The blood- and tomato plant-stained shirt above will be part of the museum’s unique catalog. The shirt was worn by a 17-yr old worker who was brutally beaten in 1996 by his supervisor after stopping work to take a drink of water. He walked several miles from the field to the CIW office, still wearing the bloody shirt, to lodge his complaint. The incident sparked a nighttime march of several hundred workers to the house of the crewleader in Immokalee.

Raj Patel (author of NY Times bestseller “Value of Nothing”) pens powerful Op/Ed crushing Publix for position on farm labor slavery!

Modern-Day Slavery Museum gathers impressive new statements of support as it enters final week before launch!

Author Raj Patel entered the fray this past week in the campaign calling on Publix to support the Campaign for Fair Food with a sharply-worded opinion piece published in the St. Petersburg Times (one of the Tampa/Lakeland area’s key papers). Here’s an excerpt (from “Supermarkets must take stand against slave conditions for tomato pickers,” 2/17/10):

“The gavel came down, the auction ended, and the winners carted their new purchases home. The bidders had walked the market, seen the wares, placed their offers and the highest bid won. It was a fair market price, struck 150 years ago outside Savannah, Ga., in a model of modern capitalism. At one of the last slave auctions in America, this was how 429 men, women and children were dispatched, through a timeless dance of supply and demand. Efficient. Mathematical. Unjust. The price may have been fair, but the market wasn’t.

Little could be further from our minds when we go into a modern supermarket, yet that dark history is much closer than we’d like to think. The descendant of Atlantic slavery taints all too many tomatoes picked in southern Florida today. Since 1997, well more than 1,000 people have been freed from conditions of modern slavery in the tomato fields of Florida. In the latest of such cases to surface, workers were chained inside trucks, charged $5 for a shower, and made to work for pennies a day, suffering heinous physical abuse from their employers…

… Yet many firms continue to ignore the call to improve farm labor conditions and end slavery in the fields. Among them is Publix, the No. 1 supermarket company in Florida, with revenues of $24 billion in 2009.

One might have imagined Florida’s self-styled “neighborhood grocer” to be more sympathetic to calls to end slavery in its suppliers’ operations. At the end of the day, it seems, business is business. The argument that Publix offers is that the tomatoes it buys — including those it buys from Pacific and Six Ls, the two growers associated with the latest slavery prosecution — are bought at a fair market price. According to Publix spokesman Dwaine Stevens they’re unwilling to interfere in what they regard as a labor dispute. “That’s not our role: to come between our suppliers and their workers.”

This is disingenuous on many fronts. First, while supply and demand have indeed met without hindrance, there’s nothing fair about profiting from the federal crime of slavery, no matter how smoothly and efficiently supply and demand have intersected. Second, when change has been demanded in the past, Publix has felt very able to make its own decisions. In 2005, the company stopped buying grape tomatoes from Ag-Mart, a supplier alleged to have violated state and federal pesticide laws. Publix cared when methyl bromide might have tainted its tomatoes — but it seems the sweat of modern-day slaves can be rinsed off a little easier…”

He concludes his piece with this: “While many other large corporations have adopted a code that raises farmworker wages and, for the first time, commits buyers to cut off suppliers who are involved in slavery, Publix has no plans to meet with the coalition. On its Web site can be found the line: ‘The Publix guarantee to never knowingly disappoint our customers is legendary in the industry.’ Consumers have every reason to be disappointed with Publix’s attitude. And Publix needs to live up to its word.” You can read the full text of the of the op/ed here.

Museum support pours in!… Meanwhile, support continues to flood in for the Modern-Day Slavery Museum, which is just days away from hitting the road. Since we last updated you, statements of support have come in from anti-slavery and human rights figures from Mary Robinson (former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, pictured here on the right) to preeminent historian Eric Foner of Columbia University and John Bowe, author of the highly-acclaimed 2007 book on modern-day slavery, “Nobodies“.

Here below is one example of the kind of statements that have come in during the past several days, this one from Kevin Bales, Pulitzer-nominated author and president of Free the Slaves, the internationally-respected anti-slavery advocacy organization:

“There is real slavery in the fields of Florida. This is not about lousy jobs, but violent control, vicious exploitation, and the potential for serious harm and even death. Even more heartbreaking is the fact that there has never been a day in the history of Florida agriculture without some amount of slavery tainting the food grown there. That food leaves the hands of slaves and ends up in the meals we eat with our families.

It is an ugly problem and we cannot solve problems we do not understand. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is one of the most effective anti-slavery groups on earth. Their new traveling museum helps all of us learn what we need to know in order to bring this crime to an end. This is a living museum that restores the right to life. This is not a dry and academic collection of dusty artifacts (and as a Professor I know about dry and dusty!). Bring the traveling museum to your town, church, library, or convention. Then take your children and friends and family. It is so much more than learning, it is our chance to be part of ending slavery.”

Dr. Kevin Bales
President, Free the Slaves
Emeritus Professor, Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation
University of Hull

Click here to see the full list of new statements for support for the Modern-Day Slavery Museum, and check back soon for the very latest news as the museum readies for his Feb. 28th launch!