21st Century U.S. Slavery: Immigrant Farm Workers

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/01/31/21st-century-us-slavery-immigrant-farm-workers/

by James Parks, Jan 31, 2008

Although slavery was officially banned in the United States more than 130 years ago, some immigrant workers who pick the crops that end up on our dinner tables still are enslaved.

Earlier this month, federal officials in south Florida arrested Antonia Zuniga Vargas on a 17-count indictment, charging her with conspiring to make money off workers from Mexico and Guatemala, forging documents and committing identity theft. Vargas, along with five other co-defendants, is connected to a business operation in Immokalee, Fla., allegedly created to hold workers in involuntary servitude and peonage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74-Clx-u1vk&eurl=http://www.ciw-online.org/news.html

Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy told the Fort Myers News-Press Vargas and the others are 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.

According to the federal indictment, the co-defendants, for more than two years, held more than a dozen people as slaves on their property. They made them 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 documents list 13 instances when the workers were beaten.

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

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who visited farm workers in the south Florida fields the day after the slavery arrests, says:

The idea that in the year 2008, in the United States of America, people are being indicted for slavery is almost beyond comprehension. Yet this indictment sheds a light on the kind of conditions tomato workers in Florida are forced to live in. (See video above.)

Farm workers who pick tomatoes for the fast-food industry are among this country’s most exploited workers. Those who work in the tomato fields throughout Florida earn subpoverty wages and have no health care coverage or freedom to form unions. Growers have paid the farm workers in that state roughly the same wages for the past 30 years.

FULL story at link.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. You really need to see the job that the Palm Beach Post did on this

several years ago....

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/moderndayslavery/content/moderndayslavery/reports/realcost1209.html

Part 1:
Used and Abused
Part 1 How migrants live in Florida: With fake names, fake Social Security cards and few rights, migrant farm workers stay invisible in plain sight.