When will the governor meet?

ON A sunny and warm early spring day, farmworkers, students, journalists, activists and members of the clergy, all friends and supporters of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) got to Tallahassee, Fla., with a simple request: a meeting with Gov. Charlie Crist.

But meeting with a grassroots organization that fights against the abuses perpetrated on a daily basis in the Florida fields would mean Crist admitting that there is a problem with workers' rights in the Sunshine state.

On March 9, the CIW brought to the capital city of Florida the 36,925 signed petitions taking the governor to task. In an open letter, the CIW requested Crist to publicly renounce the comments made by Florida Department of Agriculture spokesman Terence McElroy who inhumanely downplayed the gravity of the conditions of farmworkers.

Against the backdrop of the white and shiny State Capitol, Florida farmworkers dramatized the latest of the seven cases of modern-day slavery that the CIW has uncovered: Two men pick tomatoes from dawn to sunset, threatened, beaten up, forced in and out of a truck by a mean-looking contractor; then the man gets paid by his boss, puts all the money in his pockets, and chains the workers back into the van.

CIW members re-enacted the way the Navarette brothers treated their workers. Last December, Cesar and Geovanni Navarette pleaded guilty to running a slavery operation on their property.

"Of course, I say any instance is too many, and any legitimate grower certainly does not engage in that activity (slavery)." Mr. McElroy had said. "But we are talking of maybe a case a year."

Posters of recent national and international news articles about the abuses perpetrated in Florida were positioned on the grassy lawn of the Capitol: an open invitation to the passersby to reflect on the existence of slavery in the 21st century. A series of notable, longtime CIW supporters spoke from the podium to the couple of hundred people gathered there to listen.

BUT LET'S step back for a second.

Before the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, slaves were imported from Africa and deployed not only to pick tobacco, sugar and cotton in the southern United States, but also the produce American families put on their tables. Additionally, indentured servants imported from Europe supplied the remaining, necessary agricultural labor force.

The legal abolishment of slavery did not bring justice and fair treatment in the fields, especially in the South. Along with poor whites, mostly African Americans kept harvesting the crops around the country, living and working in inhuman conditions as the CBS documentary presented by Ed Murrow, Harvest of Shame, showed in 1960.

Things somewhat changed with the Second World War. American men (whites and Blacks) were drafted and sent to fight in Europe. In order to meet the demand for manual labor, while women were quickly expected to get out of their private realms and go work in the factories; "brazos" were imported from Mexico to harvest the American fields. Under the official aegis of the Bracero Program, strong, young arms were brought to the U.S. to work the fields and feed American families. The agricultural program was eventually closed in 1964 after repeated abuses were reported.

One of the activists and labor organizers who fought the guest-worker plan was César Chávez, who, in the 1960s, organized the Filipino and Mexican workers in California and led a successful grape boycott. It was a nonviolent movement, and Chávez almost starved himself to death to keep it nonviolent.

One of the major supporters of migrant workers' rights, the one that could have extended Chávez's efforts on the national level was a young New York senator: his name was Robert F. Kennedy. Dolores Huerta, Chávez's wife, strenuously worked in the campaign that led Kennedy to win the California primary.

In the 21st century, farmworkers are still routinely exploited. According to the National Labor Relations Board, farmworkers cannot unionize, at least at the national level. In California, the United Farmworkers (UFW), the organization founded by Chávez and Huerta in 1962, is today an important pressure group with a large base. However, in Florida unions are inexistent, and farmworkers are still very vulnerable.

"The agriculture industry is sick," said CIW representative Gerardo Reyes-Chavez from the podium of the Capitol. "It's a kind of cancer. The cancer can be seen in the form of stagnant wages, or when the humanity of the workers is not recognized. The seven cases of modern-day slavery are just little more than symptoms of these conditions, though the most extreme one."

CIW is proposing a new model--a model of labor negotiations that has worked in the past and for the acknowledgment of the institutions to obtain implementation, and thus allow the struggle for farmworkers' rights to move forward. Indeed, farmworkers are still paid by piece work, they have no insurance, no right to sick leave or vacation time. Their work days begin before the sun rises and end when the sun sets.

In the last few years, the CIW has been able to gather around the same table corporations and farmworker representatives in defense of human rights in the fields of Florida. CIW requested and eventually obtained a raise of one cent per bushel of picked tomatoes. The increase would double the wages of the Florida farmworkers.

Indeed, although four major fast food chains (Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King and Subway) have conceded, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE) has yet to lift the ban that would actually allow the farmworkers to get paid. Back in December 2007, the FTGE threatened its members with $100,000 fines if they complied with the agreements; as a sort of pitiful justification for such minatory practice, the FTGE maintained that mysterious, undefined legal technicalities existed that would prevent the implementation of the agreements, which have been labeled by FTGE Executive Vice President Reggie Brown as "illegal and un-American."

"The entire world cannot discover that there is a problem with agriculture only when new cases of ecoli or salmonella appear, while in the meantime modern-day slavery occurs without anyone taking action," Gerardo Reyes reminded the Tallahassee audience.

ON MARCH 9, Charlie Crist did not show up. He sent a team instead to meet with the CIW and talk about enforcement.

"But enforcement occurs after people have been enslaved," pointed out Laura Germino who helped the workers of Immokalee to get organized back in the early nineties.

"Preventive action is needed. Slavery occurs in degraded labor environments," she continued, speaking on behalf of Freedom Network USA, an organization that tracks trafficking survivors.

The silence of Charlie Crist--and of the governors that came before him--on the human rights' situation in the Florida fields speaks volume about the tight relationships between the farmers of Florida and its politicians. Agriculture is the second industry in the Sunshine state (right after tourism) with over 44,000 farms and an annual production of over $7 billion.

Several crops are grown in the fields around the town of Immokalee, which is located in southwest Florida and hosts the main labor pool for the state's farming workforce: cucumbers, peppers, watermelons, squashes, potatoes, but more than anything else, citrus and tomatoes. During the winter months, Florida farmworkers handpick 90 percent of the tomatoes consumed in the entire country.

"I am sure that there are growers out there that are thinking about making this change happen," said Rev. Noelle D'Amico, National Coordinator of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. "There's no middle ground, no third way."

"Where are you Governor Crist?" repeatedly asked Jim Goodma, founder and president of Family Farm Defenders. "I have done hard-work labor all my life...and I have always said I would never do something I wouldn't do myself. That's why I don't understand why more farmers would not come forward to support human rights!"

I had left Montgomery, Ala., on the day before, while the city was celebrating the hundreds of courageous and mostly unknown women and men who marched from Selma to the capitol demanding voting rights for African Americans. One person cannot start a movement Georgette Norman, director of the Rosa Parks Museum, had stressed a few days earlier while lecturing about the Montgomery Bus Boycott at Auburn University Montgomery. A social protest cannot change the law, she rightly pointed out. That's the job of lawmakers and politicians.

In the last few years, the CIW has been able to build a broad, diverse and nonviolent movement around farmworkers' rights. Now, a political response is needed.

In 2009, the farmworkers of Florida are asking Governor Crist and society as a whole to stand up for human rights.

They said they will be back. They said they will be watching.

As I was about to finish this article, news came that Governor Crist had accepted a meeting with the CIW on March 25--the same day, 44 years ago that 25,000 marchers finally reached the Montgomery Capitol to pressure George Wallace, another governor, who was unwilling to listen to the requests of the civil rights movement.

Governor Crist, we will be watching.