Slouching Towards Wall Street… Notes for the Week Ending Friday, 10 February 2012
Lo que puede el dinero… de verdad hace mentiras, de mentiras hace verdades.
- Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita (c. 1283 — c. 1350)
Poet Juan Ruiz wrote, “money turns truth into lies, and lies into truth.” Ruiz was a priest who took aim at corruption among the clergy at a time in the Middle Ages when everyone knew it was money, and not piety, that enabled a man to become a bishop. Fast forward to the contemporary United States where Senator Bob Dole once observed, “poor people don’t make campaign contributions.”
How far we have come since the Middle Ages, when Ruiz took church hypocrisy to task. Today science and the rule of law prevail. Our economy is guided by the wisdom of the market, and our private and social lives benefit from a capitalist phantasmagoria of devices that entertain us, educate us, keep us connected with — or distinctly separated from the rest of humanity. Moderns, we reject primitive notions of religion and worship instead at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Consumption. And now, like the first woman and man — whose sin was, by definition, Original — we face a moral quandary about an Apple.
Stories alleging slave labor in China have people calling one another excitedly on their iPhones, while paging nervously through the internet on their iPads and firing off letters to the editor on their MacBooks. Some have gone so far as to suggest a boycott of Apple — though social activists understand it is the workers who call for a boycott, which supportive consumers then impose. We are not aware of Chinese organizers asking Americans not to buy iStuff.
We suffer from a longstanding cultural blind spot: our society sees nothing below our own exceedingly high visual horizon. The chatter continues over inequality in our society — George Packer’s article in the most recent Foreign Affairs (November/December 2011, “The Broken Contract”) summarizes a roster of fundamental inequalities — all demonstrably accurate: “in the 1970s, corporate executives earned 40 times as much as their lowest-paid employees. (By 2007, the ratio was over 400 to 1.)” And “Between 1979 and 2006, middle-class Americans saw their annual incomes increase by 21 percent. The poorest American saw their incomes rise by only 11 percent. The top one percent saw their incomes increase by 256 percent.”
Yet, pace Occupy Wall Street, there is a further substratum below the 99% that the current dialogue does not touch. We bemoan the plight of 14 million permanently unemployed Americans, but below even this structurally disadvantaged group, our society runs on an invisible chassis of human suffering.
This week Trader Joe’s signed an agreement with a group of Florida tomato fieldworkers (Business Wire, 10 February, “Trader Joe’s and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers Sign Fair Food Agreement”) that includes labor standards for farmworkers, and adds one penny per pound to tomato pickers’ wages, paid by the purchasing companies. Trader Joe’s joins a roster that includes Whole Foods, McDonald’s, Burger King, Yum! Brands, and major food service companies such as Aramark and Sodexo, all of whom have signed a Fair Food Agreement covering their purchases of Florida tomatoes.
The Fair Food Agreement, though it arises from Leftist-style agitation and the involvement of NGOs such as Oxfam who are anathema to the Right, looks like a triumph of Capitalism at its idealized best. It includes, according to the press release, “labor standards developed in unique collaboration among farmworkers, tomato growers, and the food industry leaders who purchase Florida tomatoes, with a small price premium to help improve harvesters’ wages.” The premium is the penny per pound of tomatoes. The labor standards include guarantees against abusive treatment and enslavement in the work place. When end buyers such as Trader Joe’s sign the Agreement, it puts the growers on notice that they can no longer rely on, or turn a blind eye to abusive labor practices.
Anti-Slavery International says there are approximately 27 million slaves in the world today. According to the US Department of State, there are about 16,000 new cases of slavery within the United States each year, many the result of humans trafficked illegally from outside our borders, but also a significant number of US citizens. The DOJ estimates that 25% of slaves in the United States today are domestic workers. The approximately 16,000 new slavery cases a year is roughly equivalent to the number of murders in the US — but 80% of murder cases are cleared through the legal system, versus only 1% of slavery cases. The Florida tomato fields have long been ground zero for slavery in the American labor force — one Florida has said if you are eating a Florida winter tomato in the US, it is guaranteed that it was handled by slaves before it reached your grocer’s shelf.
Tasks that underpin the fundamentals of our society are performed by armies of disgrace. Bloomberg Markets Magazine featured a story about hidden slavery in “fair trade” (15 December, “Victoria’s Secret Revealed In Child Picking Burkina Faso Cotton”). The article reports on the persistence of debt peonage — formally defined as slavery by the US Department of Justice and the United Nations, among others — within the certified Fair Trade network. Even in our enlightened society, slavery has the legitimacy conferred by the invisibility of the afflicted, and the silence of the rest.
The case reported by Bloomberg is not uncommon. A Burkina Faso child named Clarissa was sold by her own parents to a cousin twenty years her senior, who forces her to work the cotton fields each day from before dawn until after dark. Clarissa’s cousin beats her when her pace slackens and feeds her just enough to keep her alive. Slave holders routinely destabilize their victims through a combination of food and sleep deprivation, and physical and emotional abuse. It is a delicate balance: a worker has to be kept hungry enough and exhausted enough not to be able to flee or fight back, but not so depleted that they can not put in a productive 14-hour day. The cotton produced by 13 year-old Clarissa goes to the local Fair Trade cooperative and is sold to a web of manufacturers before ultimately ending up on the body of a runway model — perhaps on your wife’s or girlfriend’s hips. The garments are Fair Trade certified, a powerful social awareness selling point. There is no allegation that Victoria’s Secret knew about this, and the company has ordered an investigation of their supply chain.
The world is a complex place, made moreso by our refusal to see what lies beneath our noses — our culture’s high horizon keeps us from noticing the people who pick our fruit and scrub our toilets and enables us to buy things like fruits, vegetables, blue jeans and iPads at a fraction of the price the rest of the world pays. Most of us have never been to China and can not begin to understand why Foxconn workers threw themselves to their deaths from the factory rooftops. The discourse is muddied by reports that Foxconn employees took their own lives at less than half China’s national average — some argue that life was therefore 100% better for Foxconn workers than their compatriots. Foxconn responded by giving workers a pay raise and installing nets around the buildings to discourage leapers. A disturbing outcome, at this remove.
This week we spent three days in dusty, dreary Immokalee, FL (sounds like “a broccoli”), home of the aforementioned CIW. Immokalee is not incorporated — it is not a “town,” but a Census-Designated Place (CDP) under the Naples-Marco Island metropolitan area. This means its law enforcement officials are appointed by voters in the wealthy coastal enclaves, whose natural interest lies not in improving the lives of undocumented immigrants, but in keeping them far away from their neighborhoods. Immokalee is the heart of Florida’s tomato-growing country and tens of thousands of migrant workers pass through during tomato season. No one can guess how many of these are slaves.
Until the 1980’s Florida tomatoes were picked mostly by Haitians. Hispanic immigration picked up in the 1980’s partly provoked by genocidal violence across Central America as the continent-wide war against leftists led to the near-extermination of indigenous communities. Guatemalan general Jose Efrain Rios Montt oversaw a civil war in which 200,000 people died. He has been charged with genocide by the UN for his campaign of extermination against the Mayan population. Montt and others like him were frequently armed and financed by the US as the front line in the war against Communism in the Americas, and indigenous populations were the primary target of both sides. Today the Immokalee workers are overwhelmingly Mexican and Guatemalan. The 2000 census counted just under 20,000 residents in Immokalee: 71% Hispanic, 18% African American and 3% white. It is estimated that as many as half of undocumented immigrants may not be counted in a census, even if they are permanent residents of a town. You can see how difficult it is to get a handle on these figures.
The majority of Immokalee’s Hispanic residents do not speak English — even those who have lived there for more than ten. Though categorized as “Hispanic,” many are native speakers of indigenous languages, with only rudimentary Spanish. Their day typically starts with a 5 AM worker selection at the central parking lot, followed by a bus ride to the tomato field where they sometimes wait for hours until the dew dries. (Tomatoes are finicky fruits and can not be gathered wet.) The picking runs until dark, followed by a bus ride back. Depending on the location of the fields, the bus ride may be as much as three hours each way. Workers do not get paid for travel time, nor for time spent waiting to the tomatoes to dry in the sun. If it rains, the picking is called off and they do not get paid at all.
Pickers are paid 50 cents per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes. Thus, it costs the grower about $33 in labor per ton of tomatoes. Put another way: in order to earn enough to feed their families, a worker needs to haul two tons of tomatoes every day. If that 50 cents seems a pittance, consider that farmers have to plant, tend, sort, pack and ship their crop, and are at the mercy of the weather. One grower said it costs between $9,500-$11,000 to produce an acre of tomatoes, yielding typically 1,400-1,600 boxes. Returns vary, depending largely on the weather. This grower sells tomatoes as low as $3 a box — taking a 70% loss on the acreage — and sometimes as high as $29, though the highest prices correspond with extreme weather conditions and greatly reduced yields.
Profitability is difficult to pin down. Figures from the University of North Carolina school of agriculture show net revenues for a range of North Carolina tomato growers ranging from $1055.20 per acre, to as low as $140.58. Any way you look at it, this is a narrow margin business. Many things have to go right — weather, competition, demand and quality of a given crop — for a tomato grower to cash in.
The Immokalee workers are not complaining about the work. Like Foxconn’s employees, their miserable existence is a considerable improvement over the alternative. The history of tomato farming in Florida is shot through with horrible abuses of workers — even those who are not technically enslaved have routinely been exposed to some of the world’s most toxic chemicals, which are a fundamental part of the Florida tomato industry. The short-term effects of these chemicals include a variety of ailments, up to and including cancer and birth defects. No one has documented the long-term effects, though communities of former crop workers are riddled with maladies, with life expectancy reportedly as low as 49 years.
Tomato crew bosses are independent contractors paid on their crews’ productivity. It is they who select and ferry the workers to and from the fields, and it is the crew bosses who most often abuse the workers. For decades it was not uncommon for crew bosses to beat workers who stop to take a drink or urinate, or merely who slow down from exhaustion, all in a frenzied effort to keep up the pace. And it was the bosses, not the workers, who kept track of the number of buckets. Thus there was no one to prevent physical abuse, wage theft, or rape of female workers. Meanwhile, to save time, poisonous cocktails were pumped on the same fields where workers picked. It was the rule, not the exception, for workers to be drenched in toxic chemicals as the rows where they worked were sprayed, and many report incidents such as painful rashes, headaches, or having their toenails fall off at the end of a day.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 provided for unionization and collective bargaining, workplace safety standards and the minimum wage. And it explicitly excluded agricultural workers and domestic help. FDR courted Southern Democrats to pass his New Deal legislation — they represented a large agricultural consistency and were mindful that the overwhelming majority of domestic and farm workers were black. Farmworkers do not receive benefits or overtime, and children as young as 12 can be put to work. Agricultural operations in the US are also covered by Federal Marketing Orders, which exempt growers from antirust provisions covering market domination and pricing. In short, even without abusive overseers the average tomato picker toils under miserable conditions. Add to that the all too common abuse in the fields, and the routine of tomato picking appears as one of the worst available human activities.
The CIW was formed in 1992. The following year they discovered workers being held against their will near Immokalee. They developed evidence which, working through local police, they presented to the DOJ. It took several years, and mounting evidence, but the DOJ finally intervened. Since then, the CIW has been directly responsible for uncovering and developing evidence leading to seven convictions for slavery and trafficking, resulting in the freeing of over one thousand enslaved field workers. The back roads of Florida’s farm country make it easy to set up a fenced-in slave compound, but in one notorious case two dozen men were beaten daily, kept undernourished and required to sleep in their own filth locked in a trailer that was parked in the heart of downtown Immokalee, a situation that persisted for nearly three years before one of the workers escaped and alerted the CIW.
Largely through the CIW’s success at bringing slavery to light, Congress passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act in 2000. The original version of the Act provided for incarceration of those who profit while “knowing or having reason to know” that they are benefitting from slave labor. This would have put farmers and end buyers on notice and would have had immediate impact on abusive behavior. Observers say the Act would have passed as written, but at the last hour Senator Orrin Hatch insisted that the language be cut. So Hispanic criminals who traffic people into the US, who hold them in miserable conditions, who beat and rape and otherwise abuse them can be thrown in prison, but the companies who contract with them can walk away and find a new supplier. This leaves a crime that no one is incentivized to report — slaves pick tomatoes cheaper than paid workers. The victims are often nearly as badly off once they are freed as while in captivity. They do not speak English, have no local network of friends or family, are physically and psychologically disabled, are not offered social services or medical care, and do not have a valid permit to remain in the US. Such a permit exists — a T-1 visa which allows the holder to remain in the country and work legally for four years, with the possibility of obtaining a Green Card. But the understaffed departments responsible for issuing the visas generally refuse to do so in the absence of government documentation, which generally does not exist and is not required under the visa law. The one percent of victims of slavery who are released often end up with a one-way return ticket to their home village and a lifetime of physical and emotional suffering.
The Slave Next Door, by Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter, presents a comprehensive analysis and history of slavery in contemporary America. One can argue with the authors’ policy prescriptions, but their analysis is thorough. One key observation is the very structure of our society — what we have called the “high horizon” — that makes it difficult to address slavery at all. There was a time when people referred to some couples as having “a stormy relationship.” It was not until the 1970’s that words for Spousal Abuse entered our vocabulary, that Battered Wife became a legal definition and women’s shelters sprang up. In order for the situation with slavery and human trafficking to change substantially, our society needs to be made aware of extent of the problem. It needs to be made visible.
The CIW do not blame the capitalist system, nor do they blame farmers. All economic and social systems are subject to horrible abuses. The Coalition wants to work within the system America offers them. Far from asking the growers to give them something for nothing, the workers want a safe work environment and the ability to engage in the system themselves. Secretary of State Clinton presented the CIW an award in 2010 for their work against slavery. But their efforts to integrate the Fair Food Program into the consumption chain are moving slowly. One by one, Florida’s growers have signed the Fair Food Agreement, but the program will only work when the end buyers are on board.
The CIW does not question the buyers’ morality, but insists on a uniform transparent and verifiable process. Compliance with the Agreement is overseen by an independent panel with representatives from the growers and the CIW, and headed by a former New York State Supreme Court judge. At least one major grower had their supply contract with a major company terminated for a finding of non-compliance, so the system appears to work where it is applied. We think this is a Best Outcome for all concerned.
The CIW appears to have a straightforward capitalist overview of the entire business that understands how each component contributes, from planting to the dinner table. Their objective is to harmonize the entire chain and ensure their workers’ place within it. And by the way, we returned from Florida convinced that most Americans, used to 9-to-5, minimum wage, lunch breaks and vacations, would never put themselves through what the average tomato picker does in the course of a day.
When the State of Georgia signed its draconian immigration law last year farmers could no longer hire migrant workers to pick their crops. All crops in the state died and rotted in the fields, causing losses estimated at upwards of $10 billion. Desperate for workers, the state offered prisoners perks and extra pay if they would pick crops. The first busloads of convicts headed out to the fields at the height of picking season, spent the morning picking crops, and all refused to return after lunch.
The CIW are an unusual group. For all they have suffered, they do not express anger or seek revenge. They see the big picture of the farming industry and know how well it can treat them — if only it stops abusing them. They want what everyone else comes to America for: a chance to earn their fair share in return for hard work, not to be given it for nothing.
Take a good look next time you eat a tomato. It represents struggle and suffering. Will it also come to represent the best our society has to offer?
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