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March/April 2003
Challenging Modern-Day Slavery in the Fields by Ibrahim Abdil-Mu'id Ramey It's a humid, overcast December evening in South Florida, and the Southern Human Rights Organizing Committee has put together a large, hard-hitting "Tour of Shame" in The Other Miami that never shows up on the travel brochures and beach party television shows. Some 200 of us who are attending the Fourth Annual SHROC Conference are getting a close up, first-hand experience of misery in America's Southern tropical paradise. We've held a series of successful nonviolent protests. The first was at Liberty City, Miami's largest inner-city African-American community, where the federal government has created an urban "displacement" program called Hope Six. Next came a demonstration at a large Taco Bell restaurant, where we were joined by over a hundred Latino/Latina migrant farmworkers who are seeking a minimal wage increase for the tons and tons of tomatoes they pick for the largest restaurant conglomerate in the USA. Finally, we moved to the Immigration and Naturalization Service Detention Center (that is, jail), where a number of Haitian refugees were on the verge of spending their second Christmas locked up. It's a high energy, throw-down action. Dozens of people from the Miami community have joined those of us who've traveled from around the country to be in solidarity with the Mississippi worker activists who organize SHROC, and the Miami Workers Center coordinating the local scene. We're told that these demos represented the only time in recent memory when three different Third World communities - African-Americans, Latinos, and Haitians—have come together (with their Rainbow allies) across ethnic lines in racially-segmented Miami to challenge the specific oppression that each group is confronting today. Is this what a real, multicultural movement against race and class oppression looks like? As I take a break on the sidewalk outside the INS Center, I find myself sitting next to Jaime Sotomayor, his wife, Ines, and his eight-year-old son, Javier, who have come from the Coalition of Immokalee (Florida) Farm Workers to join hands with the SHROC organizers. And as I speak with Jaime and his family about their trip to Miami, their work, their lives and struggle, I become more deeply aware of the enormous well of racist oppression and profound economic injustice that lies at the bottom of everyday life in the USA. Jaime and Ines are typical of thousands of migrant farmworkers on the front lines of an enormous struggle for living wages, dignity, and economic justice. They are struggling against a large conglomerate of growers - "Agribusiness, Inc.' - responsible for the food on the tables of the 280 million people in the United States. But mostly, their struggle for a living wage is fought against Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc., the multi-billion dollar parent company of Taco Bell Restaurants and the largest restaurant corporation in the world. Taco Bell is the largest single end-user of the tomatoes that Jaime and Ines and thousands of workers, mostly from Mexico and Central America, pick each day for the restaurants and home tables in this country. And as farmworkers, they represent the last segment of the working class in the USA not covered by the minimum wage law. They don't earn bonuses for overtime work, or enjoy paid vacations. They don't have medical insurance to cover accidental injuries on the job (which happen with alarming frequency) or the effects of chemical pesticide poisoning. The cost of their housing and even transportation to and from the growing fields is deducted from the pay that they receive from the growers—all at rates that the growers determine and that workers have no say over at all. When non-unionized workers attempt to organize - or invite the United Farm Workers Union in to help them secure living wage contracts - they face harassment, intimidation, and threats of deportation from the growers. (Most of them are undocumented.) In some particularly egregious cases of violence and abuse, farmworkers have been held under armed guard, beaten and pistol-whipped, and even shot by labor camp bosses. One camp boss in Southwest Florida received a three-year federal prison sentence in 1997 for holding some thirty men and women in captivity in an isolated labor camp. And the children of these workers, many of whom are forced by poverty into the fields themselves, are often "migrated" to school after school, with none of the teacher support or textbooks or enrichment activities found in even the most destitute non-migrant schools in this country. Jaime points affectionately to his cherubic young son, about eight years old, who is twirling around and playing cheerfully in the twilight. The boy communicates in grunts and laughter, and Jaime explains, in Spanish, that "he doesn’t really speak well." I imagine that getting a speech therapist for the boy, or special attention for him in the classroom, is not in the realm of immediate possibility for the Sotomayor family. The cost of providing cheap tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuce for our dinner tables and restaurant outings involves a cruel calculus of labor. The workers at the bottom of the food chain earn a median income of $7,500 per year ( that is, nearly fifty percent beneath the official "poverty" wage in the United States). They are paid forty to fifty cents per thirty-two-pound bucket of tomatoes that they pick. This piece rate has remained unchanged for the last twenty years. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is demanding a union contract, decent working conditions, and a living wage for farmworkers. They have calculated that the retail cost of a taco or a chilupa at your neighborhood Taco Bell would increase by one half of a penny if their demands were met. So far, the CEO of Taco Bell has refused to meet with them. But the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, in solidarity with the UFW and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, is courageously—and nonviolently—fighting back. Earlier in 2002 the CIW organized a reality tour throughout cities in the South and West, bringing farm workers and their leaders to communities in a show of solidarity with the people whose labor feeds the nation. Individual congregations and campus groups have been signing on to the worker support campaign in the tens of thousands, and supporting the CIW campaign to “Boycott Taco Bell” and similar anti-union companies (like Mount Olive Pickle Company) until a fair contract, with living wages, is secured. The struggle to secure living wages and the right to unionize is becoming not only an economic justice issue, but a human rights issue as well. The SHROC organized a number of workshops that focused on basic human rights education and action as a cornerstone for securing justice for most exploited workers in America. Sarah White, an African-American union leader and former catfish farmworker who now chairs the board of the Mississippi Workers Center in Greenville, Mississippi, joined with Haitian and Latino workers in a unified call for ending the oppression of the working poor. I admit that, while I’m no fan of the Bell, the material conditions of farmworkers are not always on my mind when I make my weekly pilgrimage to the supermarket: I’m liable to think more about spots and blemishes on my tomatoes than the deeper wounds inflicted on the people who pick them. Yet I'd be proud to pay a few more cents for each bottle of ketchup I buy if it would mean a decent wage for the workers who bring it to my dinner table - and yours. Work for economic and racial justice demands consciousness of the web of mutuality that Dr. King talked about. We need especially to realize the connections between the exploitation of poor people of color and the cheap food and commodious standard of living we often take for granted. Much labor unrest in this nation is about making a better living for working-class people. For agricultural and food workers, more often than not, labor organizing and struggle are simply about the right to survive. As I think of the Sotomayor family and the moments I shared with the three of them on that cool, humid Miami evening, I’ll be thinking of their son - and the movement that all of us must build and support to make sure that economic slavery in the American growing fields will finally, like legal racial segregation, be relegated to the graveyard of history.
Ibrahim Ramey is a member of the program staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and an activist for racial and economic justice. For information on how you can support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, contact them, respectively, at www.ciw-online.org and www.floc.com.
©2003 Fellowship of Reconciliation |