CNN May-9-2008 Rush Transcript: Modern Day Slavery The Challenge Of Modern Slavery Slavery is in our refrigerators. From fruit to beef, from sugar to coffee, slave labor brings food to our tables. “Miguel,” a Mexican slave freed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a US human-rights organization, may have harvested the apples we eat at breakfast. Miguel picked fruit under guard in the United States. He had traveled to el norte to earn the money to pay for treatment for his six-year-old son who has cancer; instead, his employer enslaved him.
The cocoa we drink while reading the newspaper or watching the morning news shows may come from the Ivory Coast, which supplies half the world market. Children and adolescents from even poorer neighboring countries, such as Mali, trek all the way to the cocoa plantations to earn a subsistence salary. Often, they end up working as slaves in remote farms. “Nineteen-year-old Drissa was one such young man. When he was freed in 2000, he had just gone through a ‘breaking-in’ period as his master accustomed him to enslavement. His back was laced with scars and wounds from being whipped.”
Almost every product we consume has a hidden dark history, from slave labor to piracy, from counterfeit to fraud, from theft to money laundering.
We know very little about these economic secrets because modern consumers live inside the market matrix.
...
Slavery’s resurgence exerts a direct effect on its cost, which has now fallen for decades. Bates calculated that, while over the past 3,000 years the average price of a slave has ranged from $20,000 to $80,000 (adjusted to current dollar value) now people can be bought and sold for a tenth of these prices. After World War II, we witnessed a sudden surge in the supply of slave labor, pushing prices down. Ironically, this phenomenon began as a consequence of decolonization, which shifted slave ownership from colonizers to countrymen. Today’s slaves are predominantly enslaved by their national peers and not by foreign powers. Like other commodity markets, slavery operates by the law of supply and demand, and today supply proves plentiful among the millions living on a dollar to two dollars a day.
RINFWASHINGTON — Slavery exists in the tomato fields of Florida, a U.S. Senate committee was told today.
"Today's form of slavery does not bear the overt nature of pre-Civil War society, but it is none the less heinous and reprehensible," Collier County Sheriff's Detective Charlie Frost told Democratic members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee. No Republicans attending the hearing.
...
The Senate hearing focused on the living and working conditions facing thousands of migrant tomato pickers, their rate of pay, and the industry's refusal to implement agreements by major restaurant chains to pay workers an additional penny a pound for harvested tomatoes.
Lucas Benitez, a co-founder of the Coalitoin of Immokalee Workers, told the panel that tomato pickers are regularly abused, harassed, intimidated and kept so deeply in debt that they are virtually in bondage. Benitez said female pickers are additionally subjected to sexual harassment and abuse.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
