"Como trabajadores y mujeres, tenemos que luchar por nuestros derechos y contra la violencia tanto en la labor como en la casa"
"As women and as workers, we have to fight for our rights and against violence both in the fields and in our own homes"
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The top story in the Ft. Myers News Press today, Friday
December 9, reads:
"The Immokalee contractor
who prosecutors called 'brutal' for beating migrant
workers and extorting money from them to pay off
smuggling debts, spent 33 months in prison for enslaving
migrant farmworkers in 1999.
But today he's back in business
furnishing labor to farmers in Florida and New Jersey.
And it's perfectly legal. He can't own a gun or
vote, but the law says he can work as a labor contractor
five years after his conviction.
'It may be legal, but it ain't
right,' said Doug Molloy, chief assistant U.S. Attorney
in Ft. Myers who prosecuted Cuello and his brother
Basilio Cuello in 1999."
The CIW helped federal prosecutors develop the case
against Abel Cuello and his brother in 1999, one of
six such cases the CIW helped discover, investigate,
and prosecute since 1997. Laura Germino, Coordinator
of the CIW's Anti-Slavery Campaign, is quoted in the
same article, asking, "Regardless of the loophole
allowing him to get a license, what kind of company
hires someone with a criminal record -- particularly
a criminal record of egregious labor abuse -- to oversee
their employees?" (Click
here for the full story, "Former smuggler, slaver
back in business -- legally")
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The
above image, by Larry Kresek, is from an article
entitled
"Slaves Among Us," a guest commentary
by Doug Molloy to Gulfshore Life Magazine |
The answer to that question is Ag-Mart, a company
also in the news recently for being fined nearly $300,000
by Florida and North Carolina for repeatedly violating
rules designed to protect workers from dangerous pesticide
poisoning -- strict harvesting and field re-entry
rules that require a seven-day waiting period before
picking resumes after a pesticide application. Those
fines were the result of a seven-month probe by state
regulators that began after the Palm Beach Post reported
the births of three deformed babies to Ag-Mart farmworkers
in Immokalee. (Click
here for the Palm Beach Post editorial, "Publix
punishes Ag-Mart" 10/29/05)
Ag-Mart, of course, doesn't operate in a vacuum --
someone buys the tomatoes Ag-Mart produces. And so
the question begs to be asked: What kind of company
buys tomatoes produced by a grower that, by all accounts,
shows such disregard for its workers' rights, health,
and safety? According to a New York Times story from
February of this year, McDonald's is a major buyer
of Ag-Mart's grape tomatoes:
"J.M. Procacci, chief
operating officer of Procacci Brothers Sales Corporation
in Cedarville, NJ, said sales of grape tomatoes,
climbing for the past five years, had received a
particular boost from their inclusion in the McDonald's
premium salads. Since early 2003, grape tomato sales
in the United States have risen 25 percent; he attributes
a significant part of the gain to McDonald's."
(Click
here to see the entire article, "You Want Any
Fruit With That Big Mac?", 2/20/05)
Ag-Mart, marketer of the Santa Sweets grape tomato,
is a subsidiary of Procacci Brothers.
Today's story in the News Press raises some legitimate
-- indeed, urgent -- questions for McDonald's. First,
and foremost, does McDonald's, today, continue to
purchase tomatoes from Ag-Mart? If so, does McDonald's
condone the employment of a crewleader convicted of
indentured servitude? And more to the point, how would
McDonald's new partnership with the unproven, employer-dominated
"SAFE" initiative respond to Mr. Cuello's
return to managing labor in the company's supply chain?
[For more on SAFE see the CIW analysis, "What
we have learned," or scroll down this page
for statements by national religious, human rights,
and student organizations on the new initiative.]
SAFE requires only that employers abide by federal
and state labor law, and so Mr. Cuello's presence
in Ag-Mart's fields would not trigger any violation
of the SAFE code of conduct. Would McDonald's demand
more? Would the SAFE enforcement process even detect
the presence of a boss like Mr. Cuello, a man Nola
Theiss, co-chair of the Coalition Against Human Trafficking
in Southwest Florida, called "a human predator"?
Workers in Immokalee are dying to know.
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