A Slavery Museum Hits the Road

Think slavery in the United States was so 19th century? Think again, and direct your eyes toward the tomato fields of Florida. For decades, farmworkers in Florida have been picking tomatoes at slavery-level wages (not to mention in slavery-level conditions). Those tomatoes have ended up on your fast-food tacos, your fast-food burgers, in your grocery store produce aisles, and on your foot-long subs.

How dire are the straits for Florida farmworkers? Wages are so low that one farmworker would need to pick two tons of tomatoes a day, just to be able to earn minimum wage. Yup, that's right. At a rate of only $.45 per 32-lb bucket of tomatoes, farmworkers have to toil in fields for hours upon hours just to be able to pull in minimum wage.

And the horror doesn't stop with low wages. These same farmworkers are unable to organize, meaning that they don't have the right to collectively bargain with their employers for things like overtime pay, sick time, family leave, and more. And in more extreme situations, farmworkers are actually kept against their will, forced to pick tomatoes in fields beyond working hours, and forced into cramped living situations.

Since 1997, federal prosecutors have filed slavery charges against seven businesses and employers in Florida, leading one federal prosecutor to label the region "ground zero for modern-day slavery."

In the past decade, perhaps no organization in the U.S. has helped bring forward the faces and voices caught in this slavery cycle than the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). The CIW is an organization that works for farmworker rights in Southern Florida (and elsewhere throughout the U.S.). The organization has pressured fast-food giants Taco Bell, Burger King and McDonald's to make changes in their corporate policies that make lives better for the farmworkers that provide their tomatoes.

Now, the CIW is leading a traveling exhibit to educate the public on issues of slavery. They're spreading the word about modern-day slavery by going town-to-town, particularly in Florida, to let folks know that slavery is still very much a problem in this country, and that it may be happening your backyard. And as Amanda Kloer writes over at Change.org's Human Trafficking blog, this museum also comes complete with tools to get activists to take action and end slavery.

One exhibit, on display this past week at Florida State University, was a produce truck. But not just any produce truck. It was a truck used to highlight the story of four migrant farmworkers in southern Florida. Turns out that on Thanksgiving Day 2007, while millions of folks were watching parades and eating turkey, these four workers were chained inside the truck by their employers. The four farmworkers escaped, and years later, the folks who locked them up inside that truck -- Cesar and Geovanni Navarrette -- were found guilty of involuntary servitude.

That's good news for these four farmworkers, for sure.  But their story is symbolic of a pattern faced by hundreds, if not thousands of farmworkers throughout the region. And that's the point of the traveling exhibit -- to give voice to the nameless and countless folks working in the tomato fields of Florida.

"I'm shocked by how much the United States condemns everywhere else in the world for similar situations," said Florida State University student Lamar Harris, according to Tallahassee.com. "What's being done to stop abuse in our own backyard?"

The traveling slavery tour will be hitting scores of cities across Florida through early April. It will all culminate in the Farmworker Freedom March in Lakeland, Florida. The march will run from April 16-18, and will end with a demonstration in front of grocery store megachain Publix's headquarters.

As the CIW puts it, modern day slavery doesn't occur in a vacuum.

"While the phenomenon of forced labor has taken many forms over the past four centuries in Florida agriculture, the industry has never been entirely free of the scourge of slavery," writes the CIW. That history lies at the heart of CIW's work, the heart of the Farmworker Freedom March, and the heart of the traveling slavery museum.

Photo credit: OakleyOriginals