Have you heard of Immokalee, FL, and the 'harvest of shame'?

[babylonsister]

I hadn't until today. THIS is horrifying.


'The Harvest of Shame'
Sen. Bernie Sanders
Posted April 15, 2008 | 11:01 AM (EST)


Last January, I visited Immokalee, Florida, to get a first-hand view of what was going on in the farm fields of Florida. On one of the days when I was there, a federal grand jury handed up an indictment alleging that workers were held in conditions that amounted to slavery. On Tuesday, a Senate panel convened a hearing into what long ago was called the "harvest of shame."

Let me very briefly tell you what I observed and what I learned from talking with a number of workers who pick tomatoes. At 5:30 am I was in a parking lot in central Immokalee and saw hundreds of workers mulling around for buses to take them to tomato fields. While most of the workers were selected to board buses and go to work, not all were. Those who were not picked earned no income at all during that day. Also, if it rains, as it did when I was there, workers are sent away from the fields and do not earn income for those hours.

In talking with workers who go out into the fields I learned that they make approximately 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. This wage has not increased since 1998; and in fact, farm worker wages have dropped 65 percent in the last 30 years, after adjusting for inflation. I also learned that while it is possible under optimum conditions to make as much as $10-$12 an hour, the average hourly wage is far lower than that. In fact, most workers in the tomato fields earn about $250 a week in income. Why are wages so low?

I also learned that there is no overtime when workers work more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week. There are no benefits. Health care is a serious problem especially for people who do hard, physical work as they do in the tomato fields, yet employers offer no health insurance. The housing that I saw was deplorable and extremely expensive. It was not uncommon for eight or 10 workers to be paying $500 a month to live in a trailer which, in the city where I was mayor, would never have passed a safety inspection.

"Is it really going to take an act of Congress to get Florida's tomato pickers a raise?" an editorial in the St. Petersburg Times asked. "The men and women who work the fields in Immokalee earn 45 cents on average for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes harvested. It is a meager wage that has not been raised in more than 20 years. Yet when a couple of fast food giants generously agreed to pay workers an added penny per pound, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange sabotaged the deal and has refused to negotiate even after congressional leaders offered to be intermediaries."

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/the-harvest-of-shame_b_96759.html

[DAGDA56]

1. The farm worker situation all over Florida is horrible...

...most are illegal, so they feel they have no recourse. It isn't like they're going to complain to government wage and hour people. One of the worse things we hear of in Central Florida has to do with worker's pay. They are given checks, which they cash at local grocery stores. It is common for workers to be followed from those groceries by local thugs who rob them before they get home. The workers are an easy mark, if traveling alone, and are not likely to go to the cops.

[bluevoter4life]

2. Over here at USF

We have had protests at the on-campus Burger King twice in the last month to support the Immokalee farmworkers and their quest for a pay raise. It was covered by one of the local news stations just this past Monday actually.

[csziggy]

3. The original "Harvest of Shame" was a 1960 CBS Edward Murrow special

The horrifying part is that things have not improved all that much in nearly 50 years.

[carpetbagger]

4. It's pretty close to Harvest of Shame.

I lived in Collier County, and years later I participated in free migrant health clinics in the Mid-Atlantic when the same workers (or at least close, the local ones hit the circuit from Clewiston) came up for fruit harvest.

I think the only substantial difference is that there are somewhat fewer children per worker. I chuckle when people talk about all the health care undocumented immigrants supposedly siphon. It's called a cursory exam with people who don't speak a whole lot of Creole followed, if lucky, by some drug samples. Better than Haiti, but it ain't all that great.

[Synnical]

5. Coalition of Immokalee workers

http://www.ciw-online.org/