Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy - Hardcover

Bowe, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400062098 ISBN 13: 9781400062096

Publisher: Random House, 2007

Synopsis

Most Americans would be shocked to discover that slavery still exists in the United States. Yet most of us buy goods made by people who aren’t paid for their labor–people who are trapped financially, and often physically. In Nobodies, award-winning journalist John Bowe exposes the outsourcing, corporate chicanery, immigration fraud, and sleights of hand that allow forced labor to continue in the United States while the rest of us notice nothing but the everyday low price at the checkout counter.

Based on thorough and often dangerous research, exclusive interviews, and eyewitness accounts, Nobodies takes you inside three illegal workplaces where employees are virtually or literally enslaved.

In the fields of Immokalee, Florida, underpaid (and often unpaid) illegal immigrants pick the produce all of us consume, connected by a chain of subcontractors and divisions to such companies as PepsiCo and Tropicana. At the top of the chain are stockholders and politicians; at the bottom is a father of six, one of whose children suffers from leukemia, who entered America only to become the unpaid employee of a labor contractor nicknamed “El Diablo” for his cruelty.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the John Pickle Company reaped profits for years making pressure tanks used by oil refineries and power plants. Feeling squeezed by foreign competition and government regulations, JPC partnered with an Indian and Kuwaiti firm to import workers from India. Under the guise of a “training program,” fifty-three workers, including college-educated Uday Ludbe, came to the United States, only to have their documents confiscated and to find themselves confined to a factory building. Pickle laid off Americans and paid the Indians three dollars an hour.

Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific where the author lived for three years, has long been exempted from American immigration controls, tariffs, and federal income tax–a status quo assiduously protected by lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Congressman Tom DeLay. There, garment magnates–selling to clothing giants like the Gap and Target–live in luxury while thousands of foreign factory workers, 90 percent of them female, work sixty-hour weeks for $3.05 an hour and spend weekends trying to trade sex for green cards. The garments they make are allowed to be labeled MADE IN AMERICA.

Nobodies is a vivid and powerful work of investigative reporting, but it is also a lively examination of the eternal struggle for power between free people and unfree people. Against the American landscape of shopping mall, outlet stores, and Happy Meals, Bowe reveals how humankind’s darker urges remain alive and well, lingering in the background of every transaction and how understanding them may lead to overcoming them.

About this title

About the Author:

John Bowe has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The American Prospect, National Public Radio’s This American Life, McSweeney’s, and others. He is the co-editor of Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, one of Harvard Business Review’s best books of 2000, and co-screenwriter of the film Basquiat. In 2004, he received the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Sydney Hillman Award for journalists, writers, and public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good, and the Richard J. Margolis Award, dedicated to journalism that combines social concern and humor. He lives in Manhattan.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Florida

On April 20, 1997, at around 10 p.m., the Highlands County, Florida, Sheriff's Office received a 911 call; something strange had happened out in the migrant-worker ghetto near Highlands Boulevard. The "neighborhood," a mishmash of rotting trailer homes and plywood shacks, was hidden outside the town of Lake Placid, a mile or two back from the main road. By day, the place was forbidding and cheerless, silent, its forlorn dwellings perched awry, in seeming danger of oozing into the swamp. By night, it was downright menacing, humid and thick with mosquitoes.  

When the sheriff's officers arrived, they found an empty van parked beside a lonely, narrow lane. The doors were closed, the lights were still on, and a few feet away, in the steamy hiss of night, a man lay facedown in a pool of blood. He had been shot once in the back of the head, execution-style. Beyond his body stood a pay phone, mounted on a pole.  

The 911 caller had offered a description of a truck the sheriff's officers recognized as belonging to a local labor contractor named Ramiro Ramos. At 1:30 a.m., officers were dispatched to Ramos's house.  

It's unclear how much the officers knew about the relationship between Ramos and his employees. Migrant farmworkers-nearly all undocumented Mexican and Central Americans, in this case-usually arrive in this country with little comprehension of English or of American culture. Since they frequently come with little money and few connections, the contractor, or crew boss, as he's often called, often provides food, housing, and transportation to and from work. As a result, many farmworkers labor under the near-total control of their employers. Whether the sheriff's officers were or weren't clued in to the fraught implications of this dynamic, they would undoubtedly have gained insight into Ramos's temperament if they'd known the nickname for him used by his crew of seven hundred orange pickers. They called him "El Diablo."  

At Ramos's house, police found a truck fitting the caller's description. When a quick search of the vehicle yielded a .45-caliber bullet, police decided to bring in Ramos, his son, and a cousin for questioning. Interrogated at the station house, Ramos admitted that the night before, he had gone driving around the dirt roads outside town, collecting rent from his workers and looking, he said, "for one of his people." But when the police asked him if his search had any connection with the shooting, he said he didn't know anything about it. According to the sheriff's report, Ramos at this point became "upset" and said he wished to leave. He and his relatives were released.  

The deputies went into the night, looking for migrant workers who might be willing to offer additional testimony. Witness by witness, a story began to take shape. The dead chofer, or van driver, was a Guatemalan named Ariosto Roblero. The van had belonged to a servicio de transporte, a sort of informal bus company used by migrants. The van and its passengers had been heading from South Florida, where orange season was ending, to North Carolina, where cucumber season was getting under way. Everything seemed fine until they hit the migrant ghetto outside Lake Placid. Roblero had stopped to to make a pickup. And then, as the van waited, a car and a pickup truck raced up, screeched to a halt behind and in front of it, and blocked it off. An unknown number of men jumped out, yanked the chofer from his seat, and shot him. The other driver and the terrified passengers scattered into the night.  

With each new detail, an increasingly disturbing picture of Ramos's operation began to emerge. El Diablo, it seemed, had been lending money to his workers, then overcharging them for substandard "barracks-style" housing, gouging them with miscellaneous fees, and encouraging them to shop at a high-priced grocery store, conveniently owned by his wife. By the time El Diablo had deducted for this, that, and the other thing, workers said, they were barely breaking even.  

Worse, they were trapped. El Diablo's labor camp was in a tiny, isolated country town. He and his family, a network of cousins and in-laws, many of whom also worked as labor contractors, patrolled the area in their massive Ford F-250 pickup trucks, communicating with one another through Nextel walkie-talkie phones. For foreigners unfamiliar with the area, escape was almost unthinkable. But just to make matters crystal clear, El Diablo told his workers that anyone indebted caught trying to run away would be killed.  

The previous night's murder, the witnesses alleged, had taken place when an indebted employee had left. The murder was meant to send a signal to local workers and to chofers thinking about aiding their departure from El Diablo's territory.  

If the case sounds like a slam dunk, what happened next was, unfortunately, all too common in cases involving undocumented workers. After spilling most of the beans off the record, all the informants but one declined to name Ramos or his accomplices as the perpetrators, or even to offer their own names. One of the passengers in the murder victim's van told detectives that he couldn't remember a single thing about the incident. He managed not to see the color, the model, or the make of either assailant's vehicle, nor did he see who shot whom, or whether, in fact, anyone had even been shot. He only said that he was leaving for Mexico the next day, never to return.  

Another witness acknowledged seeing the murder but, according to the sheriff's report, refused to name the shooter, stating his belief that "if he told, he would be killed by the Ramos family." The Ramoses knew where his family lived in Mexico, he said; if they didn't kill him personally, they would kill one of his relatives. He, too, was leaving town and wouldn't tell where he could be reached.  

The sheriff's office was stumped. There wasn't much they could do without firmer testimony. However, they contacted federal authorities, and a few weeks later, at dawn on May 1, 1997, local law enforcement agents, backed by the Border Patrol and the U.S. Department of Labor, returned to Ramiro Ramos's house armed with a search warrant. The house and office yielded an arsenal of weapons not generally considered essential to labor management, including a Savage 7-millimeter rifle, a Marlin .22 rifle, an AK-47, a semiautomatic rifle, a Browning 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, and a Remington 700 7-millimeter Magnum rifle. The agents arrested Ramos and charged him with immigration violations.  

One would think, perhaps, that authorities would have enough evidence to halt a clearly and alarmingly exploitive situation. Here were seven hundred workers on U.S. soil working under threat of death, for low pay or possibly no money at all.  

Five days later, Ramos was released on $20,000 bail. The labor charges were dropped. Weapons charges were never brought. Business went on as usual. And the murder of Ariosto Roblero remains, to this day, "unsolved."  
The collective image of the South Florida interior is usually conjured by a single word: swamp. Beyond a smattering of self-described "crackers" and a few thousand American Indians sweating it out on sleepy reservations, the area has traditionally been reluctantly populated. The reasons for this are easy enough to understand: the landscape is unremittingly flat; summer temperatures are stultifying. Even in winter, the air hangs heavy, dank, and still-except, of course, during the frequent thunderstorms and devastating hurricanes for which the area is known.  

"I've got swampland in Florida I'd like to sell you" has long been a way of teasing a person for being gullible. The joke refers to the Florida land boom of the 1920s, which began when the increasing popularity of bona fide boomtowns like Miami and Palm Beach caused parcels elsewhere in the state to be gobbled up, usually sight unseen, by speculation-crazed northerners. Tracts billed as "oceanfront" were often situated dozens of miles away from open water or roads and chopped into ridiculous proportions, most famously by a Mr. Charles Ponzi, to as many as twenty-three lots per acre. The fact that few buyers had ever dreamt of actually moving to the "Riviera of America" didn't deter Florida land prices from rising as much as 1,000 percent annually-that is, until the fall of 1926, when the famous Miami hurricane battered the area, crashing the market and causing the overpriced deeds to become as worthless as the muck they represented.  

In the last eighty years or so, the area has been tamed, drained, canaled, paved, built upon, planted over, covered with ethylene plastic, injected with pesticides and fertilizers, and thereby induced into yielding a more predictably handsome return on investment. The steamy lowlands have become an outdoor food factory, a hydroponic stew of gook and chemicals capable of producing year-round. Florida now churns out more fruits and vegetables than any state but California, reaping an average of about $7 billion per year.  

Almost anything can be grown on Florida's 44,000 farms: some 280 different crops, including tobacco, potatoes, peanuts, escarole, pecans, okra, peppers, cucumbers, snap peas, radishes, sweet corn, and even normally cold-weather-loving blueberries. But the principal commodities are juice oranges (1.2 billion gallons from 103 million trees), tomatoes (1.5 billion pounds a year), and sugarcane (about a half billion dollars a year).  

Some forty miles inland from Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island is the town of Immokalee. A few towns down from Lake Placid, it sits at the bottom of a cluster of remote agricultural outposts dotting the South Florida interior. Three stoplights long, Immokalee (which rhymes with broccoli and means "my home" in Seminole) is bordered on the south by the Big Cypress Swamp a...

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1400062098
• ISBN 13: 9781400062096
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336