[Corp. Watch] Demanding human rights on the corporate plantation

[Corporation Watch]

Apartheid in America

  by Raj Patel

(Stuffed and Starved blog, March 7) -- I'm back from a trip to visit  
the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida, as part of a  
delegation of food justice activists. Although I'd never been there  
before, our guided tour around the town of Immokalee felt familiar.

	Immokalee means "my home" in Seminole, and it was peoples' homes that  
I'd seen before, in another country. The trailers where tomato-pickers  
sleep reminded me of South African townships, filled with densely  
packed, low-income houses, built by the government to keep the supply  
of black labor close -- but not too close -- to the cities where their  
work was required.

	Except that the conditions in Apartheid era township houses were  
better than in Immokalee.

	In Immokalee, the housing stock is largely owned by one family, the  
Blockers, who rule over an archipelago of run-down and unsanitary  
trailers in which eight people sleep, each queuing up to use the  
bathroom every morning and the stove every night, in wretched poverty.  
For this, they pay around $40 a week.

	If they want an air conditioner, they pay $20 a week more. In one  
case, if they wanted a shower to wash a day's worth of pesticides off,  
workers were charged $5 to hose down outside. Some workers find it  
cheaper and more effective to wash their hands in bleach.

	But it's not only in the inhumane living conditions that similarities  
to Apartheid are to be found.

	Immokalee is in Collier County, in which the largest city is Naples.  
That's where Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and Donald Trump, among  
others, have second (or third) homes. Average family income there is  
over $100,000. The walls are high, the golf courses lush and well  
patrolled, and the police assiduous in escorting the indigent out of  
sight.

	On the other side of the county is the source of some the largest  
profits in the state. Florida produces 90% of the U.S. winter tomato  
supply. Judging from the cars that the crew contractors drive and the  
houses they live in, it's a lucrative business.

	Their bosses in companies like Pacific Tomato, Six Ls, and Di Mare  
certainly earn considerably more -- how much more is hard to tell,  
because the tomato corporations aren't publicly listed.

	What we do know is that the work for the tomato pickers is irregular,  
dependent on the weather, and merciless. A talented picker, one  
fortunate enough to be in a field that hasn't yet been picked --  
they're picked up to four times, and on the fourth sweep, there's  
pitifully little left on the vine -- can fill 150 buckets a day.

	That adds up to about 2.4 tons of tomatoes, which will be sold in  
stores for approximately $5,000.

	If they're lucky, they'll get a wage of 40 cents per 32-pound bucket  
of green tomatoes -- or about $60 for 12 hours of work. The wage that  
hasn't changed since 1978. Back then, you'd need to fill eight buckets  
of tomatoes an hour to equal the state's minimum wage. Now you'd need  
to fill 17 buckets.

	Workers have a tough time of it beyond the living conditions and  
abysmal wages. Some of them are literally modern-day slaves. Over  
1,000 people have been freed from slavery by Florida law enforcement  
officers since 1997, with their captors prosecuted under the same laws  
that were written in the wake of Abolition.

	In the most recent case, 12 slaves escaped from the back of a locked- 
up truck where they'd been held captive. "Of course, I say any  
instance is too many, and any legitimate grower certainly does not  
engage in that activity," the governor's press officer said, "but  
you're talking about maybe a case a year."

	There's yet another similarity to apartheid. Whites in South Africa  
practiced a special sort of self-deception, a belief that there were  
two worlds, hermetically sealed from one another for the benefit of  
both sides. To this end, high walls also served a psychological  
purpose, providing layers of deniability and ignorance fostered by  
distance.

	Yet, when it suited those in power, the two worlds could be  
conjoined, parasitically. In South Africa, that bridge was the use of  
black workers to provide industrial, agricultural, and domestic labor  
and thereby generate wealth. A similar story might be told in Florida.

	Most of the time, not a thought is paid by the tomato growers to the  
treatment of their workers, kept hidden from sight and mind like step- 
children in the basement. But from time to time, we all live together  
in one big sharing happy family.

	Over Christmas, while Congress was in recess, the Florida Tomato  
Growers Exchange, comprising companies that routinely buy produce from  
slave labor (one writer suggests that any given U.S. winter tomato is  
produced with slave labor), approached the government for a $100  
million bail-out. This, apparently, was in the public interest.

	Only through the actions of Sen. Bernie Sanders (Independent -  
Vermont) that the bail-out was blocked because, as Sanders' press  
secretary said, "the senator had a problem with a government bail-out  
for folks who wink at slavery and can't figure out a way to let other  
people pay their pickers a penny a pound more for their back-breaking  
labor."

	How did Sanders come to take such an aggressive position? It's  
because the CIW campaigned hard in order to get their plight noticed.  
 From its inception in 1993, the CIW has grown into a powerful voice  
for workers, with major victories that include a deal with Taco Bell  
and McDonald's, which buy millions of tomatoes from the growers.

	In 2003, the CIW won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights award. I've  
recently been involved in work on human rights and have reservations  
about them as a vehicle for social change, so I asked CIW member Lucas  
Benitez why they tout human rights in the U.S., where rights are  
limited to claims about civil rights, like the right to free speech:


> "Rights are not new to us [Benitez said]. We didn't get off the boat  

> and find ourselves in the land of rights. We come from countries  

> like Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala, where we have been using this  

> language of rights many years in our own struggles. And here in  

> America, we are not asking for anything that isn't already a right."

>

> "When there are cases of modern-day slavery here, the people who are  

> rounded up aren't just [illegal immigrants]. A 2001 slavery case  

> involved African Americans who were recruited from homeless shelters  

> and rehab centers to work in the tomato fields, and then sold  

> cocaine and crack from a 'company store' that kept them always in  

> debt. They were U.S. citizens."

>

> "What we're asking for is the right to a fair wage, for just pay for  

> work done, for the right not to be robbed, for the right to  

> organize, which has always been denied to farmworkers. Aren't these  

> civil rights? Sadly, the U.S. public thinks rights are respected  

> here, which is why they don't know how to ask for them."


	It's all well and good to demand rights, I said, but how did they  
expect to get them when the government was so tilted against them?  
Straight away, Lucas shot back with a quotation from abolitionist and  
former slave Frederick Douglass.

	" 'Power concedes nothing without demand'," Benitez said. "We have  
been excluded from organizing, but these are our rights, so we have to  
fight. We're not asking for a CEOs pay -- we're just asking for our  
dignity."

	Then I asked about conflict, and whether this was the best way to get  
something done -- surely rights are a cooperative approach to fixing a  
problem, and since the CIW is a non-violent organization, conflict  
isn't appropriate.

	"Conflict is everywhere,' he said. "In a marriage, there's always  
conflict. Conflict isn't bad -- it's natural. We're taking on those  
people with power. But you've got to look for routes to the rights you  
want. That's what we're doing today. We use direct action, dialogue,  
and imagination in our conflict with corporations, to get our rights."

	They don't use violence, just conflict. Give me an example, I asked,  
of a tactic you're finding successful. Benitez thought about it for a  
moment, and said:


> "We're working on codes of conduct for the food industry. What we  

> did was take a bunch of different codes, and adapted them to  

> Immokalee. We discussed the codes, talked about monitoring agencies  

> and standards."

>

> "From documents that had nothing to do with Immokalee, we made our  

> own. And that's important. We're not children, we are people, we are  

> workers. We know how to think, and how to see about our own  

> development. We don't need some professor to do it for us."

>

> "We started off with someone raising their hand in a meeting saying  

> 'Why don't we do a boycott?' So we discussed who to boycott, and  

> someone else said because no-one knew who Pacific or Six L's were,  

> we should take on Taco Bell. So for four years, we campaigned around  

> that."

>

> "It was a bit crazy for 10 people to take on such a big campaign. I  

> remember being at a Labor Notes meeting talking about the boycott,  

> and a Teamster came up to me and told me 'You're nuts'."

>

> But when we got our first agreement, with Taco Bell, we felt like  

> the first man on the moon. We didn't think it would have been  

> possible just four years before. And for us, it was one small step  

> for a man, but one giant leap for mankind. We opened the door so  

> that others could follow."


	The tomato industry has its own voluntary code -- Socially  
Responsible Farm Employers (SAFE). Many of the firms that bought their  
tomatoes from slave-labor gangs were, and continue to be, certified as  
SAFE. The code urges compliance with all existing laws.

	Among those laws are ones that deny farm workers the right to  
organize, and the right to overtime pay. According to Benitez, the  
SAFE code was written far from the eyes of farmworkers "by people who  
never worked in a field, by coyotes in suits. We've said clearly that,  
in order for a code to be legitimate, we have to participate in it."

	The tomato growers in Immokalee know the tradition they're in. "I  
once heard a grower say that it began with African slaves, then they  
were free but were turned into sharecroppers, and now we've got  
Mexicans", Benitez said.

	"We're just as disposable as slaves in the past. But that's why one  
of our slogans is this: 'Yo No Soy Tractor' -- 'I'm not a tractor'.  
And in the struggle against these companies, our biggest weapon was  
our reality."

	They've got their eyes on the bigger picture too.

	"If we had the resources, we wouldn't fight only about tomatoes" he  
continued. "But it's the largest crop here, and we're stretched thin,  
so that's what we focus on. We're creating a precedent, but we hope  
that workers in other industries can benefit -- Smithfield  
[meatpacking] workers for instance, or people who pick lettuce."

	It was an inspirational trip, and it's clearly in everyone's interest  
that the kind of apartheid that characterizes American agriculture  
(more than other industries) come to an end. The tides of history  
turned against Apartheid. They will turn against the injustice in the  
fields. The question isn't whether it will happen, but what comes next.

	In South Africa, the post-Apartheid government has presided over a  
decline in welfare, an increase in crime and violence against women,  
and a resurgence of xenophobic politics. The CIW is offering a very  
different avenue out of the politics of the plantation. It's something  
we can all learn from.