Slave Next Door (10 page)

believe it when their employers are telling them it’s scary out there. There

are good people out there. They should reach for help immediately if

they’re not getting what they were promised. And no matter what, you

shouldn’t send your child away, especially with strangers.

The people were found guilty. They pleaded guilty and they did some

community service. They were asked to pay me some money for the years

that I worked for them. They are paying bit by bit, but not that much.

Right now I’m just trying to keep away from them. I just want to live my

life. I don’t want to even see them. But if it happens, I would say, look at

me now—here, look at me now.

I’m proud of myself now because now I have a job, I have a roof over

my head, I have a car, I can do whatever I want. I’m building a house for

my parents and I paid my siblings’ school tuition. My mom is always sick

so I pay her medical fees—send her to a bigger hospital so she can get

more tests. What I dream now is to be a registered nurse. I love helping

people. With the help of God I’m going to do it and I’ll be a registered

nurse. Everything is possible. I’m trying to work hard, save some money,

go to school. I’m going to do it. I have to do it.24

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3

S L AV E S I N T H E PA S T U R E S

O F P L E N T Y

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops,

Then it’s north up to Oregon to gather your hops.

Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes

from your vine

To set on your table your light sparkling wine.

Woody Guthrie, “Pastures of Plenty”

A S T U D Y I N C O N T R A S T S

About thirty miles due south of the Southwest Florida International

Airport is the town of Naples. It sits on its own bay off the Gulf of

Mexico, not far from Sanibel, Vanderbilt Beach, and the Isles of Capri.

Naples is a lovely town—a rich town—attracting wealthy retirees and

men of industry. A palm-lined walk down Fifth Avenue will take you

past art galleries offering everything from contemporary sculpture to

portraits of your pets; chic restaurants featuring a variety of ethnic and

exotic cuisines; high-end clothing and jewelry stores; and a fair smatter-

ing of Bentleys and Rolls Royces.

A small tour boat offers a sunset cruise of the bay. The area is rich in

animal and bird life, brightly colored flowers, and lush plants, but the

guide points out only the houses and properties, proudly ticking off for

the tourists the astronomical values of each. No number is below seven

figures, and several are higher. One empty lot, we are told, recently sold

for $18,000,000. It sits, like a missing tooth, between two massive struc-

tures of questionable taste but stunning worth. Many of these houses

serve as second, third, or fourth homes and are occupied for only a few

weeks a year.

The boats that line the pier are studies in sleekness and speed. Long,

shark-shaped Cigarettes and Scarabs, with their two and three out-

boards of 250 horsepower each, give the illusion of motion even at the

dock. Looming over the pier walk are elegant new apartment buildings,

painted various pastel shades, as are many of the homes and shops of

Naples. There is nothing here to jar the senses. There is everywhere an

air of money and complacency.

4 3

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4 4 / S L AV E S I N T H E L A N D O F T H E F R E E

If, however, you left the airport and drove forty minutes to the south-

east,
along narrow state roads, you would enter the town of Immokalee.

You could never confuse the two.

Driving into Immokalee, you become instantly aware that this is not

a town concerned with its appearance. There is no movie theater, no

outward indication of social activity, except for the Seminole Casino,

where out-of-towners from Naples and Fort Myers come to gamble.

Many of the buildings of Immokalee are low, basic, carelessly main-

tained. Most of the signs—many roughly hand-painted—are in Spanish,

as well as a language that looks familiar, almost French, but spelled

phonetically. This is Haitian Creole. In many of Immokalee’s homes,

English is neither spoken nor understood. The languages are Spanish,

Creole, and more than a sprinkling of indigenous tongues—Quiche,

Zapotec, Nahuatl, Ttzotzil, Mam, Mixtec, Kanjobal.1

There is a handful of restaurants—mostly Mexican—with names like

la Michoacana, el Taquito, Mi Ranchita. The décor is minimalist, the

food just acceptable; dining out is not a major activity in Immokalee.

There are a couple of nail and hair salons, housed in tiny storefronts.

One turquoise-and-yellow painted structure advertises “Mimi’s

Piñatas.” Chickens run wild, their crowing a backdrop you stop hearing

after a while, and the vultures crowd the roads outside of town in such

profusion that they present a driving hazard. Many who live here walk

from point to point or ride one-speed bicycles. They can’t afford cars.

There is not much vehicle traffic in Immokalee itself, with the exception

of the trucks that haul the produce to the packinghouses and the long

school-type buses that carry the workers to and from the fields.

T H E P R I C E O F T O M AT O E S

Immokalee is a migrant town—actually, “more a labor reserve than a

town.”2 There are many such communities in Florida, but this is the epi-

center. Immokalee—an unincorporated community—was built in the

first decades of the twentieth century for the growing, picking, packing,

and shipping of tomatoes and oranges. Old-timers can still remember

the days when teamsters drove horse-drawn wagons from Fort Myers to

haul the produce from the fields.3 There are other crops—lemons, grape-

fruit, watermelon—but these are the big two, and the tomato crop is the

biggest by far. The crews who work in the fields come from Mexico,

from Guatemala, from Haiti. Most are young—in their early twenties—

small in stature and dark skinned, both by birth and by long exposure

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S L AV E S I N T H E PA S T U R E S O F P L E N T Y / 4 5

to the sun. Many have the Mayan features of the “Indio puro.” There is

a shyness—a reserve—shown a stranger and, usually, a smile.

Immokalee’s year-round population of twenty-five thousand swells to

forty thousand during the nine-month harvest season. There are surpris-

ingly few women among Immokalee’s farmworkers; around 95 percent

of the workforce is male. They have left their home countries and crossed

our borders into Texas, Arizona, or New Mexico—most with the help of

a
coyote,
or “guide”—in the hope of finding a way to support their fam-

ilies, since no such opportunities exist at home. Instead, they have found

jobs that are unrelentingly hard, under the rigid control of crew leaders,

for the lowest wages imaginable. Every day, often seven days a week, the

workers walk through the 4:00 a.m. darkness to begin gathering at park-

ing lots around town; here they wait for buses that will take them—at

least some of them—to the fields. Some carry their lunch from home in

white plastic bags, while others choose to buy their daily food in one of

the several convenience stores, with names like La Fiesta #3 and La

Mexicana #2, that open early to accommodate them. The prices are

high, often twice what they are elsewhere; the workers have no choice.

Nor do they have much option as to where they live. The town is honey-

combed with parks of broken-down trailers, enclaves of tiny huts, and

depressing little apartments. The rents are staggering. A dilapidated

single-wide trailer, with dented, dingy yellow corrugated siding that is

separating from the frame, accommodates twelve men, who sleep on

bare mattresses abutting each other on the floor. Each of them pays a

rent of $50 a week. There are perhaps fifteen such trailers on a single

lot. The few individuals who own most of these enclaves would qualify

as slumlords in any community in America, but their tenants pay the

rents and live in their hovels; again, they have no choice.

Picking tomatoes is brutal; it requires working bent over in the south-

ern sun for hours on end, straightening only long enough to run 100 to

150 feet with a filled thirty-two-pound bucket and literally throw it up

to the worker on the truck. Lunch is a hurried affair, and water breaks

are few. But at least nowadays there’s clean water; not so very long ago,

it wasn’t uncommon for pickers to be obliged to drink from the canals

and ditches, taking in the bacteria and the runoff of insecticides and fer-

tilizer along with the water. And until fairly recently, a picker ran the

risk of being beaten if he stopped picking long enough to drink.4

The pickers are not free to decide when or how much to work; they

must work however many hours and days a week the crew chief man-

dates or weather and conditions permit. For this, they are paid a piece

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4 6 / S L AV E S I N T H E L A N D O F T H E F R E E

rate—so much per full bucket. The going rate—which has barely

changed in nearly thirty years, despite the steady rise in the cost of

living—is $25 per ton of tomatoes picked. This means filling around

125 buckets of tomatoes a day just to gross $50. But to make the equiv-

alent of minimum wage, the worker has to fill around
two hundred

buckets—or two and a half tons—of tomatoes; this often entails work-

ing twelve or thirteen hours a day, if and when the work is available.

Why aren’t these workers paid the minimum wage? The term
mini-

mum wage
is misleading; realistically, although the 2008 rate in Florida

is $6.79 per hour, the worker stands no real guarantee of earning it.

Conditions are against him. There are no fixed hours, and what records

are kept are often doctored in favor of the crew leader and the grower.

The worker is also at the mercy of the weather; the market; pestilence;

the availability of harvesting equipment; the yield due to the relative

richness of a field’s soil; the number of times a field has been picked; the

distance from the picker to the truck; personal stamina; and, most frus-

trating, time lost traveling to and from the field and waiting unpaid

hours on the bus for the dew to dry or the weather to change.

Because harvesting is by nature unpredictable, the picker must be

available every day at around five in the morning; if it turns out there is

no work that day, he’s just out of luck. This precludes his ability to take

a second job. And on days when the work is slack and few pickers are

required, he’s likely to go home with nothing in his pocket. If he gets to

the field and it rains, he earns nothing. The days spent on buses to other

regions when the local crops have been picked is unpaid time; and if he

and his fellow workers arrive at the new fields before they are ready for

picking, they’re paid nothing as they wait for the crops to ripen. They

are paid only when they are picking, and they are paid little at that. It is

no wonder that the Department of Labor (DOL) has described farm-

workers as a labor force in “significant economic distress.”5

The only true measure of the pickers’ compensation is their annual

earnings: workers average $7,000 to $10,000 per year. On a good day,

the best they can accomplish is to reach the poverty level, but their yearly

earnings are well below it. There are no benefits—no overtime, no health

care, no insurance of any kind. “You can only get sick in Immokalee,”

says Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) co-founder Lucas Benitez,

“between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., which are the hours of the clinic.” If

a picker does get sick, he works nonetheless. If he becomes seriously ill

or breaks a limb, not only is he without income, but he must pay his

medical bills himself—more often than not an impossibility, since nearly

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S L AV E S I N T H E PA S T U R E S O F P L E N T Y / 4 7

all his money goes to food and rent, with perhaps a few dollars put aside

to send home. “You wait until you are half dead to go to a doctor.”6

S C O R E O N E F O R T H E D I X I E C R AT S

There is no point in looking to the government for help: farm labor is

practically the only type of work not covered by the National Labor

Relations Act of 1935, the law that protects workers, gives them the right

to organize without fear of retaliation, and fixes wage, health, and safety

rules. Yes, farmworkers can organize a union or strike for better pay, but

they can be fired for doing so. This exclusion of farmworkers from the

rights given to almost all other American workers came from the power

of Deep South congressmen in 1935, when the law was passed. These

Dixiecrat politicians were adamant that black field hands should never

be allowed to organize. Not surprisingly, household servants were also

excluded from full rights. Some DOL wage and hour rules do apply to