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Edited on Sat Jun-04-05 09:46 AM by Judi Lynn
Fla. Tomato Pickers Still Reap 'Harvest of Shame'
Boycott Helps Raise Awareness of Plight
By Evelyn Nieves
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 28, 2005; Page A03
Click: http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I58831-2005Feb27L
Lucas Benitez, who helped launch the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, displays the bloodied shirt of a worker who was beaten in 1996, a shirt he saved. (Nuri Vallbona -- Miami Herald)
IMMOKALEE, Fla. -- The best part of the farm workers' day may be 4 a.m., still pitch black out, when they gather in a concrete building on the corner of Third and Main for hot coffee and bread.
Minutes later, hundreds of them, almost all men, head to a parking lot behind the building to wait for farm crew chiefs who will pick the workers who will pick the tomatoes for the day.
If they're lucky, the workers get to spend 12 hours on their hands and knees, filling buckets of tomatoes for 40 to 50 cents a bucket. To make at least $50, they scurry to fill 125 32-pound buckets -- two tons of tomatoes. But if it rains, as it did Friday, work stops. The workers are returned to the parking lot in rickety school buses 12 hours after they left, having earned just a few dollars, maybe none at all.
In short, things have not changed much in the 45 years since Edward R. Murrow's television documentary "Harvest of Shame" highlighted the plight of Immokalee's migrant workers. Today the Immokalee area, about 40 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico in southwest Florida, produces the largest supply of fresh tomatoes for the nation's supermarkets, as well as for some of the biggest fast-food chains in the world. But the farm workers are still dirt poor. They still work long days with no overtime, no benefits and no job security, seven days a week. They still live squished into hovels or packed 12 to a trailer, in trailers fit to be scrap.
(snip/...) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58505-2005Feb27.html~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pepe y Alfie FanjulSocial Justice Monitor - articles - April 2004 First US family of Corporate WelfareTime magazine called them the “first family of corporate welfare” and before that, when they were forced out of Cuba, Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries called them “parasites and leeches”. Both titles seem appropriate for the sugar kings of Florida, the Fanjul families. In the US they flagrantly dudded poor migrant workers out of millions of dollars through a “systematic process established by the companies to short the workers on their pay.” And for the slightest infraction or any attempt at organised protest they were summarily dismissed and sent home. Powerful sugar growing families of Florida, the Fanjuls, have become millionaires by, literally, living off the taxes paid by US citizens and by exploiting the workers who made them wealthy by providing cheap labour. They are the ugly face of capitalism and demonstrate the power of money over the White House. They are a throw back to the worst days of the Industrial Revolution. It is their clout that ensured that Australian sugar did not get a look in and never had a chance of being taken seriously despite what our government tells us. The Fanjuls claim they represent the American dream. In a rare interview in Vanity Fair magazine in 2000 Alfy Fanjul said, “We consider ourselves the classic American story. We came here and worked very, very hard.” This “classic American story” was built on worker exploitation. Before the introduction of machinery they brought in 10,000 migrant workers to harvest the cane. These workers desperate to make good were treated poorly, housed in cramped barracks, made to work long hours and were poorly paid, and then even cheated out of their wages. (snip/...) http://www.acej.org.au/archives/2004-04-02.HTMMore on the Fanjuls: April 1999. From the 11th floor of the West Palm Beach courthouse, you can see the Breakers hotel on the island town of Palm Beach, the red tiles on the roof of the museum that used to be the robber baron Henry Flagler’s mansion, the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, and the marina full of bobbing yachts, among them the 95-foot Crili, which belongs to Alfonso "Alfy" Fanjul, the head of Florida Crystals, whose subsidiaries, Atlantic, Osceola, and Okeelanta, are corporate defendants in Bygrave. For Tuddenham, the psychic difference between the Texas border and West Palm Beach is nonexistent. He believes that both are nether places of political-influence peddling, where Anglo and immigrant cultures collide. From Palm Beach, he can drive 90 minutes and be in the Third World, in the sugarcane-growing town of Belle Glade, with its squalor and its historical lack of regard for the rights Americans take for granted. The Palm Beach sheriff’s deputies once used police dogs to break up protesting workers on a Fanjul property.
Bernard Bygrave, a class representative of Tuddenham’s case, is one of thousands of Caribbean islanders, mostly Jamaicans, who once worked at Okeelanta for Alfy Fanjul and his brother Jose, known as Pepe. As a result of more than a dozen cases filed by Tuddenham and his colleagues, the cane cutters are no longer Fanjul employees, but they are charging in connected class-action suits that the Fanjuls’ companies engaged in cheating them of their rightful wages in a contract which they argue is "a monumental bait and switch." In May 1992, at the headiest moment in the litigation hell the case has turned into, a Florida judge awarded the workers $51 million in a summary judgment. That moment was fleeting, however, for three years later the decision was reversed on appeal and subsequently broken down into five separate jury trials. Now there are 90 crates of documents in the West Palm Beach courthouse. If nothing else, they provide an encyclopedia of a 50-year American labor scandal. Tuddenham calls the system "modern-day slavery." The Fanjuls’ lawyers see the case as "a major loss of income to thousands of decent hardworking men."
Like Henry Flagler, who brought the railroad to Florida and built the town of West Palm Beach for his laborers, the Fanjuls, after fleeing Castro’s Cuba, bought out scores of cattle and vegetable and sugar farmers in the Everglades and created nearly 180,000 acres of sugarcane fields, harvested by Jamaicans they imported under the government’s H-2 program. Cane was harvested by foreign workers because it was such brutal and dangerous work that no Americans would take it. Hour after hour the men chopped cane with machetes and stacked it in the fields. They wore metal arm and shin guards, and had to stoop over agonizingly to chop through stalks as thick as bamboo. Many were allowed only a 15-minute lunch break, to wolf rice down while standing up. Win or lose, the Bygrave cases have a powerful subtext: they are a morality play about the employment of foreign workers with marginal legal rights.
(snip/...) http://www.mariebrenner.com/articles/bigsugar/fan1.html |
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