When Workers Are Enslaved (ILCA)

[struggle4progress]

<snip> The workers had been promised good agricultural jobs — and so they made the perilous journey to the U.S.

But once they were at a farmworker camp in upstate Western New York, they were told that they had to pay off $2,500 in transportation debt and payments for food, shelter and transportation. They were forced to work from 50 to 70 hours per week without pay. They were not allowed to leave the camp and each night armed guards patrolled the housing site. <snip>

In the new millennium, migrant and seasonal farmworkers continue to be the most oppressed class in our society. Little has changed to improve the living and working environment of migrant workers or their families. Farmworkers remain the hidden and forgotten poor, the constituency of no one. Migrant and seasonal farmworkers are the lowest paid, worst housed workers in society today. The average family income for agricultural workers is less than $6,000 per year and that is for a working family of four. Farmworkers have little access to health care or to education. The average number of years of schooling is eight years. The vast majority of farmworkers are paid at minimum wage with no overtime pay and workers are expected to work six to seven days per week. The average workday begins at 6 and may go to 7 or 8 in the evening. A 70-hour workweek is common.

The majority of farmworkers are people of color who live in isolated rural labor camps. In New York, there exist more than 1,200 such migrant labor camps. The ability to leave these camps for the outside world, even to attend church, visit the corner store, buy groceries in a shopping mall, visit a theatre or go to the health clinic, is severely restricted by male bosses who control the camps. The lack of transportation, the cultural diversity of farmworkers, their language and the racism farmworkers experience in rural communities, limit their ability to access many community services. Thus, it is not surprising that farmworkers are not easily assimilated into the culture of rural white communities. <snip>

http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2228&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

[notadmblnd]

1. during the Robber Baron age these people were known as

indentured servents. Yes it is slavery and it is spreading beyond the farm. Where I live, landscaping companies engage in this type of slavery too. Hotels are also contracting with 3rd party companies to provide foreign workers for housekeeping services.

[pop goes the weasel]

2. no, wrong era

Robber baron era would have been the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You might be thinking of contract labor, which sometimes lived under similar conditions.

Indentured labor was a precursor of outright slavery, and existed in the American colonies/US into the early 19th century (though I have known people who were essentially "indented" in the 20th, and that's white folks, and that's in the US, so it is no big surprise that blacks and browns are kept enslaved in the US. Only someone who is a naif would think it isn't common).

[notadmblnd]

3. I was thinking of all the chinese

that were imported to build the RR's. Was that done during the 19th century or the 18th?

[pop goes the weasel]

5. contract labor

19th century

There were also many Southern European contract laborers in the US, brought in to work the mines.

[chlamor]

4. Wage Slavery