the same picker might work an entire day and fill only three bins.

But employers are really very kind.  To meet certain needs of the workers, they’ve taken to smuggling women over the border and forcing them to become prostitutes.  Instead of repaying smuggler’s fees in buckets, they repay their debt through female labor, the sex act.

Federal officials said the brothels’ clients were usually agricultural workers, who were charged twenty dollars by the brothel operators, or ticketeros . The women were required to perform between fifteen and twenty-five sexual acts per day, and received three dollars for each one. The women were told that they would be free to go once they paid off their debts, but those debts never seemed to decrease. "At the end of the night, I turned in the condom wrappers," one woman testified in a Senate hearing. "Each wrapper represented a supposed deduction from my smuggling fee. We tried to keep our own records, but the bosses destroyed them. We were never sure what we owed."

Beatings and threats of reprisals against their families in Mexico were used to keep the women in line. Several who attempted to escape were hunted down and returned to the brothels, and were punished with rape and further confinement. Victims who became pregnant were forced to have abortions and to return to work within weeks; the cost of the abortion was added to their debt. Although six of Cadena’s accomplices pleaded guilty in the case, nine others managed to run away and slip back across the border. The victims were worried about the risks of testifying until Julia Gabriel, a witness in the Flores case who later became a coalition member, met with them and urged them to stand up for themselves.

And this is not an isolated incident.

According to Leon Rodriguez, a former prosecutor with the Justice Department ’s Civil Rights Division, the number of women in sexual-slavery rings around the country is not in the hundreds but in the thousands. "You can’t just look at these as isolated labor violations or sex crimes," he said. "What you get with agriculture is a pattern of exploitation that can be understood only as a system of human-rights abuses."

So it makes sense that liberals aren’t interested in ending sexual slavery in farm camps nor amending the 1938 Federal Minimum Wage Act that exempted – and continues to exempt – farm workers from federally mandated minimum wage requirements.

They don’t want to pay ten dollars for a tomato.  Would you?

And as you fire up the barbecue this summer remember that people are slaving away and dying to bring you the bounty of summer to your table.  Literally.