Down �� And Out �� On The Farm - imported labor for agriculture - Brief Article

The Crow has found that even the most outrageous ideas may be taken seriously by bureaucrats.

About a year and a half ago I wrote an open letter to President Clinton -- tongue firmly in cheek -- suggesting that it would make more sense, logistically as well as economically, to reinstate the time-honoured institution of slavery in the United States than to continue the practice of assembling garments, toys, and electronics by child and adult slave labour in the so-called Export Producing Zones of far-flung overpopulated Third World countries.

The genesis of this brilliant idea, which was presented as an editorial in the December 1999 issue of The Ecologist was the fact that more than a million and a half non-violent drug offenders are currently incarcerated in American prisons, at a staggering cost of $50 billion a year to law-abiding tax payers.

Case in point: a penniless woman with no criminal record, who carried two ounces of cocaine from New York city to Albany in exchange for a free ride, was thrown in prison for 17 years under the state's mandatory sentencing rules, from which no judge dare deviate on penalty of being stripped of his judicial robes. More about the silly and self-defeating 'War on Drugs' in a coming issue. The point of my letter was simply that it would make more sense to put these druggies to work, performing some of the unskilled mobs which are now delegated to foreign slave labour.

But not for a moment did I suspect that my Swiftly satirical suggestion would be taken seriously. However, according to a recent article in the muck-raking American monthly Mother Jones -- named for the hell-raising 19th century labour activist Mary Harris Jones -- there is presently before Congress a bill that would permit US agribusiness to import up to one million seasonal farm workers from impoverished nations like Mexico, Jamaica and Guatemala -- up from the present number of about 50,000, which does not include an unknown number of illegal aliens.

The new system of importing foreign Gast-Arbeiter to harvest crops and perform other menial jobs has one big advantage over the old, ante-bellum system of plantation slaves: the 'guest workers' are only hired for six or seven months, and hence need not be housed and fed during the months when fields lay fallow; they are simply shipped back to their country of origin.

For the so-called H-2.A visas do not allow them to remain in the US after their term of employment expires. In this sense they are no more than indentured servants. While by law they are guaranteed certain rights as regards living conditions, working hours and minimum wages, in reality they are at the mercy of the farmers who have contracted for their labour, and who often have snitches on their payroll who report any signs of discontent to the boss, who can then summarily dismiss the alleged grouser.

On a big tobacco farm in North Carolina, 32 pickers sleep on mouldy mattresses in a hot, rat-infested tin shack, sharing six toilets and a stove on which to cook their two daily meals -- one before the 6 am call to work and one at night, after 12 hours of back-breaking work in the fields, often without access to safe drinking water or toilet facilities. Since they are not provided with any protection against potentially lethal pesticides, they have pooled their earnings to buy a washing machine in which to clean their overalls. While their federally mandated pay is good compared to what they could earn in their homeland, they are often short-changed by their temporary employer. As one farmer put it: 'We fuck 'em on the hours.' And the seasoned seasonal field hand knows better than to voice any complaints. Doing so might not only jeopardise his current job; it can put him on the list of undesirable candidates for future stints as ditch diggers, cane cutters, or potato pickers.

On the opposite side of the coin, the agribiz bosses who dole out the seasonal jobs -- often the only source of income for the Third World temps -- have little to fear by breaking the rules: 99 per cent of employers against whom complaints had been launched by workers to the US Department of Labor had no difficulty getting re-certified to receive their quota of slave labour the following year. This testifies to the power of Washington lobbies: it is cheaper for the big agricultural conglomerates and other players in the global marketplace to buy votes in Congress than to hire American workers, only a small number of whom ever get a crack at these seasonal jobs, even though there is no lack of applicants.

In the words of Mother Jones, 'the programme has turned NAFTA inside out: since US farms can't go to the Third World (the way manufacturing and mining companies can), the federal government lets agribusiness bring the Third World to US farms.'

Who said you can't have it both ways?

The Crow is a mouthpiece for thinkers with individual and strong views. This month, the role of The Crow was taken by Gard Binney.

COPYRIGHT 2001 MIT Press Journals
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group