Coalition of Immokalee Workers protest. Image by Getty Images via Daylife
What is it with Florida? The reports just keep coming in about Immokalee County, where poor immigrant workers are lured with the promise of jobs and then trapped in brutally inhumane conditions and not allowed to escape.
Over and over we have been asked to boycott this or that fast food restaurant in the last few years. After awhile we hear that the restaurant has nobly given in and agreed to pay a whopping extra penny a ton for tomatoes or whatever. And so we go back to eating there, maybe.
But the truth is none of that money ever goes to the poor workers, slaving under that hot sun without water, abused by overseers, and forced to live in abysmal squalor. None of that money is ever passed along to them so that their children can quit working in the fields to help feed the family.
Instead, the money is kept by the growers association, which has been running this racket for decades and does not want anything to interfere with it. So poor workers continue to be lured to Immokalee County with false promises, only to labor and live in conditions that would make most third-world countries look enticing.
For more information see the website of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Their stories will break your heart and turn your stomach. And make you angry–not only at what is being done to them, but that it is being done right here in the United States of America.
From election fixing to virtual slavery. There is a deep pattern of corruption here. When will someone clean up Florida?
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