Put That Tomato Down and Read This

Those pretty veggies in the produce department in February, months before local tomatoes are ripe? Yeah, you know they spent their adolescence in a truck barreling down the highway from California and Florida.

But did you know they were harvested by slaves? Today, in 2010, in the USA, though not a USA any of us would recognize.

Miguel Flores and Sebastian Gomez held 400 workers under the watch of armed guards and assaulted--even shot--those who tried to escape. Abel Cuello held more than 30 tomato workers in two trailers in the isolated swampland west of Immokalee. Once out of prison, Cuello was able to resume supplying labor to Ag-Mart Farms in Florida and North Carolina. Michael Lee recruited homeless US citizens to harvest oranges, creating debt through loans for rent, food, cigarettes, and cocaine.

Ramiro and Juan Ramos had a workforce of over 700 farmworkers and threatened with death those who tried to leave. They also pistol-whipped and assaulted at gunpoint van service drivers who gave rides to farmworkers leaving the area. Ronald Evans also recruited homeless citizens throughout the southeast with promises of good jobs and housing, then kept them in a labor camp surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. He also made sure they were perpetually indebted to him, deducting money from their pay for food, rent, crack cocaine, and alcohol.

When the visitor steps out of the truck he sees a panel which gets to the heart of CIW's analysis around modern slavery--that it's not something that takes place in a vacuum, but it's tied to the broader conditions in the agriculture industry--sub-poverty wages and substandard working conditions; from the earliest days of slavery through today, farmworkers in Florida are among the least paid and least protected workers in the nation.

On the panel are two artifacts to drive home that message: the bloody shirt of a 17-year old boy who was beaten in 1996 for stopping to take a drink of water while working in Immokalee. In response, there was a nighttime march by 400 workers to the crew leader's house. This was a significant moment in CIW's history because that kind of violence was routine and never received a widespread organized response.

There is also testimony blown up from a 1970 Senate hearing convened by Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale illustrating that these same issues were being discussed 40 years ago. Next to it is a video by Iowa public TV of a similar hearing held just two years ago by Senators Bernie Sanders, Edward Kennedy, and Richard Durbin.

At the foot of the panel is a 32-pound bucket of tomatoes. Harvesters fill it up 100 to 150 times per day, on average. For that bucket the worker receives 45 cents--a nickel more than the wage earned in 1980 (and that nickel is the result of general strikes organized by CIW in the mid- and late-90s.) The museumgoer can pick it up, getting a sense of how hard the work is for stagnant wages.

All of these exhibits allow CIW to make the arguments that they have been pushing for over 15 years very tangible. It's one thing to tell people about the conditions that persist in the fields. It's an entirely different thing to show it inside of a rolling replica of the most recently discovered slavery truck where people were held captive.

"The museum has made it possible to lay out our argument about slavery from A to Z, in a sort of irrefutable package of completely documented and totally unimpeachable facts," says CIW staff member Greg Asbed. "And when you can see the whole history and evolution of four hundred years of forced labor in Florida's fields assembled in one place, then all the false assumptions about what drives modern-day slavery just fall away. It's not workers' immigration status today, or a few rogue bosses, but the fact that farmworkers have always been Florida's poorest, most powerless workers. Poverty and powerlessness is the one constant that runs like a thread through all the history. In short, you see, it's not about who's on the job today. It's about the job itself."

SNIP

The final panel of the museum allows people opportunities for action. They can get on the CIW email list, take a postcard to send to Publix, or get information on the upcoming farmworker Freedom March on April 16-18--25 miles from Tampa to Publix Corporate Headquarters in Lakeland.

SNIP

This week in St. Augustine, two older African-American workers who used to work for Ron Evans (U.S. vs. Evans, 2007) visited the museum. They described their experience in servitude and vouched for the museum's accuracy in portraying the Evans' operations. One of the men had escaped by slipping away in the middle of the night after working for Evans for 11 years. They talked about the beatings they received if they tried to leave the labor camp and how Evans used to gather up the workers' shoes at the end of each workday so that even if they escaped, they wouldn't be able to get far running barefoot through the fields and forest.

The Modern-Day Slavery Museum stops us from running in a very different way. It forces us to confront the horrible truth that slavery still exists in America, and that too many consumers and leaders in the food industry simply turn a blind eye.

When the museum has finished traveling Florida, I hope legislators will take an interest in bringing it to the National Mall. It's time to make the fight against modern slavery part of our national consciousness.

I'd recommend a little local action. Just for shits and giggles, next time you're in Kroger, ask to see the produce manager. Ask her if she knows where the, say, tomatoes were harvested. Ask her if she has any evidence that they were not harvested by slave labor (like, for example, an agreement with farmworkers' unions like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers) and recommend she find out. Be polite, be helpful, be firm.