GuardianUK: Slavery may be outlawed, but as Florida workers showed, some battles still need fighting

[marmar]

Nobodies no longer
Slavery may be outlawed, but as a group of workers in Florida showed, some battles still need fighting

Bernard Crick
Wednesday December 5, 2007
The Guardian


As every schoolchild should know, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, perhaps the most controversial but successful public lobby in our history, was formed in London in 1787. After 20 years of campaigning came the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act; and then finally in 1833 the abolition of slavery throughout the British empire. So the society disbanded. Its work was done. Slavery was illegal.

Yet Britain might rule the seas but not all dry land; and legal status was far from the whole issue. So in 1839 the Anti-Slavery Society was formed, and gradually the understanding of slavery broadened to include forced labour and types of bonded labour. The OED gives one definition of slavery as "the condition or fact of being entirely subject to, or under the domination of, some power or influence", and finds the first figurative usage in 1592 as, no less, "the slavery of sin". But domination, power and force are perennial, even unto the present day.

Last month the Anti-Slavery Society gave its annual award to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida. The platform told us to rhyme Immokalee with broccoli. But tomatoes, not broccoli, were the issue. The coalition was founded in 1993 by a group of farmworkers, mainly Mexican, some from Guatemala or Haiti, to combat sub-poverty wages, forced labour and intimidatory beatings. As the campaign hotted up, there were fatal shootings by gang-masters and kneecappings, especially after a general strike by over 3,000 workers. And alongside low wages and brute force, ruinous prices in company stores and crazy rents for foul bunkhouses.

In 2001 the coalition began a Campaign of Fair Food, targeting the major fast-food corporations whose vast buying power kept the labourers' piecerate prices so inhumanely low. A four-year national consumer boycott of Taco Bell proved effective enough to bring its parent company, the vast Yum! Brands, to the table. Payments were increased and went straight to the workers. But the growers fought back, lobbying in the name of a no-holds-barred free-market capitalism and threatening coalition members and organisers. It got very nasty. Happily they overdid it. Congress began to take an interest and the FBI went over the heads of corrupt or idle local law officers to prosecute traffickers and growers. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2221954,00.html

[LakeSamish706]

1. The only thing that has changed is the source of slaves and...

the product that the slaves are cultivating... ie: used to be cotton, and now it's fruit/vegetables. There really is no difference in what the Union supposedly won against the Confederates...