Thank you Chairman Burton, Ranking Member Watson, and esteemed Members of the Government Reform Committee for giving me the opportunity to provide testimony on behalf of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), from Immokalee, Florida, on the issue of modern-day slavery, an issue that remains all too real for workers in the US agricultural industry today.

Before I begin, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the leadership of this committee for assembling this important hearing on slavery. The practice of slavery and trafficking in humans has been condemned by the international community and has been criminalized in the U.S., yet it continues to exist in parts of the U.S. agriculture industry. It is my hope that todayís hearing will help raise awareness of the issue of modern day slavery in the United States and, more importantly, will lead to specific amendments to US policy and agricultural labor practices that adversely affect tens of thousands migrant farm workers.

I represent farm workers in Florida, many former victims of modern-day slavery, and tens of thousands of people across the country who support the Coalition of Immokalee Workersí efforts to end modern day slavery and poverty wages in this countryís fields. To date, our efforts have helped win unprecedented change for the farm workers who pick crops along the U.S.ís East Coast, including the discovery and prosecution of five slavery operations since 1997 -- resulting in the liberation of over 1,000 workers -- and the first raise in over twenty years for workers in the tomato harvest. This industry-wide raise has covered thousands of workers from Florida to Pennsylvania.

The anti-slavery work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been called a ìmodern-day underground railroadî by the St. Petersburg Times on December, 2002. That term reflects not only the danger involved in our work, as violence has long been a hallmark of most agricultural slavery rings, but also the generally dismal state of human rights in the isolated rural areas of the East Coast that the CIW members are organizing to bring into the 21st century.

In fact, it is our belief that the individual cases of slavery we have discovered, while horrific, are only the most extreme manifestation of a much larger problem in agriculture. In short, US agriculture operates in an environment of daily, systematic violation of human rights, and it is within that context that slavery, the most egregious form of labor rights violation, is allowed to flourish. While it is important to identify and prosecute individual slavery cases as they arise, we feel that it is imperative to address the broader context of agricultural labor relations if we are to ever hope to eliminate slavery in this countryís fields once and for all.

Only once a more modern, more humane system of labor relations is in place ñ one in which farmworkersí basic labor and human rights, including the right to organize, the right to overtime pay, and the right to a fair wage, are respected without exception ñ will we be able as a society to eradicate the stain of slavery from this great countryís proud image.

Until that day, we will continue to see cases like that of Julia Gabriel.

Julia Gabriel is a Guatemalan Mayan farm worker from a poor peasant family. Julia first came to her work in human rights in 1992, through her experience of being held captive on in South Carolina fields with hundreds of other Guatemalan and Mexican workers of indigenous Mayan and Aztec origin. When she arrived from Arizona to work in South Carolina, the employers told her and the rest of the crew that everyone owed a debt for the transportation to the labor camp; if anyone tried to escape, they would be killed. Gunmen kept workers under armed guard, and the employers would regularly rouse the workers at 4 am by firing gunshots. Ms. Gabriel and her co-workers worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week harvesting cucumbers. At the end of each week, the employers took out rent, food, the transportation fee, and other charges, leaving the workers with as little as $20 for the week.

Visitors to the camp - vendors in vans, priests, relatives - were forbidden entry and run off the camp, at times with gunshots and beatings. The bosses, who ran a 400-person slavery ring operating in Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia, physically abused the men and sexually abused the women in their employ.

One day, a co-worker of Ms. Gabrielís, who had been to the US previously, told his coworkers, ìin the US, you donít have to work by force.î The bosses overheard his comment, and began beating him savagely, a public beating intended to send an unmistakable message to the rest of the crew. They pistol-whipped another worker who tried to intervene, who fell to the ground, unconscious. Ms. Gabriel, who witnessed the attack and rushed to help, began to plan her escape. She told others that she had come to believe that their experiences were not normal for life in the United States; she and her co-workers debated the issue.

Shortly following the attack, workers said that the bosses shot a worker from Chiapas several times in the stomach, a worker who had wanted to go elsewhere to work and pay off his debt. In the confusion, someone managed to run to a house down the road to call the police. Ms. Gabriel and six co-workers escaped in the middle of the night, taking their chances in the South Carolina countryside. The group found work with another crew leader, some three hours to the east in Beaufort, picking tomatoes, as Ms. Gabriel says,ìmaking only enough to get by, but we were free, no one beat us, and we could go the store or the laundromat whenever we wanted to.î

Ms. Gabriel had escaped. As an individual, she could have chosen to put the nightmare behind her.

Yet when members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers visited the Beaufort labor camp and spoke about workersí rights, she took the opportunity to gather her six countrymen and relay to the CIW members the story of how her former boss had shot a man, had beaten a friend, and had held the entire crew against their will. Ms. Gabriel joined the Coalition, and together with other CIW members, began pushing the US government to investigate the slavery operation.

Back in 1992, slavery was not a political priority for the US Department of Justice, and even less so for the FBI, the DOJís investigative arm. But Ms. Gabriel, given the opportunity to be a partner in the search for justice within the context of the Coalition, searched for additional witnesses. Extremely worried about a young woman who was still on the camp, Ms. Gabriel enlisted a friend to drive back to the camp to try and see how her friend was. With Ms. Gabriel hidden, they arrived at the entrance, where the employer told the van driver that he would shoot and kill him if he didnít leave immediately. In spite of her fear, Ms. Gabriel did not back down. Over the course of the multi-year investigation to follow she located several witnesses to testify to the government officials, including two men who had been held against their will and who had witnessed the shootings, and a 17 year-old indigenous girl who had suffered great abuse.

After 5 years of investigations by Ms. Gabriel and other CIW members, the USDOJ finally prosecuted the case. Ms. Gabriel testified in a secret federal Grand Jury, and after her captors pled guilty, she testified at the sentencing to the judge. The US court system was completely unknown to her. With her captors staring her down in the courtroom, she stood and began to speak through a translator, faltering at the start. She then looked directly at the judge, and told him step by step what she had seen and suffered, and told him, ìDo not show compassion to these men, for they showed no compassion to those who were under their care.î The Charleston judge imposed twin 15-year sentences, the longest sentences ever for slavers of Latino/Mayan farm workers (US vs. Flores).

The Flores prosecution turned out to be a seminal case in the formation of the federal Worker Exploitation Task Force in 1998, which led, in turn, to the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA). The VTVPA, signed into law by President Clinton in January 2001, is the first anti-slavery law to be enacted in the US since the 1865 laws prohibiting peonage during the Reconstruction.

And in 1999, when Department of Justice officials were working on a difficult slavery case out of West Palm Beach, Florida, they turned to Ms. Gabriel, asking her to counsel victims who were afraid to confront their captors and to share her own experience and perspective with the victims in that case. Several months later, the leaders of the slavery operation were sentenced to 15 years in federal prison, based on their victimsí testimony. Prosecutors later said that Ms. Gabrielís intervention was key to the success of that very important case (US vs. Cadena).

I have gone into such detail in recounting Ms. Gabrielís story in order to not only give you a full sense of the challenges, dangers, and hardships she has faced and the triumphs she has managed to win in such difficult circumstances, but also to sketch in very real terms the context of human rights in US fields today. Isolated labor camps, overwhelmingly powerful and sometimes violent bosses, recently-arrived immigrant workers unaware of their rights and cast out alone to make a living in the harshest of conditions -- that is the reality faced by the vast majority of farm workers today in this country. And that is the reality that gives rise to slavery in Florida, called ìground zero for modern-day slaveryî in a recent article in the New Yorker magazine.

Of course, slavery is the most extreme of the abuses faced by those who harvest this countryís fruit and vegetables. Sweatshop conditions, however, are the everyday reality. The work is long, hot, and backbreaking -- a worker must pick two tons of tomatoes to earn $50. Living conditions are dismal. In the midst of US plenty, workers have no telephones, no cars, no heat or air conditioning in the shacks and trailers they inhabit, sharing with 12-15 others. Three families may live to a single-wide trailer, hanging sheets as dividing walls, charged up to $1,200 per month in rent. According to the US Department of Labor, farm workers earn only $7,500 per year - far below poverty level. They receive no benefits, no right to overtime pay for overtime work, no sick leave, no vacation pay, no health insurance, and are denied the right to organize. They have been excluded from the National Labor Relations Act since its passage in 1938, and remain excluded from the right to overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

It is no exaggeration to say that the multi-billion dollar US fruit and vegetable industry is in fact founded upon the systematic violation of two -- if not three -- of the most fundamental human rights as defined in the UN Declaration on Human Rights. The right to organize, the right to fair compensation, and, all-too-often, the right to work free of forced labor are routinely violated in the planting, cultivating and harvesting of produce in this country.

Into this context, I immigrated to work in US fields at the age of 17. I am the second of six children of Mexican peasants from the highlands of Guerrero. I came to the US as a teenager with the hopes that through my work in this country, I could support my parents and siblings. In 1994, I was picking oranges and tomatoes in Immokalee when I began to participate in evening meetings with a handful of other workers after out long days of work. Our small but determined group of Haitian, Guatemalan, and Mexican immigrants began discussing the terrible situation we shared in common: extreme poverty and brutal mistreatment of all workers kept us focused on addressing the root causes and the eventual need to concrete actions to improve working and living conditions for all of us. When one of my bosses threatened to beat me up, I was alone in confronting him, because of the overwhelming climate of fear in the fields. We wanted to make sure no one would ever be alone again.

In 1995, our group organized the first-ever general strike in Immokalee history, with 3,000 workers staying out of the fields for a week;

Today, I am an elected staff member with the CIW. Since 1995, our organization has grown to be more than 2,000 members strong. We have launched the worker-led boycott of Taco Bell, a corporate responsibility campaign demanding that the multi-billion dollar fast-food industry take responsibility for ñ and use its tremendous market influence to help eliminate -- labor abuses in its supply chain. Today the Taco Bell boycott is one of the fastest growing and most successful social justice movements in the US today. Working with the CIW, we have organized a hunger strike lasting 30 days in 1998, three general strikes, and the national Truth Tour and 10-day hunger strike earlier this year. In the fields, we work to uncover and investigate various multi-state, multi-worker slavery operations.

We have worked to forge ahead with a ìnewî farm worker community in Immokalee; a community aware of its human rights and active in its own defense -- in short, a community that fights back. Two more recent examples of slavery in Florida will illustrate the reality of the CIW Anti-Slavery Campaign.

In 1999, we first received information from other CIW members about a labor camp in the swamps outside Immokalee where people werenít allowed to leave, and couldnít even make phone calls. Shortly thereafter, three tomato pickers managed to escape the camp, seeking refuge in Immokalee. According to the escaped workers, their former boss sought them out in town, and, coming upon them on foot along the side of the road, he tried to run them down with his Chevy Surburban, hitting one of them with the vehicle. They fled to a CIW memberís house, but the boss again caught up with them there. The boss shouted that he owned them, that he had paid for them, and threatened the workers and the family that had taken them in.

Later that evening, guided by the CIW members who took them in, the escaped workers sought help from us and relayed to us how they were under constant vigilance at the camp, threatened with death, and were forced to work to pay off a $1,000 debt that never decreased. It was at that point we began to work with the federal authorities from Ms. Gabrielís case. Ms. Gabriel was instrumental in counseling the newly-escaped workers, and helped search for one of the slavery ring leaders who had avoided arrest, a smuggler known only as ìEl Chacalî -- the Jackal. Shortly after, federal authorities freed over 30 workers from the trailers in the isolated swamp, and filed a criminal complaint against the South Florida employer for conspiracy to hold workers in slavery.

During the investigation, we worked to locate key witnesses to corroborate the workersí story, including a group of Guatemalan workers who said the boss had tried to block them from leaving, and who had witnessed the boss assaulting a taxi-van driver who had tried to give workers a ride out of the camp.

This second group of witnesses moved from state to state for the harvests, and we searched for days to locate them. We eventually found them living off a dirt road outside of the small town of Haira, Georgia, in trailers with no electricity and plywood, mattress-less beds, cooking over a wood fire. It was a good 12 hour drive one-way from Immokalee. When the government was unable to follow up and interview them quickly, the workers unfortunately moved on. With my colleagues at the CIW, I returned again to Southern Georgia, only to learn that they had moved west. In a painstaking, week-long search of every labor camp in the western Georgia area, looking for the workersí new boss knowing only his first name and bus color, as their new boss had relocated the witnesses yet again, to the lonely back-roads outside Donalsonville. This time, the government followed up quickly and interviewed the group.

In October 99, the employers pled guilty, and in January 2000, were sentenced to prison (US vs. Cuello).

In May 2000, we began our work to investigate a citrus slavery operation two hours north of Immokalee, in the town of Lake Placid. The operation came to the CIWís attention when six armed gunmen attacked taxi-van drivers who had stopped at a convenience store in Lake Placid one evening to pick up passengers, migrant farm workers wishing to leave town. The gunmen, some of them citrus employers, held the passengers at gunpoint while they pistol-whipped the owner of the taxi-van service, shouting obscenities and accusing him of ìstealing our people.î They smashed the owner in the forehead with a Llama 38, and he fell to the ground and lost consciousness. One of the van drivers called me at CIW; another of the drivers, in his fright, found himself on the convenience store roof, not knowing how he got there. We arrived at midnight to a scene of blood and broken glass from the vansí smashed windows. The police had also arrived, and said that the same employers had done such an attack a few years back, but that time had killed a van driver.

We began to put together the pieces of that terrible puzzle. The armed men were from a large family who ran harvesting companies in Florida and North Carolina, with a multi-state reach and level of violence which was extreme. They ran crews of over 800 workers, and controlled every aspect of their lives, including their housing, pay, transportation to and from the groves, and the stores they bought from. They used guards with cell phones to keep constant watch over those who would try to leave. And the one thing they couldnít control fully -- taxi-van services coming into town and representing a way to escape for workers -- they attacked viciously, and pressured store owners not to sell bus tickets. By closing off the workersí only way out, they effectively put up a fence around people, only it was a fence that law enforcement officials and the general public were unable to see.

Along with my fellow CIW members, we sought more information on the operation. Romeo Ramirez, a young Guatemalan farm worker who joined the CIW during the 1997 general strike, volunteered to go to Lake Placid and work undercover in the crew in order to learn firsthand the details of the workersí situation. No one had ever gone undercover since the CIW first started investigating slavery operations back in 1992, much less in an operation as armed and as violent as the Lake Placid crew appeared to be.

At the age of eight, Mr. Ramirez began working in coffee plantations in Guatemala. At 15, he was picking tomatoes and peppers up and down the East Coast of the US. And at the age of 16, Mr. Ramirez became a leader in the 1997 general strike. From that time forward, he played a central role in all CIW activities, and was elected to serve on the CIW staff in 2000. His history was featured in the recent publication entitled, ìGlobal Uprising: Confronting the Tyrannies of the 21st Century, Stories from a New Generation of Activists.î His chapter in the collection is entitled, ìEliminating Slavery in Agricultural Labor.î

Mr. Ramirezí information proved crucial to building the case against the Lake Placid operation. He was able to corroborate the information already gathered about the workersí living conditions, the suffocating control that the employers exercised over the workersí lives, and the system of cellphone-equipped informants inserted in the crew to watch over any dissension or plans to escape.

Once his undercover work was completed, Mr. Ramirez took the additional risk of returning to the camp to check in on several of the captive workers he had come to know. He was quickly spotted by one of the cell phone guards, who grew suspicious and called the bosses. Just as quickly, one of the bosses appeared at the camp, blocked Mr. Ramirezís car in with his truck, and started questioning him, indicating that they suspected him of trying to ìtake their people,î and threatening him with physical harm. A slight, small man, he faced down the employers and henchmen with pure bravado. ìInstead of showing my extraordinary fear,î he said, ìI turned it around on them and acted angry that I hadnít ever been paid. They believed me and I was able to defuse the situation. î

The case broke when, following a April 2001 visit by I and other CIW members to the camp, a group of three workers managed to arrange a daring escape from the camp in broad daylight. The story of the escape was retold in the April 28, 2003 issue of The New Yorker magazine:

ìAround sunset, a white Mercury Grand Marquis with tinted windows pulled off Highway 27, a short distance from La PiÒita (the labor camp). Lucas Benitez emerged and raised the hood, as if checking an overheated radiator. From the balcony of a nearby hotel, Asbed and Germino (two other CIW members) signaled that the coast was clear.

Ortiz, Sanchez, and Hernandez sat on a railroad tie at the campís edge, near the highway, debating what they were about to do. Then, leaving all their belongings, including their Mexican documents, behind, they walked slowly toward the roadside. As they neared the Grand Marquis, they suddenly began sprinting, and jumped into the back seat as Benitez slammed the hood closed, got behind the wheel, and gunned the car down the road. The passengers kept their heads out of view until they were twenty miles away.

Now that witnesses were available, the government finally became involved. Two days after the escape, FBI interviewed the freed workers. The Ramoses (the employers), along with their cousin Jose Luis, were arrested and eventually charged with conspiracy, extortion, and possession of firearms.î

After the escape, I, Mr. Ramirez, and Ms. Gabriel helped the workers to find safe housing, understand their rights, talk with the ex-captives from the Cuello case, and integrate themselves into the community network and labor rights trainings of the Coalition.

Over a year later, in July 2002, the ringleaders were found guilty of slavery, and sentenced in November 2002 to a total of 34 years in federal prison. The judged also ordered the employers to forfeit $3 million in assets illegally obtained through the slavery operation (US vs. Ramos).

One final detail about the Ramos case: when federal authorities searched the Ramosí house, they found, as the New Yorker Magazine article stated, ìan arsenal of weapons not normally associated with labor management, including a Savage 7-mm. rifle, an AK-47, a semi-automatic rifle, a Browning 9-mm. semi-automatic pistol, and a Remington 700 7-mm.mag.rifle.[were found sic]î

The roots of these outrageous human rights violations and dangers confronted by farm workers in Immokalee, Florida lie in the backward, oppressive state of agricultural labor relations in Florida today. Because farm workers are exempted from the National Labor Relations Act, they are denied the crucial protections necessary to allow field workers to collectively bargain. That exemption, combined with the desperate poverty of most immigrant workers today, gives farm employers a tremendous advantage of power in relation to their workers. Sweatshop-like conditions in the fields -- up to and including slavery -- reflect that drastic imbalance of power. Though the outrageous cases mentioned above have brought long-overdue attention to slavery in the fields, peonage will finally disappear only when Floridaís corporate agri-businesses recognize their workers as partners in the industry and agree to sit at the table with workersí representatives to negotiate more modern, more humane working conditions.

In 21st century America, slavery remains woven into the fabric of our daily lives. On any given day, the tomatoes in the burgers we eat or the oranges in the juice we drink may have been picked by captive workers. The major buyers of Florida produce -- corporations like Taco Bell, McDonalds, Tropicana, Burger King, and Wal-Mart that sell the majority of produce to the public -- have a crucial role to play in modernizing working conditions in Florida agriculture. The fast-food industry in particular has grown almost overnight into a multi-billion dollar, multi-national business, thanks in large part to low-cost ingredients that have allowed fast food chains to control costs and plow their profits back into advertising and expansion. Convictions and harsh sentences for crew leaders who enslave their workers are necessary today because corporate growers and their multi-billion dollar corporate clients continue to demand cheap labor, without little concern given to how labor costs are controlled.

That is why the CIW launched its Taco Bell boycott in April of 2001. We believe the campaign could lead to the ultimate solution to the stubborn persistence of modern-day slavery in the fields.

It is because of this that those of us at CIW joined with the Cuello ex-captives and the Ramos ex-captives to form the group of 100 workers and students who crossed the nation on the Taco Bell Truth Tour, demanding that the fast-food buyers of East Coast produce leverage their vast market power to end slavery and sweatshops once and for all. It is why, in February 2003, we participated in one of the largest hunger strikes in US labor history, 10 days and nights without eating, outside Taco Bellís world headquarters in Irvine.

The hunger strike was a tremendously trying experience, with Irvine police constantly harassing us strikers, forcing the workers and their allies to suffer rain and cold without shelter for all but 6 hours of the night when they were allowed to put up tents, and denying the strikers -- who remained outside Taco Bell headquarters 24 hours a day during the 10 week period -- portable toilets for the final three days of the strike. Three strikers were hospitalized over the course of the action. The hunger strike ended when Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, and several other national religious leaders requested, out of concern for the workersí health, that the workers end the strike and pledged to take up the workersí cause. Since the strike, the momentum of the boycott has continued to skyrocket, breaking into the mainstream press with coverage in The New Yorker, PBS, and the National Geographic.

Unfortunately, it still takes such extraordinary work, like that done every day by my colleagues at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers -- combining the difficult and dangerous work of the anti-slavery campaign with the task of forging a national movement for economic justice from a base in one of the countryís poorest, most marginalized communities ñ to carry on the day-to-day battle against the this countryís most exploitative employers.

We firmly believe, however, that the struggle will be made infinitely easier, and ultimately won, through an approach that demands more of our countryís huge retail food industries than simply turning a blind eye to human rights violations in their supply chain as they profit from high-quality, low-price produce kept cheap through the deprivations of tens of thousands of this countryís hardest working men and women, US farm workers.

Through this forum here today, we want to ensure that when this hallowed body talks about modern-day slavery, we also bring to light the ugly reality of modern day slavery that plagues the U.S. agriculture industry. In that context, we are not talking about ìslavery-like conditionsî or ìvirtual slaveryî in quotation marks. We are speaking of actual slavery according to federal court verdicts, of being held against oneís will through violence or threats of violence. The details of the operations investigated by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers leave little room for doubt that slavery, true slavery, still exists in the United States in the 21st century.

We recommend various changes in public policy, in order to decrease the extreme imbalance of power between workers and employers in the agricultural industry:

• Give all agricultural workers, including guest workers, protections against retaliation for organizing

• Encourage corporate responsibility on the part of corporate buyers of fruits and vegetables for labor abuses in their supply chain

• Give all those workers who come on employer-specific guest worker visas the right to change employers (portability)

• Raise the federal minimum wage

• Require employers paying by piece-rate to increase piece-rate to keep pace with federal hourly minimum wage increases

• Devote more resources to enforcement of the minimal labor protections which currently are in place

• Include farm workers in the right to overtime pay for overtime work under FLSA

• Allocate more personnel, resources and training for the FBI Civil Rights agents for investigation of trafficking/ slavery operations, and encourage NGO training of FBI

• Encourage labor organizing in low-wage industries

• Implement fair trade policies which do not foster migration out of desperation by small farmers from their lands overseas

• Restore the initial language of the drafts of the bill that became the VTVPA which provided a prison sentence for any person who profits, ìknowing, or having a reason to knowî that a worker will be subject to involuntary servitude.î

Also, like agricultural workers, domestic workers have long been deprived the rights and protections of other workers, and suffer also from an extreme imbalance of power between workers and employers. So in addition, we would like to include some recommendations from Freedom Network colleague and director of Break the Chains, Joy Zarembka, who works with domestic workers held in modern-day slavery.

• Void diplomatic immunity for diplomats who have trafficked someone into the US for domestic work

• Allow domestic workers on employer-specific guestworker visas the right to change employers (portability)