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INEQUALITY
FARMWORKERS
IN FLORIDA ARE MARCHING AGAINST SLAVE CONDITIONS
Starting on March 14, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers will
lead a 5-day march to protest abuses in the farming industry and to compel
companies like Wendy’s and Kroger to join the Fair Food Program.Led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), farmworkers,
advocates, and community members march along a road outside of Pahokee,
Florida, on day one of the “Build a New World” march, which will last 5 days
and cross a 50-mile expanse through Southern Florida. Photo taken on March 14,
courtesy of the CIW.
In December of 2016, the Coalition of
Immokalee Workers (CIW), based out of Immokalee, Florida,
received a phone call from two men who had just escaped captivity near the town
of Pahokee by hiding in the trunk of a car. The two men were migrant
farmworkers, working on H-2A visas,
who had been harvesting watermelons for Bladimir Moreno, owner of the farm
labor contracting business Los Villatoros Harvesting LLC—a business that, in
reality, was little more than a modern-day slave camp. “They told of being held
against their will on a labor camp surrounded by barbed wire,” the CIW notes,
“working and living under constant surveillance, and earning extremely low
pay.” On Dec. 29, 2022, after a lengthy investigation and subsequent
trial, a US District Court judge sentenced Moreno to 118 months in prison for
leading a federal racketeering and forced labor conspiracy between 2015-2017,
spanning multiple states. “According to court documents,” Kristin Leigh Lore reports,
Moreno
owned, operated and managed LVH — a farm labor contracting company that brought
large numbers of temporary, seasonal Mexican workers into the U.S. on H-2A
agricultural visas — as a criminal enterprise. According to the Justice
Department, Moreno compelled victims to work in Florida, Kentucky, Indiana,
Georgia and North Carolina, and he also engaged in a pattern of racketeering
activity that included visa fraud and fraud in foreign labor contracting… Once
the immigrants arrived in the U.S., Moreno and his co-conspirators coerced over
a dozen of them into providing long hours of physically demanding agricultural
labor, six to seven days a week, for unreasonably little pay, according to the
Justice Department, which said Moreno and his co-conspirators used various
forms of coercion, including tactics such as:- Imposing debts on the workers.
- Confiscating their passports.
- Subjecting them to crowded, unsanitary
and degrading living conditions.
- Harboring them in the U.S. after their
visas had expired.
- Threatening them with arrest and
deportation if they failed to comply with demands.
For a variety of sordid and explicitly racist reasons,
agricultural workers in the United States were deliberately exempted from the
provisions circumscribed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. To this
day, workers in this industry remain some of the most exploited and
underrepresented across the workforce.
The horrors uncovered at Moreno’s operation—horrors that
involved the enslavement, abuse, and exploitation of flesh-and-blood human
beings right here, in the United States, all around us—are not some remnant of
a grim, bygone past. They are a stark reminder of the dual realities that exist
side by side across the landscape of American labor: One world where working
people are at least recognized as human beings with the bare minimum of rights,
and another world, a
submerged world, where workers who are no less human are treated as
cattle, or worse. It is out of this underworld that the farmworkers of the CIW
emerged in the early ’90s—and, along with their committed team of organizers
and community supporters, they have remained a force to be reckoned with. For a
variety of sordid and explicitly racist reasons, agricultural workers in the
United States were deliberately exempted from the provisions circumscribed by
the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. To this day, workers in this industry
remain some of the most exploited and
underrepresented across the workforce, with the majority of
states still denying equal labor protections to farmworkers, including
collective bargaining rights. This is why—taken together with the harsh working conditions,
the low pay, and workers’ vulnerability to extortion and harassment—the
grassroots worker-to-worker organizing and national campaigns waged by the CIW
are so vital, and so damn impressive. Perhaps the crowning achievement of the
CIW so far is the Fair Food Program. Launched in 2011, the Fair
Food Program promotes a model of worker-driven
social responsibility that not only educates farmworkers about
their rights but encourages—and, if necessary, applies pressure to—growers and
retail buyers of their produce to commit to a system of humane business
practices and mutual accountability. Participating buyers, for instance, agree
to only source produce from growers who comply with the worker-developed code
of conduct. As Derek Seidman writes, “There are
few human rights achievements that are so universally celebrated today as the
farmworker-led Fair Food Program, a partnership between agricultural growers,
sellers and workers with a proven record of ensuring an “ethical supply chain” from the farms where
products are harvested, to the grocery stores where they’re sold, to the
kitchen tables where they’re consumed. For the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the main group
behind the Fair Food Program, this makes it all the more disappointing that
holdouts like fast food chain Wendy’s and the supermarket chains Kroger and
Publix still refuse to join.
Kroger, it should be noted, was one of the retail giants identified by the
Department of Labor that purchased produce harvested by workers
slaving away for Bladimir Moreno’s LVH operation. To compel these corporate chains to commit to only sourcing
produce from growers that abide by the code of conduct laid out in the Fair Food
Program, and to combat the scourge of forced labor that still plagues the
agricultural supply chain, the CIW is leading the “Build a New World”
march, which will last five days and cross a 50-mile expanse through
Southern Florida. The march begins on Tuesday, March 14, in the agricultural
community of Pahokee, where Moreno’s captive migrant workers were discovered,
and will end at the wealthy enclave of Palm Beach on March 18. For TRNN, I
spoke with Lupe Gonzalo, a longtime farmworker who is now a staff member and
organizer for CIW, about the importance of this march, the success of the Fair
Food Program, and the ongoing fight for dignity and justice for farmworkers
everywhere.
Interpretation by: Ileana Roque González
Translation by: Adriana Garriga-López
Lupe Gonzalo: My name is Lupe Gonzalo. I’m
currently a staff member at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). I worked
for about 12 years in the fields, mostly harvesting tomatoes, but I also used
to do other types of work in the industry, as well.
When you arrive at these farms, the only tool they give you is a
bucket—a bucket that you have to fill with tomatoes… We used to get paid 50
cents for each bucketful.
LUPE GONZALO,
COALITION OF IMMOKALEE WORKERS
As workers, we have faced situations of abuse for decades. One
of the biggest problems that has affected women is sexual harassment on the
part of their supervisors, contractors, or even their own co-workers. In the
most extreme cases, workers have faced conditions akin to modern slavery—these
are workers who have been deprived of their liberty, threatened, including
receiving death threats. They have been violated.
This is why, around the 1990s, we started organizing workers
here in Immokalee to demand justice and to see how we could eliminate these
abuses. We conducted different actions, such as work stoppages, marches against
violence, and a hunger strike that lasted 30 days. This was all taking place,
more or less, in the 1990s, but we did not find a solution at that time. The
violence against workers did decrease a bit, but other abuses continued.
So, then, in 2001, we began the Campaign for Fair Food, which we began to focus
directly on the big corporations. Because corporations, when they buy their
tomatoes, are looking for a good quality of product and fresh product, but they
are not seeing the situations that workers are facing. That’s why we began, as workers, to apply pressure more directly
on the corporations, but also to educate consumers. The consumer should know
where their products come from and what the labor conditions that workers
endure to get those products on their tables are.
Maximillian Alvarez: Like you said, so many
consumers don’t know (or don’t want to know) what workers like yourself go
through to get their produce to the supermarket, to restaurants, etc. Can you
say a little more about your own experience as a farmworker and what that work
entails on a day-to-day basis? And who are the people primarily doing this kind
of work?
Lupe Gonzalo: They are migrant workers who
come here to Immokalee from different countries, specifically from Guatemala,
Mexico, Haiti, and several other countries.
A normal day for us workers means waking up at 3:30AM to begin
your day and prepare some food to take to the fields. For me, as a mother, it
meant getting my children ready at that early morning hour to take them to
someone else, another woman. There is no school or daycare that opens before
8AM. Therefore, there are other people who take care of children. So, I would
take them there and then go to work.
When you arrive at these farms, the only tool they give you is a
bucket—a bucket that you have to fill with tomatoes. A bucket weighs about 32
pounds or more when it’s filled up to the brim. When they tell you to pile the
fruit above the rim, though, it can weigh up to 37 pounds. We used to get paid
50 cents for each bucketful. We did not get paid by the hour, we were never
guaranteed a minimum salary at the end of the week—we got paid for each
bucketful that we harvested. So, in order to be able to make a decent income at
the end of the week, one had to harvest between 100-150 buckets per day. But
that always depends on the weather, it depends on how hot it is and also on the
experience of the workers
Also, if you reported some abuse, or if you complained about the
working conditions, the contractor would say, “Here’s the pay I’m offering, if
you want it. Take it or leave it.”
And, as I mentioned before, sexual harassment is a problem that
oftentimes affects women in the fields. When I was working there, there were
contractors or co-workers who would touch you. Many times, when you would say,
“I don’t want you to touch me,” they would just laugh at you or simply ignore
you, and continue doing these things.
When it comes to the cases of enslavement, what we in the CIW
have seen involves workers who have been imprisoned under lock and key—there
are even workers who were put in chains so they could not escape.
LUPE GONZALO,
COALITION OF IMMOKALEE WORKERS
On top of that, there would often be times when it was very hot
and you needed to drink some water; instead of letting you take a drink,
though, they would yell at you, “Hold on, it’s about to rain,” or, “Go drink
water from that ditch!”
Or, to give another example, when we wanted to use the
bathrooms, the bathrooms were located very far away from where we would be
working. The bathrooms were never cleaned, either. Weeks would pass and those
bathrooms would get so dirty. Because of this, people would go into the woods
[translator’s note: monte literally means “hill,”
but it’s often used as an expression to refer to wildlands, or land that is not
being cultivated, but is growing wild] to use the bathroom, because the
bathroom was basically inaccessible. But going out to the woods, you also ran
the risk of running into animals that could hurt you, too.
When it comes to the cases of enslavement, what we in the CIW
have seen involves workers who have been imprisoned under lock and key—there
are even workers who were put in chains so they could not escape. Workers there
are surveilled. There is armed surveillance surrounding where they are living.
When they go to work, they are pushed to work until very late, and the pay they
receive is nothing, or almost nothing.
These are the kinds of abuses that we faced day-to-day. Whenever
you wanted to speak out, as I mentioned, they would threaten to fire you, or
some other kind of retaliation would sometimes be used against us. You had to
decide: If I make a report, I run the risk of losing my job. How am I going to
feed my family if I get fired? I better keep quiet, keep working, and make sure
my family has food to eat.
Maximillian Alvarez: My God… This really highlights
the dire need for worker organizations like the CIW, and the human stakes of
the work you do.
Lupe Gonzalo: For us in the community, CIW is an
organization that protects the human rights of workers. Regardless of where we
come from, regardless of the legal status of the worker, it doesn’t matter:
Human rights are human rights.
The CIW is a home base in Immokalee where workers can come and
feel free to talk about any problems that are happening. The Coalition itself is
made up of several staff members who used to work in the fields and who now
work at the CIW full time, and part of the Coalition is made up of allies like
Ileana who supported us and who are now part of the staff, as well.
Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s talk about the Fair Food
Program, what it is, and how it has changed the industry for workers like
yourself over the past 10 years…
Lupe Gonzalo: Yes, the Fair Food Program came from
the victories that we won with the Campaign for Fair Food that we previously
discussed. When we began to pressure the big corporations, we, the workers,
would urge them to sign legally binding agreements committing them to
participating in the Fair Food Program.
One of the legally binding agreements we pursued was with Taco
Bell—that’s where it started. Our demand was that they should pay one more cent
for every pound of tomatoes, and that this money should be directly distributed
to the workers as a bonus payment.
The goal was also for Taco Bell to sign a code of conduct that
was created by us, the workers, in which we were asking for basic rights like
having water, shade, clean bathrooms, and breaks. But the code of conduct also
included zero tolerance for harassment and sexual assault, and zero tolerance
for modern slavery [translator’s note: forced labor, indentured
servitude, or human trafficking].
We also pushed for workers to be able to have a voice at their
workplace, so they could make reports without being fired or threatened.
I spent more than a decade working in the fields without knowing
my rights. But the moment my comrades arrived at the ranch where I worked and
started talking to us, educating us, it was a pretty big deal for me. It’s
pretty much the same thing for other workers on farms that participate in the
Fair Food Program—it’s like night and day.
LUPE GONZALO,
COALITION OF IMMOKALEE WORKERS
In 2010, 90% of the ranches that produce tomatoes in the state
of Florida also reached an agreement with us. Then, in 2011, we started
implementing the Fair Food Program.
With the Fair Food Program, we basically hold these
worker-to-worker educational sessions on the ranches. We speak with the workers
in a place where they have some shade. They also now have clean water to drink,
clean bathrooms—basically, everything that we were demanding, we now have it on
the ranches. Another thing is now people are paid for their time [translator’s
note: instead of per bucket], dignifying the life of the workers
Maximillian Alvarez: It sounds like the changes
have been pretty dramatic for workers on farms that participate in the Fair
Food Program?
Lupe Gonzalo: Yes, it’s been very interesting.
When I received this training for the first time, for me, it had a pretty big
impact. I spent more than a decade working in the fields without knowing my
rights. But the moment my comrades arrived at the ranch where I worked and
started talking to us, educating us, it was a pretty big deal for me. It’s
pretty much the same thing for other workers on farms that participate in the
Fair Food Program—it’s like night and day.
It is a new day for us, as workers, to have protections, to be
able to make reports. There is now a complaint hotline open 24/7 that is
accessible in whatever language one wants to make the complaint in. And there
are bosses or supervisors who have been fired for not wanting to follow this
new rule, this new acknowledgement that we farmworkers have human rights. This
is a rule, not an option. They have to do it.
And, as women, the difference now is feeling that no one is
touching you and no one is going to be harassing you. That is a pretty big
relief. After work, we can get home and have a nice dinner with our kids
without having to be worried about the dangers we might have to face tomorrow.
Maximillian Alvarez: Tell us about the march that’s
happening this week. Why are workers marching? And what do you hope to
achieve?
Lupe Gonzalo: The march is going to start on Tuesday of this
week, from March 14-18. We’re going to start in Pahokee and we are
going to finish in Palm Beach, where one of the top Wendy’s executives, Nelson
Peltz, lives. We’re also going to stop by Publix and Wendy’s to protest, but
we’re going to go as a big group marching for justice. (If people want to
support us, they can follow us on
our social media and continue learning from the workers of Immokalee.) We continue this fight because, on the farms that don’t
participate in the Fair Food Program, the problems continue and the abuses
continue. Thus, the program has expanded to other states, to other products,
and has expanded to other industries, even internationally. What we want is for
more corporations to join us, more farms to cover the cost of the Fair Food
Program.
In 2015-16, unfortunately, as I predicted would happen, we
discovered a case of enslaved workers in
Pahokee, Florida, which is where we are going to start the march
this year. Workers there, who had arrived on H-2A visas,
fell into the hands of a contractor who had them living in conditions of modern
slavery. This is a problem that continues to plague the agricultural industry,
and the corporations [that purchase from these farms] are not taking
responsibility to ensure that the workers are protected. When you know that abuses this extreme are happening, you cannot
just stay at home and do nothing. You have to stand up. And that is what we are
doing now: We are continuing to march for justice, because we want corporations
like Wendy’s, like Publix, like Kroger, to join the Fair Food Program. We have
asked these corporations to join us for years now, but they have refused to be
part of the Program.
This is also about raising the consciousness of consumers. I
think that, as consumers, we have a pretty important role to play in this fight
for human rights. Consumers should know where the things we consume come
from—we need to think about where our food comes from, and about the conditions
that the workers who harvest our food confront every day. And consuming a
product that was harvested with justice—that is surely something we all want.
When you know that abuses this extreme are happening, you cannot
just stay at home and do nothing. You have to stand up. And that is what we are
doing now: We are continuing to march for justice, because we want corporations
like Wendy’s, like Publix, like Kroger, to join the Fair Food Program.
LUPE GONZALO,
COALITION OF IMMOKALEE WORKERS
As my colleague says, we are not mathematicians or anything like
that, but we have an equation here at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers: C + C
= C (Consciousness + Commitment = Change). We make the consumer aware, then
they commit to supporting us by marching, coming to our protests, and making
donations. There are a lot of people committed to supporting our struggle and we,
the workers, can see the resulting changes..
Maximillian Alvarez: Speaking of supporting that
struggle, there is a lot of popular enthusiasm for the labor movement right
now, but people can often leave farmworkers out of the discussion (they really
shouldn’t, but they do). Do you have any final words you wanted to share with
folks reading this about the importance of showing solidarity with CIW and
farmworkers everywhere?
Lupe Gonzalo: I have always said that for
the workers in this country, nothing that we have has been given to us for
free. There has always been a struggle. Yes, it is hard, but it is not
impossible to get justice.
People can learn a lot from the workers of Immokalee. It is
always possible to build community in our struggle, as we have done and will
continue to do moving forward, always demanding what is just. We are not asking
for anything that is not owed to us, only that which is fair.
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Editor-in-Chief
Ten years ago, I was working 12-hour days as a warehouse temp in Southern
California while my family, like millions of others, struggled to stay afloat in
the wake of the Great Recession. Eventually, we lost everything, including the
house I grew up in. It was in the years that followed, when hope seemed
irrevocably lost and help from above seemed impossibly absent, that I realized
the life-saving importance of everyday workers coming together, sharing our
stories, showing our scars, and reminding one another that we are not alone.
Since then, from starting the podcast Working People—where I interview workers
about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles—to working as Associate Editor
at the Chronicle Review and now as Editor-in-Chief at The Real News Network, I
have dedicated my life to lifting up the voices and honoring the humanity of
our fellow workers.
Email: max@therealnews.com
