Exposing the human cost of producing cheap food

[flashl]

Slave Labour That Shames America

Migrant workers chained beaten and forced into debt, exposing the human cost of producing cheap food

Three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom.

When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen.

The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them $5.

Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America today.

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[Mnemosyne]

1. KnR for more visibility. n/t

[knitter4democracy]

2. I've heard stories of migrant worker abuse here in Michigan.

The farmers are supposed to provide good areas to live and good food and enough breaks, but I've heard of farmers who basically treated them like slaves. One guy in my hometown was caught, it was a huge scandal, and he ended up losing his farm. He deserved jail time but they just fined him into bankruptcy instead.

[flashl]

4. There hundreds of these stories, they are labeled differently.

[conspirator]

3. That's why RICH people like the illegal immigrants so much. They can beat them without fear of

the law or reprisals. Plus when these workers are integrated into society they and their kids will accept low wages, and the middle class will be forced to accept it too. And then there will be no middle class, just feudal lords and slaves.

[TahitiNut]

5. Our 'laws' are gamed and perverted to enable Trafficking In Human Labor

The same corporate forces who have, over decades, perverted our Immigration Laws to treat human beings as a commodity - valued almost solely for labor exploitation - have acted in Latin America over the past century to perpetuate and exacerbate the Plantation Economics of a Banana Republic with Gini Ratios (measures of income inequity) in excess of 0.50. Over the last 30 years, the same forces have imported both cheap labor and Plantation Economics into the U.S - converting us to yet another Banana Republic with Gini Ratios in excess of 0.40 and rising. MAKE NO MISTAKE, this is absolutely a class war between the 'ownership class' and the 'working class' - and the 'ownership class' is winning!

[flashl]

6. 'Plantation Economy' is a keeper.

[TahitiNut]

7. Thanks. I think it has the virtue of being both evocative and accurate.

So incredibly MUCH of our 'structural view' of the economic system in which we're embedded is infused with assumptions regarding "that's the way it is" (especially for younger folks still learning) that we don't often raise such elements to the point of consciousness that we can even challenge the impact or necessity.

I see this in all its glory when I watch Susan Lasorda (on the floor of the NYSE) ... and there's so incredibly MUCH that's just accepted and embraced in her rhetoric that it stuns me. It's really staggering - I can't even begin to enumerate the symptoms of the con game. After spending decades myself in the "belly of the (corporate) beast" it amazes me how much of a "gingerbread cottage" the whole myth has gotten.


I know ... obscure allusions. :shrug: I'm just not equipped to make it any clearer in writing.

[flashl]

8. The same crosses my mind each day. You have done well creating clarity.

[porphyrian]

9. That subject line is misleading.

It isn't necessary or preferable for this type of behavior in order to produce cheap food.