Book review: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/30/RVOGS0HPA.DTL

Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy
By John Bowe
RANDOM HOUSE; 305 PAGES; $25.95

Judging from the reaction to Hurricane Katrina, contemporary America seems to think it would be easier to change the planet than to change itself. Many seem to have incorporated the initial shock of a storm wreaking such havoc upon a city so major as New Orleans into a growing sense of the role of human activity in the proliferation of natural disasters. After this flood, people didn't think only of the usual questions of levees and engineering, they also thought about global warming and what they could do about it.

The effect of Katrina's second shock, the revelation of poverty in New Orleans deeper and broader than many had thought could exist in 21st century America, is less clear. If it has fed into a movement to do something about the plight of the nation's lower class, that has not yet become apparent.

Journalist John Bowe believes that "equality and social justice could come to be viewed as the environment has," but understands, as George Orwell wrote, that "economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner." And he has written "Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy" in an effort to move that moment forward.

Bowe's eagerness to grab the reader by the lapels and give voice to the voiceless may stem from a bit of a personal transformation he experienced in researching the book. Writing at that time for the New Yorker, he walked into his first meeting with migrant farmworker organizers from Florida's Coalition of Imokalee Workers and "called them 'do-gooders,' " intending it ironically, "to convey how other people (not me, of course) might have thought of them." Not only did he quickly realize how dense it was to expect them "to understand my own personal code of irony," but more importantly he recognized he was "less politically informed, more mainstream, and less liberal than I had thought I was." He was "shocked by their earnestness ... about something as straightforward as fighting for social justice." (New Yorker readers might wish the magazine required a humility-inducing experience of all its writers but, oh, I digress.)

As an organizer explained to him, the cases of workers kept in conditions of legal slavery that the Coalition sometimes encounters "occur in degraded labor environments ... where the labor force is contingent, day-haul, with subpoverty wages, no benefits, no right to overtime, no right to organize," as is the case with farm labor which, Bowe explains, was excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, "as if for some reason the production of food is necessarily different from the production of other goods." As a result of this exclusion, today's average farmworker would need to make an additional $3,200 a year to reach the minimum wage, an increase that would cost the average American household $50.

FULL article at link.