Ex-sugar cane cutters take pay fight to U.S. court

[Judi Lynn]

Ex-sugar cane cutters take pay fight to U.S. court
They say a major producer cheated them of more than $5-million in 1987-92. A state judge has rejected their class action.
By Associated Press
Published September 9, 2005

ORLANDO - A group of more than 1,000 former sugar cane cutters took a 16-year-old battle against one of the nation's largest sugar producers to federal court Thursday, suing Osceola Farms Co. to recover more than $5-million they say is owed them in back wages.

The class action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach came after a judge ruled this summer that the workers couldn't continue as a class in their lawsuit first filed in 1989 in state court. That required them to file separate claims.
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Osceola Farms is a subsidiary of Flo-Sun Inc., one of the nation's largest sugar producers, which is controlled by the politically influential Fanjul family.
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http://www.sptimes.com/2005/09/09/State/Ex_sugar_cane_cutters.shtml

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.....Not a lot of subtlety is required to understand what's driving Administration policy. It's large infusions of cash. In 2004 "Rangers," who bundled at least $200,000 each to the Bush/Cheney campaign, included Barclay Resler, vice president for government and public affairs at Coca-Cola; Robert Leebern Jr., president of federal affairs at Troutman Sanders PAG, lobbyist for Coca-Cola; Richard Hohlt of Hohlt & Co., lobbyist for Altria, which owns about 85 percent of Kraft foods; and José "Pepe" Fanjul, president, vice chairman and COO of Florida Crystals Corp., one of the nation's major sugar producers.
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050829/ruskin

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MEET THE FANJUL FAMILY

To understand the power of Florida sugar, it is illustrative to look at the very wealthy, very private members of the Fanjul family of Florida. With an enormous sugar empire that dwarfs even the U.S. Sugar Corporation, the Fanjul family's sugar holdings in Florida and the Dominican Republic total more than 400,000 acres, operated by a family of companies under the corporate umbrella of Flo-Sun, Inc.

Four brothers -- Alfonso "Alfie," José "Pepe," Alexander, and Andres -- are the principal owners and managers of Flo-Sun. The Fanjuls are Cuban-American descendants of the wealthy Gomez-Mena family of Cuba, which controlled much of the American-dominated sugar industry in Cuba until Fidel Castro seized power, and the New York-based Fanjul family. Matriarch Lillian de Fanjul and her four sons make their home in exclusive Palm Beach, Florida, an hour's drive and a world away from the gritty sugar plantations of western Palm Beach County.

Unlike U.S. Sugar Corporation, its Florida rival, whose offices are smack in the middle of Clewiston's sugar fields, Flo-Sun is headquartered in a posh complex in Palm Beach. The Fanjuls themselves live in multimillion-dollar mansions set among the palm-tree-lined streets of the town.
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http://www.opensecrets.org/pubs/cashingin_sugar/sugar08.html



Pepe and Alfonso Fanjul

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There was a tv program on CBS concerning the savage treatment of workers from the Caribbean at their Florida sugar cane plantations.If you do a search for these people you will find a lot of sobering information to ponder.

[ima_sinnic]

1. my heart goes out to the cane cutters, mostly(?) from Haiti

--Haiti is nothing more than a U.S. colony of cheap labor that the corporatists have created for their own benefit. The entire culture and economy of the island includes the notion that someone in the family, or more than one, will ultimately "go to Miami." Corporatists have set up a tragic parasitic system of forcing the people to have no recourse but to work for them (because of no jobs in Haiti) in different unobserved, unregulated, illegal venues but to be constantly persecuted and abused because of even being in the U.S.

[Bosso 63]

2. Jamaica, I beleive.

A great book called "Big Sugar" was written on the subject in the late 80's. These bastards not only bring new meaning to labor explotation, they are destroying the everglades.