Want to know the root of the global economic crash? Go to Florida.
Yes, the state's become infamous for its manic house "flipping," but in a deeper sense the crash can best be understood by paying attention to other disturbing news from Florida. Just drive northwest from Miami to Immokalee. If you've bought tomatoes this winter, there's a good chance they were harvested here. And there you'll see it.
We all know that when a big tree is toppled in a storm, its roots get exposed. In today's financial hurricane, big roots are sticking out of Immokalee's sandy soils. There, this week, as part of a delegation sponsored by Just Harvest, suddenly abstract economic "forces" got very real for me -- embodied in human lives, human faces. Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney General Doug Molloy described as "slavery, plain and simple"* some of what is happening here: For locking up, beating and threatening field workers-- some for up to two years -- seven prosecutions in a dozen years have sent men to prison. I got to see the "legal" parts of what's going on.
Twenty thousand farm workers live in Immokalee, and each day many gather at dawn hoping a grower will choose them to pick tomatoes till dusk.
They are legally covered by the minimum wage, but in practice, they often don't even get that. Nor do they benefit from many of the other labor laws that protect the rest of us. They must work as fast as possible to fill and haul as many 32-pound buckets as possible, each bringing them 40 to 50 cents. I'd thought I was pretty strong but was humbled by lifting even one over my head for throwing into a truck; and to earn even $6.00 an hour I'd have to lift and haul 100 such buckets in an eight-hour day.
But there's a theft of dignity happening off the fields, too. I toured a sample of workers' living quarters: a dilapidated, grungy, unheated, un-air-conditioned two-room, 300 square-foot trailer. Eight guys sleep here, and from them the landlord rakes in a total of almost $1,300 a month.
Why do I call this modern-day form of slavery and its legal face -- this kind of gross injustice -- the secret of today's imploding economies? It is simple. A market economy only works if people -- all people -- can participate in it, and do so from a position of real choice not coercion and fear. And that's exactly what's been disappearing from the face of the earth.
Why?
Because of the fantastical notion that a market driven largely by a single rule, by highest return to existing wealth, can sustain itself. It cannot, for wealth returns to wealth until, as in Monopoly, the game abruptly ends. Inequalities have been worsening -- in some cases like the U.S. and India quite rapidly -- in two-thirds of the world's nations in the last 15 years. The gap between compensation to CEOs and workers has leapt ten-fold in three decades. This isn't just an equity debacle; it is a market debacle.
When one family, the Walton's, controls as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans, and when 400 people control as much as half the world's population, markets get wacky: Not only do customers for even sweatshop-made goods shrink, but ever-more concentrated private-money power infuses itself into public decision making; it then uses that clout to further remove transparency and commonsense safeguards against shady financial instruments, modern-day enslavement, and monopoly control -- all of which contribute to the death of a market.
This is why I see the treatment of Immokalee workers as the embodied cause of our global financial meltdown. Their plight should alert us! We've drunk the market Kool-Aid -- the baseless idea that the market can work without us. Without citizens placing values around the market, wealth won't circulate. Nor can we all participate in the market from the ground of dignity. Without that, a storm will blow in sooner or later that will fell even the biggest tree.
Let's have the guts to examine the roots now exposed.
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If you'd like to stand with these workers and for yourself, you can. (Note that even if tomato pickers doubled their per bucket pay, their share would come to just over one percent of the $2.00 a pound you might pay for tomatoes.) Here's our opportunity: The human rights-award-winning organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has in the last four years won commitments from five giant food companies to pay a penny a pound more for tomatoes. But the growers' association refuses to let its members pass that fairer pay on to the workers.
So on Monday, March 9, Coalition members showed up at the office of the Governor of Florida, Charlie Crist (R), who had long refused their repeated requests to meet. Click here to email Governor Crist today! Ask him stand up for these workers' rights and to stand up for all of us: for the best thing that could happen to our sick economy is for those at the bottom to advance. Click here to download the petition (pdf) and collect signatures in your own community.
* The quote from Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney General Doug Molloy may found in an article (9/3/08) which requires purchase from the archives of Newspress, Ft Meyers, FL.
UPDATE FROM FRANCES MOORE LAPPE 4/7/09: After my visit and an action at the capitol by the farmworkers (3/35/09), Governor Crist issued a letter of support. Check with the Coalition of Immokalee Farmworkers for the action we all can take to support them.
Frances Moore Lappe is author of Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad and Diet for a Small Planet, among many other works. Visit her at www.smallplanet.org.
Follow Frances Moore Lappe on Twitter: www.twitter.com/fmlappe
Daniel Klein: Did A Slave Grow Your Tomato?
Their point was that socially controlling circumstances had taken so much buying power from the rural public that there was not enough cash flow left to keep the economic ball rolling. They mentioned the exploitive excesses of the 1920s - sharecropping, company towns with script money, one crop farming. They also told me that "the trusts" had taken so much money up out of the local areas that there was not enough left to do business.
There is no reason a market economy "only works if all people participate in it."
The tendency of people like Lappe to try to link unrelated issues under a single umbrella like the economic crisis is exactly why Presidents over-simplify arguments and use loaded language to justify their policies. President Bush knew this. That's why he justified every conservative action he could take by saying "9-11". Obama knows this, that's why he's doing things like unemployment insurance reform and increading ongoing educational funding under the umbrella of a short term economic stimulus. Or when he stresses that energy and health care reform are essential to solving the short term crisis.
The problem with this approach in my opinion is that we don't honestly evaluate the policies we enact, often to ill effect. It also increases cynicism of the electorate.
The argument for greater social equity is pretty good on its own. And in the long run, it is important for EVERYONE'S prosperity. But that's not the same as saying it is part of the current crisis.
This certainly not a matter of equating apples to oranges or connecting dots inappropriately; your comments raise serious ire in anyone who clearly sees the connections that you either don't understand or choose not to see.
Before you deride anyone else with such blatantly idioctic comments, please do try to understand the situation and how this works across a broad spectrum of economic applications. Free market fundamentalism is at the core of this crisis and the gross and inhuman ideology that inspires corporations and small business owners to maximize their own profits at the expense of those actually doing the work.
Anyone making the bogus claim that this article isn't directly pertinent to the current financial crisis is either clueless or seeking to shift blame from those who drive the policies that result in the conditions noted in this article.
Regardless, it is very important that we get out of the current crisis, not just for the newly unemployed but also for underpaid workers such as those Lappe highlights. I think people are not fully aware of the extreme hardship many people, particularly those already economically marginalized, may face if this thing truly melts down. And yes, I mean to suggest that it could possibly get so much worse than it is now that we see it as qualitatively different than it is today.
My argument is (1) that muddying the waters on the causes of the current crisis will make it harder to fix it and to prevent such crises in the future; and (2) pulling unrelated or distantly related social problems into the debate will undermine public support and even distract officials from making the fixes we need now.
Sorry. Slavery, or not, the real ripoff is at the other end, where hundreds of millions of people pay good money for unripe, tasteless fruit.
back to the pickers bosses: GREEDY OPPRESSIVE PEOPLE GOP