The Coalition of Immokalee Workers acceptance speeches for the
2007 Anti-Slavery Award

Good evening. It's a tremendous honour to receive this award from such a storied organization like Anti-Slavery International. At the same time, of course, it is very troubling. The sad fact is that we are here today because there is slavery in the fields in the United States in the 21st century.

We work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a membership organization of farm workers, 4,000 members now, the majority of whom are immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti. Immokalee is a large labour reserve in South Florida, on top of the Everglades, that serves Florida's massive agricultural industry. Our members pick tomatoes and oranges nine months of the year in Florida, and then follow the crops up the East Coast, as far as New York, during the summer harvest.

We began as a community organization addressing exploitation in Immokalee - Lucas will explain more of this in a bit. We did not set out to be an anti-slavery organization. In the summer of 1992, however, while CIW members were visiting a labour camp in South Carolina, we encountered a young woman, Julia Gabriel, and her friends who explained that they had fled another labour camp on an isolated farm after a worker there had been shot for wanting to leave and go work elsewhere. Over time, others from her crew told us of 12-hour workdays and 7-day work weeks, of being awoken at dawn by gunshots instead of alarm clocks, of a young man who was beaten for telling other workers that forced labour was illegal in the US, of women sexually assaulted by the crew bosses, and of earning no more than $20 a week in wages, once "deductions" for transport to the job, rent, food, and so forth were taken out. More than 400 workers suffered this plight.

After five years of the CIW investigating and pressuring the government to act, the young woman who escaped saw her captors sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. Her employers were prosecuted on slavery, extortion, and firearms charges, using the same laws passed just after the US Civil War prohibiting peonage. Julia Gabriel is now a CIW member and winner of the RFK Award for her ongoing activism. I should note here that she and others formerly held in forced labour are not able to be here to tell you about it themselves because none has yet to receive the kind of papers which permit you to travel overseas, even, in Ms. Gabriel's case, after all these years.

But perhaps this case was an anomaly, or just "one bad apple" - in the words of one lobbyist for the agricultural industry when pressed by a journalist. Certainly no one in the agricultural industry or the corporations that bought the produce Ms. Gabriel and her colleagues picked spoke out after the sentencing - their response was a deafening silence. There were no outraged calls for reform, no contracts cut - the vegetables kept flowing to the market without so much as a hiccup.

So maybe Julia's case was just a fluke. But then our members uncovered and investigated another operation which was prosecuted on slavery charges in 2000. In that case, two bosses were convicted for holding dozens of workers in a trailer deep in the swamp of Southwest Florida and forcing them to pick tomatoes for virtually no pay. The grower where they worked said he had no idea whatsoever that the workers were being held against their will.

And after that case, another. Late one night, we received a call from a CIW member, "I called 911 emergency" - he said - "we are being attacked by men with guns! They look like bosses!" We drove an hour north to Lake Placid, to find a scene of blood, broken glass, and terrified workers at a store on the side of the highway. The member who called us worked for a taxi-van service catering to immigrant farm workers. This time, the passenger vans had made a scheduled stop to pick up workers wanting to leave Lake Placid to go elsewhere - but the armed gunmen, crew bosses, didn't want their workers to be free to leave. So they held up the passengers at gunpoint, beat the van drivers, and smashed the butt of a pistol on the forehead of the owner of the van service, splitting his head open and leaving him unconscious, saying, "You're the s.o.b.s who are stealing our workers." During the years-long investigation of those bosses, we had to help workers escape who later testified in federal court, and again, the crew bosses received 15-year sentences on slavery and firearms charges.

In all of these cases we are speaking of modern-day slavery, in the form of debt bondage, different of course from the legally sanctioned chattel slavery of the plantation era. The debt incurred starts from a transport fee -- workers too poor to pay upfront are told they can "owe" $1,000 for a ride to a job -- from Border States to farms in Florida or other Southern states. Upon arrival, workers learn they cannot leave until they pay off their debt -- and employers control their workers through violence or threats of violence, enforced in many cases by armed guards through beatings, shootings, and threats of death to families back home.

And when we use the term slavery we confine it to operations that have met the high standard of proof necessary to prosecute under federal law -- anti-slavery laws based on the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution and a new law enacted in 2001, The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the TVPA, which guarantees that victims' human rights are respected. In fact, the first case I spoke of, involving Julia, was one of the seminal cases leading to the drafting of the new law.

[Today, part of CIW's work involves training state and federal law enforcement, i.e., FBI, police, sheriffs, and NGOS on the rights of victims under the new law and how to identify and put a stop to slavery operations in their communities].

In closing, I'd like to underscore that while it is true that the cases I've mentioned here involve immigrants, that is only because the workforce as a whole in Florida is today majority immigrant. But forced labour preceded the relatively recent arrival of immigrant workers in Florida's fields. Thirty years ago, when the farm labour force was mostly US citizens, a significant percentage of the workers were also held in forced labour. Citizenship is not the key factor -- the drastic imbalance of power between workers and employers is.

We were reminded of this on our first full day here in London, when we visited the National Gallery's exhibit on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. The exhibit included a map showing 18th century slave plantations outside Daytona Beach, Florida. More than two hundred years later, our most recent prosecuted case involved an employer working a crew in fields just an hour away from those plantations in Daytona, in the small rural town of Palatka, Florida. Earlier this year, that boss received 30 years in jail for what the Department of Justice called the "worst form of servitude." His wife received 15 years and his son 10. They recruited homeless US citizens, mostly African-American, from homeless shelters, with promises of a roof over their heads and a good job. The workers found themselves indebted in isolated rural labour camps in Florida and the Carolinas, in fear and penniless. It's a chilling illustration of how fragile human rights truly are, and how they constantly need defending and expanding.

One thing to keep always in mind: the investigative work we do is vital, but it is cleaning up an abuse after it has already happened, that is, when it's too late. Here we have workers who've escaped describe the experience as, "I feel I came out of the darkness into the light," or "I came from death back to life." It's outrageous that anyone has to go through that in this day and age, or that we even have an Anti-Slavery Campaign at all. My colleague Lucas will be talking about how to prevent this from happening in the first place.

Lucas Benitez

Good evening -

As Laura was saying, eliminating already-existing slavery operations, while absolutely imperative, is nonetheless treating the symptom, not curing the disease. So while we of course will continue to treat the symptom, we must cure the disease, and prevent modern-day slavery from taking root in the first place. To do so, workers and consumers are acting together -- in the tradition of the abolitionist movement here in Great Britain -- as allies. And as allies fighting together in our Campaign for Fair Food we have arrived today at the threshold of a more modern, more humane agricultural industry. But before I explain where that Campaign stands at this moment, first I'd like to describe a bit of the road that has brought us to this place today.

When we first began meeting in the early 90s, workers in Immokalee endured terrible exploitation -- and I speak here of the majority of farm workers, those who are free, not held in forced labour. In the agricultural industry, "sweatshop" conditions prevail, what we call "sweatshops in the fields." And the factory-like conditions are similar to those at the turn of the 19th century in the US -- sub poverty wages, no benefits (that is, no health insurance, no sick leave, no pensions) and no right to overtime pay, no right to organize. Paid by piece rate -- 45 cents a bucket -- a rate which has not risen in 30 years. Except unlike a factory, there's no roof over your head, rather it's work done in the boiling sun, backbreaking, and you move from workplace to workplace, state to state. You live in trailers or shacks, 10-12 men per trailer, with exorbitant rents that can only be met by extreme overcrowding. Most workers have no cars, no phones in homes, no heat, no air-conditioning, none of the amenities taken for granted in the US.

We began organizing against this grim reality as a few dozen workers, and held a general strike of 3,000 workers in 1995, beating back a wage cut. But the feudal mentality of agribusiness was deeply entrenched, and well protected by laws designed to guarantee that growers hold power over their labour. In 1997, Six CIW members organized a 30-day hunger strike in 1997, their only demand: dialogue with the growers. Christmas passed, and then New Years, a striker went to the hospital, and still no word. The growers' resistance was not so much economic but rather based on a refusal to shift how they view their workers. They had a deep-rooted aversion to seeing workers as employees instead of as peons or hands. Back then, a friendly businessman told us of how he asked one of the growers, "Why don't you all go down to Immokalee and simply talk to the workers?" The grower responded, "Because a tractor doesn't tell the farmer how to run the farm."

In the following years we organized two more general strikes, and though our strikes brought about the first raises in 20 years, it grew increasingly clear that systemic change was not going to come from confronting the growers. In response to our pressure, growers claimed that they were caught in a "cost-price squeeze" with pressure from their buyers for ever-lower prices leaving them unable to raise wages.

Corporate buyers from the fast-food industry buy high volume in exchange for low price, wielding tremendous market power. That downward pressure on prices is translated directly into downward pressure on farm worker wages, and so in this way the major buyers of Florida produce are in fact a driving force behind the increasing misery of our members. Fast-food profits from farm worker poverty.

As we came to realize this, we also came to realize that if you can wield buying power to depress wages and working conditions, you can also use that power to demand fairer conditions and help improve wages. The same mechanism that draws profits to the top of the food industry can be reversed to return those profits to those that have been impoverished for so long at the bottom of that industry.

And so the Campaign for Fair Food was born.

We began our campaign after finding out that Taco Bell, a major fast-food chain in the US, bought its tomatoes from a major grower based in Immokalee. A year after first contacting Taco Bell and receiving no response, we launched a national boycott campaign. With the growing support of students, religious, and labour allies across the country, from the Carter Center, the Presbyterian and Catholic churches, and countless others, we were able to win that boycott after four years, establishing three key precedents for fair labour standards in agriculture:

• a penny more per pound to be passed directly on to the workers,
  
  
• a supplier code of conduct establishing fundamental human rights in the field, including the first enforceable zero tolerance policy against slavery,
  
  
• a guaranteed role for workers in drafting, enforcing, and monitoring the code in the fields.

Taco Bell is part of the enormous corporation YUM Brands - owner as well of Pizza Hut, KFC, and others -- and soon after, YUM's other brands also agreed to participate in paying a penny more per pound.

We then launched a campaign against McDonald's, and two years later, came to an agreement that expanded upon the Taco Bell agreement, involving the creation of an industry-wide supplier code of conduct and a third-party monitoring system, with worker participation in its implementation.

So with the leadership -- albeit after initial strong resistance -- from both the world's largest restaurant system (YUM) and the world's largest restaurant chain (McDonald's), the road to systemic change was laid out, and a functioning, workable model in place. Other corporations serious about social responsibility could simply agree to participate and drastically improve the lives of the farm workers picking the tomatoes that end up in burgers and sandwiches.

Naturally, we approached Burger King, the second-largest burger chain, with its headquarters in Miami. But Burger King not only remains recalcitrant, but is even working actively to undermine the agreements already in place. Burger King is working in conjunction with the agribusiness lobby which is against their member growers participating in the agreements. To clarify -- the lobby is against giving a raise to farm workers even when it's paid for by someone else. Again, the industry's resistance is not based on economic reasons.

What we have achieved so far is through an historic alliance of workers and consumers. That alliance is key to bringing an end to the sweatshop conditions that allow slavery to prevail, through pressuring more and more corporations to take responsibility for abuses in their supply chains. The movement is growing and growing: consumers don't want to partake of food produced in forced labour or exploitation, and it's not a question of if we win, but when. With an excellent ally such as Anti-Slavery International at our side, we know European consumers will join the fight.

The abuses are preventable, a model of the solution already in place, and it needs to happen now.

I invite all of you to come to Miami November 30th and march along side us to Burger King! I assure you the weather will be better than here. . . . And I'll leave you with this: here in England, you all may or may not appreciate, but will surely understand, one of the chants we'll be shouting on that march:

"Serfs Up! Kings Down!" "Serfs Up! Kings Down!"

Thank you