by James Parks, Sep 4, 2008

More than 130 years after slavery was banned in the United States, five people in Immokalee, Fla., pled guilty on Tuesday, Sept. 2, to numerous charges of enslaving immigrant workers from Mexico and Guatemala, brutalizing them and forcing them to work in farm fields.

The guilty pleas prompted lawmakers, newspapers and farm worker advocates to call for immigration reform, new laws and better wages and working conditions to end this “shameful plague.”

A 17-count federal indictment, which was issued in January, charges that for more than two years, members of the Navarrete family, led by Cesar and Geovanni Navarrete, and several associates, held more than a dozen people as slaves on their property. They forced the immigrants to work in farm fields in Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina, while keeping them in ever-increasing debt.

They also made the workers sleep in box trucks and shacks, charged them for food and showers, didn’t pay them for picking produce and beat them if they tried to leave, the indictment charged. The documents list 13 instances in which workers were beaten.

The case began last January when several courageous immigrant workers escaped from the ventilation hatch of a locked box truck in Immokalee and made their way to the local sheriff’s office. Ironically, this was the same day that a delegation from the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE) and an industry-friendly “third- party” monitoring group named Intertek visited Immokalee to declare Florida’s fields free of slavery.

Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy told the Fort Myers News-Press the five defendants were charged with:

…slavery, plain and simple. Some of the folks have been there for years. It is the hope to send back money to their families, and they hang on to that hope. It’s just a situation that’s difficult to get out of.

 The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), which has been assisting the farm workers, said in a statement:

The facts that have been reported in this case are beyond outrageous—workers being beaten, tied to posts, and chained and locked into trucks to prevent them from leaving their boss. How many more workers have to be held against their will before the food industry steps up to the plate and demands that this never–ever–occur again in the produce that ends up on America’s tables?

Since 1997, federal civil rights officials have prosecuted five such slavery operations run by Florida growers, involving more than 1,000 workers.

Over the past three years, the CIW has won groundbreaking agreements with several major fast-food chains—Yum Brands, McDonald’s and Burger King—to pay a penny more per pound to workers harvesting tomatoes, which means the workers will get 72 cents to 77 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick, up from 40 cents to 45 cents.  But the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE) refuses to abide by the agreements. According to the CIW, changing the way business is done is the key to ending slavery in the fields.

Slavery is the extreme. The norm is a disaster. If we can improve the norm—guarantee fair wages and humane conditions for all Florida farm workers—then we can eliminate the extreme. And there are now several retail food industry leaders who have agreed to do their part to promote social responsibility in Florida agriculture. Yet the leaders of Florida’s tomato industry continue to stand in the way of progress. The FTGE needs to start working with Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Burger King, and the other major tomato buyers who want to put an end to exploitation in Florida’s fields.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who visited farm workers in the south Florida fields the day after the slavery arrests, said yesterday he intends to introduce legislation in the very near future to close a loophole in the current law that enables growers to avoid taking responsibility for what happens on their fields when workers are being enslaved.

In an editorial today, the News-Press called for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to legal residency and citizenship for certain workers, “to bring this shameful plague to an end.”

So long as agriculture relies on illegal labor, a culture of human exploitation and disrespect for the law will prevail, so we can eat slightly cheaper food and certain people can pocket extra profit.

Disrespect for human beings is in the DNA of the current system. Respect demands that we legalize the foreign labor we clearly need to harvest our crops. We need a mix of guest worker programs, liberalized legal immigration and a path to legal status and earned citizenship for illegal immigrants who are committed to life in this country.

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