We cannot continue to ignore farmworkers

Daphne Holden

My View

Tallahassee Democrat

March 11, 2009

Monday, I went with my family to the Capitol to see farmworkers in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers try to gain the attention of Gov. Charlie Crist.

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.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a farmworker group that has assisted in investigating or prosecuting five out of the seven of the most recent slavery prosecutions in Florida, freeing more than 1,000 victims. CIW has unsuccessfully tried to set up a meeting with Gov. Crist to talk about slavery and other human-rights abuses in the fields.

After the latest federally prosecuted farmworker slavery conviction, Gov. Crist deflected a reporter's questions to a spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture, who trivialized the problem by saying, "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."

This egregious statement should give us all pause as it implies that it's just business as usual for Florida farmworkers to be enslaved.

Farmworker slavery cases that get prosecuted are only the tip of the iceberg, given that victims are often unable or too scared to speak up. Slavery is but the worst violation in a system of human rights abuses in the fields of Florida, where farmworkers work from dawn to dusk on a piecework system at a rate relatively unchanged in 30 years (earning on average $7,500 to $10,000 per year) without health insurance, overtime pay, sick leave or pensions.

Nonetheless, the CIW has worked to improve the lot of farmworkers by working with students, human-rights organizations, religious communities and consumers to successfully pressure Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, Whole Foods and Subway to pay farmworkers one penny more per pound of tomatoes picked.

These large buyers of tomatoes also agreed to work with the CIW to develop a farmworker-led monitoring system to protect farmworkers from human-rights violations. The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, an industry group and powerful lobby, has effectively discouraged its members — large tomato growers — from passing on the penny or participating in a monitoring system, entrenching the conditions of modern-day slavery in Florida.

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daphne Holden is a sociologist living in Tallahassee. She has researched the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation's Human Rights in the U.S. project. Contact her at daphne.holden@comcast.net.