Making the Connection: Modern-Day Slavery and Retail Food Purchasing

A new and vicious form of slavery is alive and well in the agricultural fields of Florida: human trafficking. Human Trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transporting, providing or obtaining by any means any person for forced labor, slavery or servitude in any industry or site such as agriculture, construction, prostitution, manufacturing, begging, domestic service or marriage.  According to federal law, a person may not be trafficked within the United States itself or from another country. 

Marching to end slavery in the fields. Photo courtesy of CIW.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has worked with the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to expose and prosecute six cases of slavery in recent years, freeing more than 1,000 slaves.  These are not instances of poverty wages, but of forced labor where men and women are forced through violence or threat of violence to work and are unable to leave.  The use of the word slavery is neither hyperbolic nor metaphorical language.  These cases meet the high standard and definition of slavery under U.S. federal laws.  These cases have been prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division either under laws forbidding peonage and indentured servitude passed just after the Civil War during Reconstruction (18 U.S.C. Sections 1581-9) or under the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which prohibits the “recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery.”  The VTVPA was reauthorized in 2003 and 2007.

In January of 2008, a federal grand jury indicted six people under the 13th Amendment for enslaving farmworkers in Immokalee itself.  Among other abuses, the workers were beaten, locked in a truck and were unable to leave.  This is the seventh case of forced labor to emerge out of the Florida fields. 

In November 2007, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers received the premiere international anti-slavery award from Anti-Slavery International for their “extraordinary contribution to ending slavery in the U.S. agricultural industry.”  Founded in 1839 in England, ASI is the world's oldest international human rights organization.  The CIW has previously won the Robert F. Kennedy International Human Rights award (2003) as well as commendations from the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice for their ground-breaking work.

Because giant retail food corporations (fast-food and grocery) help to create the conditions in which farmworker poverty and modern-day slavery flourish, it is critical to correct these detrimental business practices.  Major corporate buyers — companies like Burger King, WalMart, McDonald's and Yum! Brands, whose sheer economic muscle is unprecedented — have increasingly used their buying power to drive down their costs, squeezing their suppliers for the deepest possible discounts on produce. In turn, growers have sought to maintain their margins by squeezing their suppliers, and in particular the one supplier with the least power to negotiate its price and labor.

While growers cannot demand cheaper tractors from John Deere, cheaper chemicals from Monsanto or a break on the interest rate from their bank, they can hold wages stagnant, or even cut the piece rate, and still obtain desperately poor workers to pick their crops. In its 2003 study “Like Machines in the Fields: Workers Without Rights in U.S. Agriculture,”  Oxfam America concludes: "Squeezed by the buyers of their produce, growers pass on the costs and risks imposed on them to those on the lowest rung of the supply chain: the farmworkers they employ" (page 36). 

And grower/packers themselves agree with this analysis.  In May 2005 an article, “Big Fast-Food Contracts Breaking Repackers” appeared in “The Packer”  a grower industry journal, which particularly named Burger King as exerting this downward pressure that negatively effects the tomato pickers.

By paying a penny-per-pound increase to farmworkers and working with the CIW to establish and enforce rigorous Codes of Conduct, Burger King, Yum! Brands and McDonald’s are working to counteract the downward pressure on wages and human rights that their purchasing practices exert.  The PC(USA) Campaign for Fair Food joins with the CIW and other institutions and individuals in urging the rest of the fast-food and grocery industry to work with the CIW to adopt similar practices.