Slave labor in America

[TrOtOaRkA]

In his gripping investigative book Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, John Bowe tells the story of workers who are literally or virtually enslaved to fatten the profits of dozens of American food and clothing chains, including Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Burger King, PepsiCo, Gap, Polo Ralph Lauren, and others. In this excerpt, he outlines the shocking facts about migrant farm workers.
The arduousness of farm labor has been well documented. The average migrant has a life expectancy of just forty-nine years. Twenty thousand farmworkers require medical treatment acute pesticide poisoning each year; at least that many more cases go unreported. Nationally, 50 percent of migrants-up from 12 percent in 1990-are without legal work papers. Their median annual income is somewhere around $7,500.

Florida farmworkers have it even worse. No one knows for sure how many there are. The most reliable guess is about three hundred thousand. An estimated 80 percent of them have no work papers, and at last count, in 1998, their average yearly pay was an estimated $6,574. Adjusted for inflation, these income levels have fallen by as much as 60 percent in the last twenty years.

According to the Florida Tomato Committee, during the 2005-2006 growing season, Florida farmers were paid $10.27 per twenty-five-pound box of tomatoes. The migrants who pick the tomatoes, however, are paid an average of 45 cents per bucket, a rate that has remained unchanged for thirty years.

To earn $50 in a day, a picker in Immokalee, South Florida, must harvest two tons of tomatoes, or 125 buckets. Each bucket weighs about thirty-two pounds. Once a worker has picked enough tomatoes to fill it-about fifty, depending on the size-he must then hoist the bucket onto his shoulder and walk/run across soft, spongy, lumpy soil to the dumpeador, an overseer who checks each bucket for ripeness. The worker then raises his bucket, dumps its contents into a central bin, and runs back to the tomato plant, anywhere from a few yards to a hundred yards away.

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, shakily propped on soggy soil against shifty boughs, 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. A full sack weighs about a hundred pounds; it takes ten sacks-about two thousand oranges-to fill a baño, 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 typical field under decent conditions 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.

Most Americans have by now heard about the dangers of illegal migration. For starters, there are the perils of crossing the border, which include running out of food and water and dying in the desert heat. Between 1995 and 2004, more than 3,000 Mexicans died while trying to enter the United States. According to the U.S. Border Patrol, the death rate is rising; in a recent twelve-month period, a record 460 migrants died crossing the border.

Moreover, gangs and police on the Mexican side of the border prey on migrants, knowing that they are seldom armed and frequently carrying cash. (The term used by coyotes, the notorious professionals who guide or smuggle migrants across the border, to describe their clients is pollos-chickens, vulnerable and ripe for plucking.) On the American side of the border, migrants lucky enough to survive the crossing face armed Border Patrol guards, canines, choppers, and, most recently, self-styled vigilante groups like the Arizona-based Minuteman Project, which, since April 2005, has chartered at least twenty chapters across the country.

Find out more about Nobodies by John Bowe.