The Coalition of Immokalee Workers: Fighting modern day slavery in the industrial food system

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4
General Assembly of the United Nations, December 10, 1948

By Eric Holt-Giménez

Recently, at the invitation of Just Harvest, I joined a delegation of food justice activists to visit the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Immokalee, Florida. The CIW wanted us to see its new office, meet with members, and tour the town and surrounding tomato fields to see the working conditions of the Immokalee workers first hand. (See the CIW website: http://www.ciw-online.org/food_justice_del.html) I arrived en route back to California from Dakar, Senegal where I had visited the notorious Ile de Goreé, the island where for over 300 years Africans were held as slaves had been held before walking through the infamous gates for “the trip from which no one returned.” (See the UNESCO website: http://webworld.unesco.org/goree/en/index.shtml)

It was a tragically fitting segue to Immokalee, the town called “ground zero” for modern day slavery.

Modern day slavery? The use of the term is at once shocking and confounding. After over 200 years as a reprehensible national institution, after a bloody civil war and the passage of the 13th amendment abolishing human bondage, has slavery returned to the U.S.? What could possibly be modern about it? Surely, there must be some mistake? Or perhaps it is an anomaly. As Florida Department of Agriculture spokesman Terence McElroy claimed, “You’re talking about maybe a case a year.” Actually, in this sunny land of oranges there have been seven cases involving over 1,000 workers over the last eleven years. The most recent involves the Navarrete family, convicted of beating, enslaving and stealing wages of twelve workers. The Navarrete’s are just one of dozens of labor contractors that serve up poorly-paid day workers to the wealthy tomato growers of Florida. These growers, organized in the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, supply over 90% of the U.S.’s winter tomatoes, and are the main suppliers for McDonalds, Subway, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut and other retailer and restaurant chains. The three main buyers of the state’s tomato crop are familiar agri-food giants Cargill, Tropicana (Pepsico) and Minute Maid (Coca Cola). The workers who pick their tomatoes receive the same price per 32-pound bucket paid in 1978: 45 cents. This means that in order to make minimum wage today they have to pick twice as many tomatoes in a day as they did then—around 2 ½ tons. Average annual wages in Immokalee are just $6,500, a thousand dollars under the national average for farmworkers.
http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009903050320; http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2009/mar/04/modern-day-slavery-was-focus-...

“Modern day” slavery practices holding Florida’s tomato industry in place are grim: long hours of backbreaking labor, debt-bondage, extortion, abysmal housing conditions, meager and rotting food, chained confinement, beatings, knifings, pistol-whippings and worse. These egregious violations of human rights are accompanied by usurious rental rates for the decrepit trailers and U-haul trucks where workers sleep eight to a room (or truck). Those workers without running water can be charged $5 for use of a garden hose with which to bathe.

These kinds of abuses were formerly associated with the institution of chattel slavery—in which human beings are legally bought and sold. While Florida’s tomato pickers are not technically chattel, they are subject to the modern day slavery practices that have survived the abolition of slavery as an institution and are now systematically employed in the backwaters of another modern day institution: the agri-foods industry.

Sadly, the majority of the tomato pickers in Immokalee are young, indigenous men from Mesoamerica whose history as a people includes five hundred years of oppression under another system of forced labor: peonage. Following the Conquest, peonage was a feudal institution ensuring a cheap labor force for the encomiendas and haciendas that produced agricultural products and raw materials for the Spanish Crown. Following independence, peonage continued to bond peasants in the service of the agrarian elites. In Guatemala, forced labor of indigenous peoples was not legally abolished until 1944. With the introduction of modern, transnational, industrial agriculture, the brutal and coercive practices associated with peonage continued to be widely employed whenever workers attempted to assert their rights.

In today’s global food system, modern day slavery practices are frequently overlain with the practices of modern day peonage. Poor farmers displaced from their lands and crowded out of the market by transnational agri-food monopolies, find employment in the U.S as indentured workers with labor contractors who smuggle them across the border. Under the control of these contractors they work cheap and pay dear for their food, housing and transportation. This frequently leads to bondage in which, like the old system of peonage, they are tied to their employers by un-payable debts from which they never escape. Should they protest or attempt to escape, labor contractors apply the coercive practices of slavery—to which the growers, the processors, the retailers, and in the case of Florida, the governor—all turn a blind eye and a deaf ear.

Since 2005, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, with Just Harvest and the Student’s Alliance for Fair Food, have carried out a successful campaign demanding a 1-cent a pound raise for tomato pickers (a 70% raise in daily wage), to be paid directly to pickers by McDonalds, Subway, Burger King, Taco Bell and Whole Foods. These companies have also agreed to buy tomatoes from growers adhering to a code of conduct in the field and zero tolerance of slavery. However, the Florida Tomato Grower’s Exchange recently moved to block these efforts by threatened their members with a $10,000 per worker fine if they collaborate with the retailers participating in the CIW’s agreements. The CIW is fighting this in the courts, and at the same time is mounting a nationwide campaign against modern day slavery.

The plight and the resistance of the CIW points to a gaping hole in the national food and sustainable agriculture movements: labor rights. Lucas Benitez, coordinator of the CIW asks how it is that a salmonella outbreak can mobilize the press and the USDA, how the humane treatment of farm animals is a national issue, and how people will pay more for fresh and organic food while the workers who harvest that food are subject to modern day slavery practices. He is quick to insist that everyone should have access to safe and healthy food and that animals should be treated humanely in agriculture. But don’t food workers also need to be treated fairly?

The issue of labor is central to the food system because it is at the core of our economic system. Industry needs cheap food in order to pay low wages (especially in the service sectors and the agricultural sector). In order to ensure cheap food, commodities are overproduced and agricultural workers are exploited. So, not only do the Immokalee tomato pickers need to make a living wage, workers in general need living wages in order to be able to pay the true cost of food. If we address the labor question in the food system, we must also address it in the economic system.

The cases of modern day slavery and peonage in Immokalee are just the tip of the iceberg of our modern day industrial agrifoods system (built with the wealth generated from the slavery and peonage of past plantation and hacienda systems). These despicable “tips” are surfacing with increasing frequency around the world; with cocoa producers exploiting child labor on the Ivory Coast, cane cutters in bondage on agrofuel plantations in Brazil, and the harsh working conditions and poverty wages in the slaughterhouses and meat packing plants of the U.S. These cases should and must be denounced wherever and whenever they occur. But without systemic change, it will only be a matter of time until the iceberg will roll, exposing yet another set of abuses. Ending labor abuses in the agri-foods industry means taking on the body of the iceberg, not just the tip—it means we need to reform our food system.

Upon my return from Immokalee I mentioned my trip to my sister-in-law, who is a rural sociologist from Guatemala. “Immokalee!” she cried, “The campesinos in the Highlands all fear that place!” Sadly, “ground zero” for modern slavery practices in the U.S. is well known—and dreaded—by indigenous people in Mesoamerica. Indeed, for some it is a “gate of no return.”