In Equality: Migration, Labor, and Our Modern Global Economy

MIGRATION, LABOR, AND OUR MODERN GLOBAL ECONOMY

bERNICE jING yEE woNG

In Equality Migration, Labor, and Our Modern Global Economy

Bernice Jing Yee Wong

In Equality: Migration, Labor, and Our Modern Global Economy Š 2018 Published in fulfillment of the Master’s Thesis at School of Visual Arts MFA Products of Design 136 West 21st Street New York, NY 10011-3212 www.productsofdesign.sva.edu Written and Designed by Bernice Jing Yee Wong Edited by Jamie McGhee All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior consent of the author.

For inquiries, please contact bernicejywong@gmail.com or visit bernicejywong.com

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION RESEARCH

22

Modern Slavery Across Global Supply Chains

30

Modern Slavery in America

36

Slavery in U.S. Agriculture

56

The Bracero Program

66

METHODOLoGY

80

PROJECTS r(ally)

84

GRIT

92

Common Cents

102

Almost Free

114

WHAT’S NEXT

128

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people who have been a part of this journey, and to whom I am deeply grateful.

Thank you: To my mum and dad for your love, your faith, and your support. Thank you for raising me and Eunice to be open to every opportunity, even as our independence caused you countless evenings of worry.

To Brittany, for your unwavering support, your patience, and for always giving to me straight.

I will always be grateful for everything you have done and continue to do for me.

To my family and friends, especially Alice Mao, Malcolm Mo, Emily Schwenger, Pedro Aparicio, Christina Cai Lee, and Alice Thai, for the late-night calls, last-minute favors, and everything in between.

To Allan Chochinov, for your leadership, encouragement, support, and kindness. Thank you for the mission of this program, and for teaching us nearly everything. Thank you for teaching me to have a point of view and to have the courage to share it.

To Marko Manriquez, Alisha Wessler, Krithi Rao, and Nadia Delane for being the backbone of this program, and for always being there to save the day.

To Sinclair Scott Smith, for your soliloquies. In all honesty, I learned a lot from them.

To Dharini Thiurchittampalam, Moura Quayle, and Dr. Bruce Fulton, without whom I’d never have made it to grad school.

To the thesis faculty: Rachel Abrams, Brent Arnold, Emilie Baltz, Hannah Calhoon, Abby Covert, Bill Cromie, Steven Dean, KT Gillett, Andrew Schloss, Rebecca Silver, John Thackara, and Jennifer Rittner, for pushing us forward when it was right and for keeping us on track when it was necessary.

To the rest of the Products of Design faculty: Lawrence Abrahamson, Hlynur Atlason, Paola Antonelli, Kate Bakewell, Ayse Birsel, Matthew Borgatti, Michael Chung, Andrew Dent, Jennifer Dunnam, Elizabeth Galbut, Lauren Mackler, Sigi Moeslinger, Toshi Mogi, Jason Severs, Becky Stern, Manuel Toscano, Richard Tyson, Masamichi Udagawa, Rob Walker, and James Wynn, for sharing your knowledge and passion.

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To my sister, who brings joy and laughter into every room she walks into. thank you for being someone I could always look up to. Thank you for shaping who I am, and embodying all the values I strive to meet.

To Claire Hartten, without whom none of the work enclosed would be possible. Thank you for your incredible generosity.

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To my Products of Design family: Alexia Cohen, Will Crum, Lassor Feasley, Sebastian Harmsen, Jingting He, Sowmya Iyer, Louis Elwood-Leach, Juho Lee, Jiani Lin, Antriksh Nangia, Chris Rand, Manako Tamura, Kuan Xu, Teng Yu, and Kevin Cook, for the laughs, tears, and for making New York home.

Especially to Smruti Adya and Andrew Schlesinger for challenging me to be a better designer and a better person.

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To the Class of 2017: Karen Vellensky, Jenna Witzleben, Arjun Kalyanpur, Julia Lindpaintner, Andrea Cameron, Josh Corn, Doug Fertig, Alexa Forney, Dayoung Hong, Gahee Kang, Michael Kenney, Will Lentz, Xumeng Mou Oscar Pipson, and Ailun Sai, for showing us the way.

To the Class of 2020: Rhea Bhandari, Eugenia Ramos Alonso Benjamin Bartlett, John Boran Jr., Zihan Chen, Evie Cheung, Gustav Ole Dyrhauge, Tzu Ching Lin, Micah Lynn, Sophie Carrillo Miranda, Phuong Anh Nguyen, André Orta, Ellen Rose, Hannah Rudin, Carly Simmons, Oomung Varma, Antya Waegemann, Qixuan Wang, Runshi Wei, and Yangying Ye, for carving a path forward.

To the VFL staff: Oya Kosebay, Tak Cheung, John Heida, AnneMarie Lavigne, Maya Ragazzo, and Bronwen Densmore, for the hours of support, and for (quite literally) making our ideas real.

To Jamie McGhee for your enthusiasm and for your words.

To Lindsey Harris, Susan Fine, Stephanie Rhoades, Keith Reisen, and the staff at Turnstyle Underground Market and 16 Handles x Mochidoki for making my project, Almost Free, possible.

To Asaf Calderon, Rachel Isacoff, Alanna Olken and Riga Shakya for spending a Sunday afternoon indoors to help me with my thesis.

To my interviewees: Kylie Aquino Waddy, Yumi Endo, Julia Friedman, Patricia Chu, Aaron Friedland, Isaac Rodriguez, Palash Singh, Jessica Giang, Karlson Leung, Hera Chan, Omar Jackson, Marc Dones, Klaus Vanhoutte, Christina Wong, Cindy Bombeeck, Megan Aebi, Adam Jaffee, Dr. Lars Beattie, John Thackara, Dr. Dinali Fernando, Tracy Potter, Michael McMahon, Amelia Gelnett, Leah Hennessy, Lee Miller, Betty Getty, Sonia Huq, Kathleen Sexsmith, Margaret Gorlin, and my anonymous interviewees, for your wisdom and generosity.

To the immigrant workers, parents, and children, whose labour and sacrifice have enabled innumerable ways of life.

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Mum and me, 2016

INTRODUCTION I’ve always had a tenuous relationship with food.

1. James S. Matthews, “Conversations with Khatsahlano: 1932-1954s”, https://archive.org/ details/ConversationsWithKhahtsahlano1932-1954_346 2. “Kitsilano,” Tourism Vancouver. https://www.tourismvancouver.com/vancouver/ neighbourhoods/kitsilano/ 3. Christi Belcort, “Reclaiming ourselves by name,” Briarpatch, https://briarpatchmagazine. com/articles/view/reclaiming-ourselves-by-name

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At eighteen, I entered the world of food for myself when I got my first real job running dishes at a restaurant that also branded itself a long-time, local establishment. We were a Southeast Asian restaurant serving authentic food—minus the spice, minus the Southeast Asians.

The space we occupied in our affluent, Western customers’ minds was comfortably exotic: similar

In reflection, these questions of place, belonging, and identity have been at the heart of my thesis pursuit over the last year. Métis visual artist and author Christi Belcourt writes, “Most Canadians are quite comfortable with, and even comforted by, the Indigenous origins of the names of the places they call home. But only to a point. The names must remain vague—empty references—rather than carry the burden of Canada’s colonial history and the erasure of Indigenous ownership of lands.”3 But what does it mean to have a sense of belonging, when our homes are built on stolen land? How can we begin to bear the weights of being, and not being, local?

Introduction

Don’t get me wrong—I love to eat.

But growing up, food gave me away as Other: whereas my classmates ate ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch, my mother spent her mornings cooking fried rice and pork dumplings, soups and stir frys for my sister and me, before heading out to her job sewing garments for a local fashion label.

My mother was one on a floor full of Chinese immigrant women stitching together luxury garments proud to be “locally designed, locally made” in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada. I’m not sure if the public’s image of local included my mother and her friends, animatedly gossiping in Cantonese amidst factory-like rows of sewing machine clicks and whirs, and I threw away my lunch when it smelled too strongly of home.

to the space of the neighborhood we occupied, Kitsilano, named by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1905 in an anglicization of the name of Squamish (Sḵwxwú7mesh) Nation Chief Khahtsahlanogh.

Chief Khahtsahlanogh was born in Sun’ahk, the unceded territory known today as the neighborhood of False Creek. His name, not given at birth but by formal ceremony in his youth, can be very roughly translated to “Man of the Lake,” where Khahtsa means “lake” and Lanough means “man.”1 The Kitsilano I know today relays very little of this reference, better described by Tourism Vancouver as “the birthplace of global yoga brand, lululemon athletica”.2

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Introduction 12

During a background interview for California Newsreel’s three-part series on race in society, science, and history, UCLA Professor Robin D.G. Kelley said, “...every slave society had to have a buffer class. In the Caribbean, which had a 90-95% African-descended population, that buffer class was the mulatto group.

In North America you had a buffer class of poor whites. And as long as you had that continual immigration of poor whites, white working-class people in North America with limited privileges, that class would always oppose these Africans.”4 In today’s America, where young black men are nine times more likely than other racial groups to be killed by law enforcement 5, where there are eight prototypes for a southern border wall on the between Mexico and the United States6, economic immigrants can be characterized as “people from shithole countries”7, and Islamic visitors subject to travel bans and national security debates, who pays the price of belonging?

Truly, it seems twofold: where there are minorities that are targeted in their media representation, there must be others that represent “a step up”. This system rests upon intermediate groups’ maintained

status of being almost, but not exactly, white enough—and today, I am part of the “model minority”, or in other words, the latest buffer class.

The most common narrative in this space, first posited in the 80s, has been around affirmative action: in short, framing the policy as a bonus for African- and HispanicAmericans and a penalty for Asian-Americans. In 1988, Head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, William Bradford Reynolds said, “While university officials are understandably loath to admit that they are discriminating against qualified Asian-Americans, rejection of such applicants ironically appears to be driven by the universities’ “affirmative action” policies aimed at favoring other, preferred racial minorities.”8 And while Asian-American leaders have historically rejected this racial mascotting9, a segment of the population today has bought in, most notably through a lawsuit alleging discriminatory college admission practices filed by the Asian American Coalition for Education.10 Asians make up 3.8 percent of the total eligible

4. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Race - The Power of an Illusion”, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/race/000_ About/002_04-background-02-05.htm 5. Jon Swaine and Ciara McCarthy, “Young black men again faced highest rate of US police killings in 2016”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/08/thecounted-police-killings-2016-young-black-men 6. Zeeshan Aleem, “Trump still wants Mexico to pay for the wall. He also wants tariffs. He can’t have both.”, https://www.vox.com/world/2018/3/12/17109282/trump-border-wallmexico-tariffs 7. Laignee Barron, “‘A New Low.’ The World Is Furious at Trump for His Remark About ‘Shithole Countries’”, Time, http://time.com/5100328/shithole-countries-trump-reactions/ 8. Alvin Chang, “Asians are being used to make the case against affirmative action. Again.”, Vox, https://www.vox.com/2018/3/28/17031460/affirmative-action-asian-discriminationadmissions 9. A term coined by DePaul University professor, Sumi Cho in 1994 10. “Asian-American Coalition for Education (AACE)”, http://asianamericanforeducation. org/en/home/

I was instead challenged by one of my expert interviewees, John Thackara, to define “a good outcome” for this year’s work. I mean, slavery is as old as civilization itself, and there was an ocean of possibilities and people more qualified to contribute to the vast body of work that is in its intellectual criticism. However, to revisit my understanding, the power of design is in its ability to make the complex, tactile. To serve to translate words, not into art, but into forms that must be experienced as commonplace in order to truly criticise the current and future contexts that necessitate its bringing into being. As such, the collection of works described in this volume are at once about human migration, food, and the value of our work and our bodies.

I will begin with a broad overview

11. “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths”, Pew Research Center, 2012, http://www. pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths-overview/ 12. Karthick Ramakrishnan, Janelle Wong, Jennifer Lee, et al. “2016 Post-Election National Asian American Survey”, National Asian American Survey, http://naasurvey.com/wpcontent/uploads/2017/05/NAAS16-post-election-report.pdf, 15 13. Ibid., 58

13

This thesis began as an investigation into modern slavery, and I had thought I would be writing more directly about global supply chains, children in garment factories and workers in brick kilns. And I still am—but the more I wrestled with the topic, the more I became lost in the need to distill the notion of modern slavery down to core concepts: the who, what, where, and when of it all. But as in all matters of intent, there was no clear-cut answer. And instead, what I found was this: as economies are

increasingly intertwined and supply chains globalized, the question of who was responsible for modern slavery became ever more complex.

I could ask, who has the power to call the shots? Or to what extent we, as consumers, were responsible for demanding better, or if I truly cared about the quality of life of some unnamed person, in some far away corner of a community, whose notion of better is my definition of extreme poverty. I realized that goal of this thesis could not be to find these answers, but at the very least, I no longer wanted to be responsible.

Introduction

electorate, but just 2.9 percent of the voting population, historically having one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any racial group.11 In the 2016 Post-Election National Asian American Survey, ChineseAmericans made up the highest percentage of respondents who voted for President Trump and the lowest percentage who believed that undocumented immigrants should have an opportunity to eventually become U.S. citizens.12,13 I would be remiss not to acknowledge that most of the Asian-American population, and especially the younger demographic, can be characterized as progressiveminded, but it is my belief that given our history and status as immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and people of colour, we can and should be doing more.

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of the current state of modern slavery across global economies as well as the United States. I will draw lines of connection through the state of labor rights in today’s American agricultural industry, back in time to the abolition of slavery in 1865. I hope to confront the issues of immigration, exoticism, colonization, and race as intersected and inseparable. Finally, I will present a series of design projects that seek to intervene where there are structures of abuse, by way of methods large and small.

Introduction 14

Artist, writer, and critic John Berger commented on the state of our increasingly globalized world in 2002, pushing us to think on a cosmopolitan scale by seeing “the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place.”14 He questioned at the time if the coming year, in the context of America’s looming invasion of Iraq, the proliferation of consumer culture, the estimated 68-million-person cost of the AIDS epidemic, and former President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Kyoto agreement, was perhaps the “most tyrannical—because the most pervasive—chaos that has ever existed?”15 John Berger passed on January 2, 2017, but I can’t help but wonder what he might say about our current state of affairs.

I have already asked and failed to answer the question of how

much we as consumers might be responsible for demanding better of the corporations and institutions that craft the world in which we live. But we are also aware that exploitation is happening, and we know that where incessant growth remains an imperative of global economies, those who are most vulnerable will continue to be exploited concurrent to the limits of our natural resources. And despite this knowledge, “...which of us sinners was going to cast the first stone?”, writes Arundhati Roy in Capitalism: A Ghost Story, “Not me, who lives off royalties from corporate publishing houses. We all watch Tata Sky, we surf the Net with Tata Photon, we ride in Tata taxis, we stay in Tata Hotels, sip our Tata tea in Tata bone china, and stir it with teaspoons made of Tata Steel. We buy Tata books in Tata bookshops. Hum Tata ka namak khate hain. [Translation: We eat Tata’s salt.] We’re under siege.”16 To respond here with collective inaction approaches slavery as a global, inevitable consequence of our economic system, leaving us with little to choose from—and in the age of the paradox of choice, this is more than mildly ironic.

As such, this body of work then rests upon the belief, to quote Paulo Freire, that “‘washing one’s hands’ of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”17 I have hoped that by learning more about my role

14. John Berger, “Written in the night: The pain of living in the present world”, Le Monde diplomatique, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27a/113.html.

15. Ibid.

16. Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, (London, Verso, 2015), 20.

17. Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation, (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1998), 122

in this system, I can gain a better understanding of what it would truly take to revise, dismantle, or even replace it.

18. Roy, Capitalism, 37.

19. James Shikwati, Michael Matheson Miller, Poverty Inc., (Michigan, Acton Institute).

20. Cynthia Kao, “Huffington Post Haiti’s Multi-Billion Dollar Humanitarian Aid Problem”, The Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/young-professionals-in-foreign-policy/ haitis-multi-billion-doll_b_8207494.html

15

I sought as well to learn from inclusive models of resistance, and found an answer within Angela Davis’ collection of interviews, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Here, she demonstrates the power and success of the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement through its unique

Introduction

There are two other ideas shared by Berger and Roy that have shaped my thesis exploration. First, that people suffer throughout their lives from inequities that are simultaneous and inseparable, but that are regarded as distinct categories in institutional and academic study. And resultantly, Roy says that “in the NGO universe, which has evolved a strange anodyne language of its own, everything has become a “subject”, a separate, professionalized, special-interest issue. […] Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could.”18 Our tendency to classify, organize, and simplify complex issues—such that they can be parsed—has once again answered the interconnected with that which is one-off and unscalable. This is not a new idea.

The 2014 documentary, Poverty Inc. examines the business of international development and the role of Western-centric charitable organizations in creating aiddependent economies over their quest for global poverty alleviation.

Incorporating interviews with “over twenty-five development stakeholders and citing many more across twenty countries, the film emphasizes an uncomfortable truth succinctly described

by Kenyan Economist James

Shikwati: that “…development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems.”19 In visiting the website of any anti-trafficking nonprofit—or that of any other advocacy focus area, for that matter—the crux of their services will be described as Client-Centered, SurvivorLed, Hand-In-Hand. But despite the plethora of efforts to move nonprofit work from philanthropic to capacity building, Cynthia Kao of the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy still describes that the aid landscape* “…often excludes partnering with local businesses and staffing local workers (due to a variety of business partnering issues).”20 These thoughts resonated with me once again, to say that the end of every statistic and insight I have read and will echo next, is an entire human experience as full and complex as my own, and must be treated as such in any solutionoriented design.

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Introduction 16

ability to push activist struggles beyond borders. She discusses the importance of recognizing links between mass incarceration in the United States and occupied Palestine, particularly through the multinational corporate entities—in this case, G4S Secure Solutions, the world’s largest private security company—that profit from both places of oppression. “…G4S is involved in the operation of private prisons all over the world…

Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex. And so if we say abolish the prison-industrial complex, as we do, we should also say abolish apartheid, and end the occupation of Palestine!”21 The BDS movement itself draws inspiration from the consumer boycott campaign of the 1959 - 1994 British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). After the National Party came to power in South Africa in 1948, existing policies of racial segregation compounded and expanded throughout the nation. The British AAM’s 35-year-long boycott and sanctions campaign motivated hundreds and thousands of consumers in the United Kingdom, Holland, and the United States to oppose apartheid through the collective power of their dollars. As one of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement’s most successful campaigns, the BDS model has

since been replicated throughout protest culture to oppose and displace other oppressive regimes.

I realize that through these paralleled examples I have conflated acts of human aid with those of protest. Though the typology and modalities of the two are quite different, at their essence they share a common purpose of ensuring human rights are met, and quality of those lives is improved or sustained. Perhaps either or both of these models are in some ways broken, but I’m sure each could serve to learn from the other.

All this is not to say that boycotting is the only inclusive model for collective action and resistance, but to use this example to emphasize the ability of people, none of whom must live in the same place at the same time or within the same cultural, social, and political norms, to recognize injustice.22 And this is relevant to crafting large, outright acts of protest, all the way down to informing our everyday acts. It is not less of an act to vote with your dollar, by choosing to spend it elsewhere, than it is to vote with your ballot. The work that follows has served as a reminder of this for me, and I can only hope that it can serve as a small reminder for you.

21. Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, (Tantor Media Inc., 2016), 58 - 60 22. I was inspired by a number of examples in John Thackara’s How to Thrive in the Next Economy. Though he does not provide outright models of protest, Thackara has collected examples of how people have been able to, rather than resist, replace broken systems and take climate action: whether that is in the form of rewilding cities, or through an agricultural approach that keeps the inconsistencies of natural ecosystems in mind or by involving leather workers in the conversation to design a safer and more natural leather making process. Many of these examples can serve as analogues to the kinds of systems and services that must be designed with resilient labor practices at the core, in addition to eco-action.

Introduction 17

fig 1

Kara Walker, Pastoral, 1998.

fig 2

Edward Burtynsky Manufactured Landscapes, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China, 2005

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Introduction 20

“For me, the mundane of “simplicity and clar yet another mechanism complexity of the theo particularly if these th interrogate the prevai ideology. It is for this Gayatri Spivak correc the call for ‘plain pros a step further and say prose not only cheats, Donaldo Macedo, in his introduction to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Introduction 21

e call for a language rity” represents m to dismiss the oretical issues, heoretical constructs iling dominant very reason that ctly points out that se cheats.’ I would go y, ‘The call for plain , it also bleaches.’ ”

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LEXICON, part I The foremost section of research will discuss modern slavery, the terming of which is at times under debate, and is otherwise known as human trafficking. The qualifier “modern” is necessary as modern slavery is distinct from historic forms of slavery. Accordingly, the first five terms are largely defined as they are outlined by the U.S. State Department, and especially as their inclusions and exclusions may vary by region. The remaining terms appear throughout, or necessarily frame the perspective of, the work.

Lexicon 22

Trafficking In Human Beings (THB) or Human Trafficking or Trafficking In Persons or Modern Slavery: These terms are widely considered to be synonymous, and are used at varying degrees of frequency depending on region. They refer to the recruitment, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of persons achieved through threat of harm: including force, fraud, physical threats, psychological coercion, abuse of the legal process, deception, other coercive acts, or any combination of such means that create an exploitative

environment from which the victim cannot leave of their free will. It can include, but does not require, a victim to be physically trafficked (transported).23,24 The primary distinction between this and chattel slavery, or the slavery we are most familiar with through the transatlantic slave trade, is the concept of ownership. Effectively, modern slaveholders hold the same power to repress and control another person as derives from possession of them, but without the legal concept of ownership.

The use of “slaveholder” is, as such, intentional as opposed to “slaveowner”.25 Debt Bondage or Bonded Labor: Perpetrators will create an exploitative environment in which victims are unable to leave of their own volition. One of the methods used to do so is in the imposition of a bond or debt as a method of coercion. Often, these are monetary obligations that take the form of recruitment fees and exorbitant interest rates that are difficult, if not impossible, to pay off. The debt can be inherited or assumed, wittingly or unwittingly, as a term of employment.26 This model is similar to, but differs from, indentured servitude in the

23. “Modern forms of slavery”, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/slaveroute/modern-forms-of-slavery/.

24. “What is modern slavery?”, Anti-Slavery International, https://www.antislavery.org/ slavery-today/modern-slavery/.

25. Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, What Slaveholders Think: How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize What They Do. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

26. “What is Modern Slavery?”, U.S. Department of State, https://www.state.gov/j/tip/what/.

U.S. Indentured servants differed from classical slaves as they worked for a fixed period, typically from four to seven years, to repay the cost of their room and travel, amongst other fees. Life as an indentured servant was difficult and restrictive, and is widely understood as by no means fair, but it was not the same as slavery. Indentured servants were afforded some rights under law, and were expected to complete their term.27 Bonded labor differs from this in that slaveholders will use artificial means of inflating their victim’s debt, such that there is no expectation on the perpetrator’s side that the victim will ever pay off the debt.

Domestic Servitude: A form of human trafficking where a slaveholder uses force or physical threats, psychological coercion, abuse of the legal process, deception, or other coercive means to compel someone

A form of human trafficking where a person (perpetrator) uses force or physical threats, psychological coercion, abuse of the legal process, deception, or other coercive means to compel an adult to perform commercial sex acts, such as prostitution. Even if an adult initially consents to participate in prostitution, this consent is irrelevant. If this adult, after consenting, is subsequently held in service through psychological manipulation or physical force, he or she is a trafficking victim and should receive benefits outlined in the Palermo Protocol and applicable domestic laws.30 The above terms are defined separately when the victim is a child.

Child slavery is outside of the scope of this project.

Slave: A person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them (less common today); or who is excessively dependent upon or

27. “Indentured Servants in The U.S.”, (Oregon Public Broadcasting, Oregon), http://www. pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured-servants-in-the-us/.

28. What is Modern Slavery?”, Bureau of Public Affairs.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

23

Forced labor encompasses the range of activities—recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining—involved when a person (perpetrator) uses force or physical threats, psychological coercion, abuse of the legal process, deception, or other coercive means to compel someone to perform manual labor. Common industries are agriculture, domestic work and factories.28

Sex Trafficking:

Lexicon

Forced Labor or Labor Trafficking:

to perform domestic labor in a private residence, resulting in unique vulnerabilities. These include restricted ability to move freely, increased social isolation, and greater distance from legal protections, as labor officials generally do not have the authority to inspect employment conditions in private homes.29

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controlled by something; or who is compelled to perform hard labor without proper remuneration or appreciation; and whose dependency, control, and work is compelled through threat of force, fraud, physical threats, psychological coercion, abuse of the legal process, deception, other coercive acts, or any combination of such means.

Slave Society: A slave society is any society where the concepts of ownership and labor are defined by slavery, and where slavery affects every system within that society.

Lexicon 24

Professor David Blight of Yale University describes, “Where whites and blacks, in this case—in America in a racialized slavery system—grew up, were socialized by, married, reared children, worked, invested in, and conceived of the idea of property, and honed their most basic habits and values under the influence of a system that said it was just to own people as property.”31 Though this list may still be heavily debated, slave societies through history can be counted as: Ancient Greece and Rome, Brazil by the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the Caribbean, the Great West Indies (The exploitation colonies of the French, Spanish, British, Dutch, and others), and

the American South.32 Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2011 emphasizes the importance of distinguishing a slave society (rather than describing these eras as having societies in which slavery exists) for “the basic point... that you can’t think of slavery in the antebellum South as simply something people did. Slavery defined people— slaves, slave-owners, non-slave holding whites, free blacks and native Americans.” 33 Human Supply Chain: A key structure of the global economy, involving the recruitment and carrying of migrant workers to jobs when the job or labor task cannot move because it must be done in a particular location, and corporations or other employment providers seek to bring in low-wage workers from less wealthy countries to fulfill the job.34 I frame this together with, but separate from a product supply chain, to address that they are both necessary to the production and distribution of a commodity, but must be considered separately if we are to treat them as such.

Indirect Slaveholder: A position which is generated through complex systems of plausible deniability that allow victims of forced labor to be deposited in the charge of an

31. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Slave Society Defined”. (The Atlantic, 2011) https://www. theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/09/the-slave-society-defined/244581/.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Jennifer Gordon, “Regulating the Human Supply Chain” (Iowa Law Review, 2017), https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-102-issue-2/regulating-the-human-supply-chain/.

abusive employer. This abusive employer may retain the profitable output or cost-savings generated by the eorts of the forced laborers (direct net economic beneficiary), must share the profitable output or cost-savings with investors (indirect net economic beneficiary), must share the profitable output or cost-savings with more powerful players in the supply chain (indirect net economic beneficiary), or passes the profitable output or cost-savings along to the customer (indirect net economic beneficiary).

In this thesis, the three latter roles may also be described as indirect slaveholders.35

Lexicon 25

35. Fitzpatrick, What Slaveholders Think.

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CONCEPT DIAGRAM

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cost extended in

revealed governance

MODERN SLAVERY

INDIRECT SLAVEHOLDERS

...visible than

are met through

but th term can

reduced in gaps in

FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN NEEDS

distract from

is the

same as

HUMAN TRAFFICKING

are umbrella terms, including:

Adult, Commercial sex act Due to: force, threats of force, fraud, coercion or combination

...widespread than

SLAVERY (ANTIQUATED)

FORCED labour / labour TRAFFICKING Adult, Compelled other work Due to: force, threats of force, fraud, coercion or combination

was more...

is/was exploited through

ENSLAVED PERSON(S)

domestic servitude

are made vulnerable by

ignorant of

bonded labour / debt bondage Form of coercion as the imposition (knowing or unknowingly) of a debt, at times inherited

control

maintain

additionally often

child sex trafficking

referring to

forced child labour

conflated with

referred to

CHATTEL SLAVERY

INDENTURED SERVITUDE

The strictest sense of the word slavery, in which people are considered property instead of workers or servants

Unfree labour bound by a forced contract — fixed term with a definitive date of completion (may or may not be achievable)

recruitment and use of child soldiers

27

DIRECT SLAVEHOLDERS

Lexicon

Adult, Compelled domestic work Due to: force, threats of force, fraud, coercion or combination Uniquely vulnerable, especially ability to move freely

fears

may be

SEX TRAFFICKING

In Equality

Modern Slavery Across Global Supply Chains

Research 30

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 40 million people, a quarter of whom are children, still exist in conditions of slavery around the world.36 Here, “conditions of slavery” refers to both adults and children trapped in forced labor and forced marriage. The ILO estimates that an additional 152 million people under the age of 18 are child laborers: those who are not given the time, dignity, and education that encompass a full childhood. Child labor refers to any form of work that interferes with a child’s education: that means any work that deprives them of the opportunity to attend, obliges them to leave school prematurely, or requires them to attend school while performing arduous and time-consuming work. Child laborers are defined separately from children who are victims of labor exploitation, as the latter group “suffer[s] both the impact of the hazardous working conditions and the trauma of coercion, threats of penalty, and lack of freedom.”37

Exposés of these individuals’ living and working conditions are familiar to news consumers, though they are more commonly referred to in media as victims of human trafficking or debt bondage.

The terminology human trafficking may at times be misleading, as the act of enslavement can include, but does not require, the victim to be physically transported from one place to another. Trafficking victims are considered to be as such whether they were born into servitude or trafficked into the role; were exploited in their locality or were transported to the exploitative situation. The U.S. Department of State continues that, “At the heart of this phenomenon is the traffickers’ aim to exploit and enslave their victims and the myriad coercive and deceptive practices they use to do so.”38 It can be difficult to clearly differentiate between someone who is caught in their labor circumstances primarily due to extreme poverty, and someone who is enslaved and forced to work. For example, not every one of the 1,134 deceased victims of the widelycovered 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh would fit into the category of a modern slave.

Nonetheless, global trade unions called the event “mass industrial homicide”39, and survivors reported

36. “40 million in modern slavery and 152 million in child labour around the world”, International Labour Organization, http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/ news/WCMS_574717/lang--en/index.htm 37. “Global Estimates of Child Labour” International Labor Office. (Geneva, 2017), http:// www.alliance87.org/global_estimates_of_child_labour-results_and_trends_2012-2016.pdf, 13.

38. What is Modern Slavery?”, Bureau of Public Affairs.

39. Tansy Hoskins, “Reliving the Rana Plaza factory collapse: a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 22”, (The Guardian, 2015), https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/ apr/23/rana-plaza-factory-collapse-history-cities-50-buildings.

that “many of the workers who entered Rana Plaza on the day of the tragedy were reluctant to do so because of concerns for their safety, but were threatened with losing their jobs.”40 Similarly, not every worker who participates in the estimated US$6.4 billion prostitution and sex tourism industry in Thailand is a victim of sex trafficking. But paid sex is so prolific and closely attached to the nation’s tourism sector that Gambia’s Minister of Tourism, Hamat Bah, said in an interview, “We are not a sex destination. If you want a sex destination, you go to Thailand.”,41,42

40. Jim Zarroli, “3 Years Later, Bangladeshi Survivors Remember The Collapse Of Rana Plaza”, (National Public Radio, 2016), https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwoway/2016/04/24/475499651/3-years-later-bangladeshi-survivors-remember-the-collapse-ofrana-plaza 41. “Chuwit demands govt take action to stamp out prostitution”, (The Nation, 2012), http://www.nationmultimedia.com/national/Chuwit-demands-govt-take-action-to-stamp-outprost-30175704.html 42. “Thailand protests Gambian ‘slander’ of tourism”, (Bangkok Post, 2018), https://www. bangkokpost.com/news/general/1418803/thailand-protests-gambian-slander-of-tourism 43. John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, (New York, Random House, 2008), 36

31

The industries named so far as examples of opportunities for slavery—fashion, sex, food and hospitality, and domestic work—are likely unsurprising. This is because cases of modern day slavery don’t happen in isolation. Laura Germino, a founding member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based human rights organization founded in 1993 and recognized for its achievements in workplace social responsibility, human trafficking, and gender-based violence, explains that “for every case of outright slavery discovered and disclosed in the news, we can reasonably assume that thousands of others are working in degraded labor conditions, in situations that are regularly, fundamentally exploitative.”43

Research

To clarify, modern slavery is defined as work or service which is exacted from any person under threat of penalty, and for which the person has not offered themself voluntarily. “Work” can refer to any type of sector, whether formal or informal, and “voluntarily” indicates that the worker provided their free and informed consent to take a job and possesses the freedom to leave anytime. The concept of informed consent is particularly important to emphasize here, as human traffickers may intentionally mislead a victim about their potential working

conditions; this is a frequent coercion technique. For example, if someone agrees to migrate under the pretense of employment as wait staff but is compelled to work as a domestic servant once they arrive, this is trafficking. Unfortunately, it is incredibly difficult to prove this prior information asymmetry in an investigation.

In Equality

If you find that the above descriptions read quite differently from the historical American institutions of slavery with which we are familiar, it’s because in many ways, these forms of slavery are distinct. Kevin Bales, preeminent scholar of contemporary slavery and cofounder of Free the Slaves, an international anti-slavery organization established in 2000, breaks down the differences between modern slavery (“new slavery”) and chattel slavery (“old slavery”) like so:

OLD SLAVERY

NEW SLAVERY

Legal ownership asserted High purchase cost Low profits Shortage of potential slaves Long-term relationship Slaves maintained Ethnic differences important

Legal ownership avoided Very low purchase cost Very high profits Glut of potential slaves Short-term relationship Slaves disposable Ethnic differences not important44

Research 32

The distillation of the nuanced differences between the two eras of slavery serves a clear purpose; it allows us to both parse the key characteristics and see how their consequences impact exploited groups differently. Inevitably, these distinctions are contentious, to say the least—particularly the condition that “ethnic differences [are] not important” in determining who is and is not enslaved today.

Modern day slavery is economic: its victims are often funneled into servitude as a result of economic systems that privilege one group over another. Sometimes these inequalities evolve from centuries of cultural norms, and other

times they arise because a society does not provide a safety net for its most disadvantaged classes.

However, in every example, power imbalance is rooted in discrimination. Bales’ own book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, introduces examples of this: ranging from sex trafficking victims in Thailand, where most girls are recruited from a region that is both culturally foreign to the rest of Thailand and considered “not Thailand proper; originally the kingdom of Lanna”45, to Mauritania, where chattel slavery is still exacted by the nation’s Hassaniya Arab, also known as White Moor, minority upon its Black Moor population.

44. Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012), 15.

45. Ibid., 39.

Additionally, John Bowe’s Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy references three situations where Hispanic, Indian, and pan-Asian groups are being exploited. And the examples continue.

33

46. Bowe, Nobodies, 230.

47. Julia O’Connell and Joel Quirk, “Race, ethnicity and belonging”, (Open Democracy, 2015), https://www.opendemocracy.net/ beyondslavery/julia-o%27connell-davidson-joel-quirk/race-ethnicityand-belonging.

Research

I believe the pointed reference to non-ethnicity-based modern slavery may have two points of rationale.

First, we are no longer predominantly considering a white-to-black dynamic and antiblack racism across global instances of slaveholding. Second, as today’s slaveholders and slaves may often be of the same ethnicity, it is not necessarily a highly visible ethnic distance that allows the perpetrator to dehumanize their victim. Or, in the words of one of Bowe’s interviewees, “No one can fuck a Chinese like a Chinese can.”46 And this is all understandable, but by example, Walk Free’s Global Slavery Index found that the majority of those enslaved today are found in formerly colonized regions, “which is to say places where the majority of the population are not racialised as white.”47 The examples of modern slavery we have seen thus far, and those which we are exposed to in everyday media, overwhelmingly affect non-white people. The roots of slavery are in antiblackness and, by extension, the privileging of whiteness.

Racism continues to fuel modern day slavery, in the devaluing and debasement of Othered bodies, even and especially if perpetrators’ actions stem from a false consciousness of one’s own race.

fig 3

Earle Richardson, Employment of Negroes in Agriculture, 1934

fig 4

Kehinde Wiley, Two Heroic Sisters Of The Grassland, 2011

In Equality

Modern Slavery IN AMERICA

Research 36

From the last section, modern slavery may appear to be an issue that exists only within the developing world. However people are still enslaved today, here in the U.S., as well. The Polaris Project, who works directly to disrupt human trafficking networks, has found victims in American industries ranging from construction to hospitality to wellness. The National Trafficking Hotline, also run by Polaris, reported that trafficking rose across the U.S. in 2016 by 35.7%, listing the number of found victims and types of trafficking as “sex, 5,551; labor, 1,057; non-specified, 696; and sex and labor, 268.”48 Beyond reported cases, it is important to note here that indisputable data on trafficking is near impossible to find. This is for a number of reasons, most notably due to the criminal nature of trafficking, that coerced victims are rarely in a psychological state to report crimes committed against them, and that victims are commonly physically isolated.

In June 2017, Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author, Alex Tizon, published his own family’s story of enslavement in The Atlantic, “My Family’s Slave”. He recounts her,

Lola’s, life with him and his family: gifted to Alex’s mother at 18 years old while still in a rural province in the Philippines, Lola spent 56 years as a domestic servant cooking, cleaning, and caring for his family.

Tizon’s account demonstrates many of the uncertainties of agency, responsibility, and ultimately morality, that exist between two people in a real slave-slaveholder relationship. Mostly, this is through his attempts to understand his mother’s ability to rationalize her relationship with Lola. “You must embrace your role as the giver of commands.”, he writes of how his mother was taught to be a proper matriarch, “You must keep those beneath you in their place at all times, for their own good and the good of the household. They might cry and complain, but their souls will thank you. They will love you for helping them be what God intended.”49 This echoes much of Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick’s findings in What Slaveholders Think: How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize What They Do, namely that a pervasive paternalism— similar, in my mind, to how African slaves were infantilized and seen as primitive—“elides altogether the exploitative nature of these relations. Five years paying off a paltry debt are seen in light of the shelter they provided rather than in terms of

48. Allen Cone, “Report: Human trafficking in U.S. rose 35.7 percent in one year”, (UPI, 2017), https://www.upi.com/Report-Human-trafficking-in-US-rose-357-percent-in-oneyear/5571486328579/.

49. Alex Tizon, “My Family’s Slave”, (The Atlantic Magazine, 2017), https://www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/.

wages denied.”50 He follows that “perpetrators of bonded labor are not pathological rights violators. It is instead more likely they have a socially constructed preference for inequality.”51 This preference allows a slaveholder to legitimize their actions in their own eyes.

And it seemed to, truly, run deep.

Tizon recounts the mounting disagreements he had with his mother around Lola’s treatment, that eventually drove an irreconcilable rift between them:

The night ended when she declared that I would never understand her relationship with Lola. Never.”52 And perhaps, as complex as human relationships are, there was some truth to this. The author’s father deserted the family after 25 years of marriage. after which Lola and his mother became even closer. “As Mom snapped at her over small

50. Choi-Fitzpatrick, What Slaveholders Think, 54-55.

51. Choi- Fitzpatrick, What Slaveholders Think, 55.

52. Tizon, “My Family’s Slave”.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid.

37

“A slave,” Mom said, weighing the word. “A slave?”

Later on in life, after the author’s mother mother passed and Lola came to live with his family, Tizon found that he had trouble helping her adjust to his definition of a “free” lifestyle. He’d argue, “‘You’re not a slave here,’ I said, and went through a long list of slavelike things she’d been doing. When I realized she was startled, I took a deep breath and cupped her face, that elfin face now looking at me searchingly. I kissed her forehead.

‘This is your house now,’ I said.

‘You’re not here to serve us. You can relax, okay?’

Research

“I came back at her, saying she would know all about being a phony, her whole life was a masquerade, and if she stopped feeling sorry for herself for one minute she’d see that Lola could barely eat because her goddamn teeth were rotting out of her goddamn head, and couldn’t she think of her just this once as a real person instead of a slave kept alive to serve her?

things, Lola attended to her even more—cooking Mom’s favorite meals, cleaning her bedroom with extra care. I’d find the two of them late at night at the kitchen counter, griping and telling stories about Dad, sometimes laughing wickedly, other times working themselves into a fury over his transgressions.

They barely noticed us kids flitting in and out.”53 After so many years together, and despite her servitude, Lola lived by a principle of Come What May; and what had come into her life was “eight children: Mom, my four siblings and me, and now my two daughters. The eight of us, she said, made her life worth living.”54 Lola was clearly loved, if not by Tizon’s parents, definitely by him and his siblings. Does that make up for the years of choices lost? It seems from her portrayal in this piece, that her answer would have been yes—would it have done her any good to question that?

In Equality

‘Okay,’ she said. And went back to cleaning.”55

Research 38

At this point, at 75 years old, servitude was all Lola knew.

There was also no opportunity for independence: living in the U.S., she had no means to communicate in English, to navigate technology, to take transit or travel. This eventually changed; as Tizon gave her a bedroom and funds without obligation, she eventually learned to take breaks and read and have hobbies. Even so, Lola never stopped performing household chores and caring for the children.

She did these things because she loved the kids and because household tasks were second nature to her. At the same time, they represented first what she was never given the opportunity to have and second the skills she gained from that stolen opportunity. I can only begin to imagine how complex these layered experiences must have felt.

The last thing I’d like to share about Tizon’s account of Lola and his family, is in his portrait of his mother. The above may paint her in all shadows, and without light, but she must be recognized for all her nuances. After she was diagnosed with leukemia, Tizon learned more about his mother through her journals.

“I glimpsed slices of her life that I’d refused to see for years. She’d gone to medical school when not many women did. She’d come to America and fought for respect as 55. Tizon, “My Family’s Slave”.

56. Ibid.

both a woman and an immigrant physician. She’d worked for two decades at Fairview Training Center, in Salem, a state institution for the developmentally disabled.

The irony: She tended to underdogs most of her professional life. They worshipped her. Female colleagues became close friends. They did silly, girly things together—shoe shopping, throwing dress-up parties at one another’s homes, exchanging gag gifts like penisshaped soaps and calendars of half-naked men, all while laughing hysterically. Looking through their party pictures reminded me that Mom had a life and an identity apart from the family and Lola. Of course.”56 I use this anecdote to illustrate one form of modern slavery, such that our understanding of a person enslaved might be more than a list of methods by which they may have been manipulated, and our understanding of a person doing the enslaving must be more than a judgement of their morals. It is too easy to write this relationship off as black and white. We must recognize the ease of assuming abusive roles of power if we are truly to move forward.

Despite that the above example took place in the United States, the initial enslavement happened overseas in a rural community.

Ai-Jen Poo, activist and Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, has shared that as a result many readers believe the situation is due to Filipino and other immigrant culture. This is not the

For migrants this power imbalance is also uniquely enabled by U.S. immigration laws. The pressures are various: first, the burden of cost for low-wage temporary visas falls upon the migrants, meaning that many of them will have to borrow money in order to afford it. Recruitment for some of these visas, namely the H-2A and H-2B Nonimmigrant Worker visas, must happen in their home countries, leading many to fall victim to extortionist recruitment groups. I will expand on the H-2A program further in the following section.

And third, temporary workers’ visas are tied to their initial employer, where termination of employment

Victim did not have a key to her residence, so was unable to leave unless she was accompanied by one of her employers. She was not allowed to use the phone or speak in her native tongue.

A study performed by the Urban Institute on the process of labor trafficking in the U.S. found that 71 percent of their participants had arrived with a legal work visa, but by the time of the study, 69 percent were unauthorized.58 They summarize seven general forms of coercion and force used by perpetrators as follows. Each definition includes several examples experienced by a victim interviewed in the study, of which I have included one per category: 1. Depriving/disorienting

2. Threats or use of violence One trafficker kept a handgun with him and shot and killed animals as a threat. He violently beat one of the workers in front of the others in order to set an example. He forced victims to work while sixk, and threatened them with death while they were ill.

57. Ai-jen Poo, “Lola Wasn’t Alone.”, (The Atlantic, 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/ business/archive/2017/05/slavery-today/527412/.

58. Colleen Owens, Meredith Dank PhD, Justin Breaux, et al., “Understanding the Organization, Operation, and Victimization Process of Labor Trafficking in the United States”, (National Institute of Justice, 2014), x.

39

also means termination of the worker’s visa. This is especially dangerous as it begins to inhibit workers from voicing concerns about the workplace or seeking help, for fear of deportation.

Research

case. “There is a deep history of these arrangements among families at the U.S.-Mexico border where U.S. citizens regularly exploit the insecure citizenship status of workers by forcing them to clean, cook, and take care of children and elders.”57 Nobodies documents the story of the Tulsa, Oklahoma bornand-bred John Pickle Company, and their trafficking and abuse of fifty-two Indian welders. Victims span a range of demographics, but are commonly highly impoverished with few options for their economic mobility. They will more often than not speak little to no English, and lack ties to their present community. These are all examples of the kinds of extreme power imbalances, rather than cultural qualities, that allow individuals to be vulnerable to slavery.

In Equality

3. Demeaning and demoralizing Perpetrators would consistently verbally and psychologically abuse the victim, using her ethnic tribe to demean and threaten her, by calling them “cockroaches.”

4. Diminishing resistance Victims were given spoiled food and crowded living quarters. There were 20 people per room, with too few bathrooms. Victims’ medical conditions were denied.

5. Intimidation and control Traffickers would randomly conduct searches of victims’ belongings, while victims were locked in their camp, and denied free movement and visitors.

6. Deception around consequences Research 40

Victims received false paperwork numerous times that implied the company was processing their immigration requests.

7. Use or threatened use of law Victims were threatened with deportation, and told that their traffickers had connections to judges and other immigration officials. They were told that police were monitoring their phone calls.59 The report found that most victims experienced eight60 or more forms of abuse, and that it was rare for anyone to experience less than five.

59. “Understanding the Organization”, 81 - 82.

60. The report numbers seventeen types of labor victimization experiences, but does not provide detail on the forms that are less common than the above-listed seven.

Research

41

fig 5

Zarina, Home is a Foreign Place, 1999

fig 6

Zarina, Home is a Foreign Place, 1999

fig 7

Tings Chak, Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention The Architecture Observer, 2014

fig 8

Tings Chak, Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention The Architecture Observer, 2014

fig 10

Tings Chak, Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention The Architecture Observer, 2014

In Equality

you broke in ha Introduction 50

only nothing that

Nayyirah Waheed, Salt, 2013

the ocean lf to be here.

51

â ť immigrant

Introduction

to meet wants you.

In Equality

LEXICON, part II The following section of research, and much of the ensuing body of work, is oriented around undocumented labor on American farms.

Migrant:

Lexicon 52

A person who moves regularly from one place to another, especially in order to find work or better living conditions. For me, the term was largely innocuous, and perhaps equivalent to ‘traveler’.

However in this field, migrants are largely vulnerable to human rights abuses due to an increased risk of trafficking.76 Large numbers of migrants are a likely signal of environmental, political, or cultural shock—whether in recent memory or historically.

Immigrant: An immigrant is, in its dictionary definition, a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country. However in everyday use, it is generally used to refer to an economic immigrant: one who has moved to a wealthier country in search of work and economic opportunity. By contrast, ex-pat is used to refer to a person living permanently in a foreign country in order to retire or do business;

refugees and asylum seekers are people living permanently in a foreign country in order to flee a crisis.77,78 This thesis uses immigrant interchangeably with economic immigrant.

Manual Laborer: A segment of the workforce more commonly referred to as Unskilled Laborer, where the work performed is associated with a limited academic skill set or minimal economic value. It requires no specific education level and typically results in smaller wages.

Menial or repetitive tasks, jobs that do not depend on technical abilities or skill, and that can be fully learned in less than 30 days will often fall into this category.

However, highly experience-driven and kinesthetic jobs will also fall into this category.

This thesis seeks to reassert the significance and elevate the status of manual labor, with the understanding that personal meaning is found through our work. It will not refer to this manual labor as unskilled labor.

Temporary Labor: Usually referring to manual labor, temporary labor encompasses any employment situation where work is limited to a defined period of time based on the needs of the employer or employment organization. Work may be full-time or part-time, is not often compensated with benefits,

76. “Migrants”, Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/topic/migrants.

77. I admit that this was not my observation, but one that I came across on Urban Dictionary.

78. “Immigrant”, Urban Dictionary, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define. php?term=immigrant.

and is often found through a thirdparty. Temporary laborers that are not manual laborers are more often referred to as, freelancers, contractors, or consultants.

Seasonal labor is a subset of temporary labor that has a cyclical nature due to annual temporal necessity. To this end, seasonal labor often refers to Agricultural labor: including the maintenance of crops such as fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts and/or the tending of livestock. Labor is performed on farms of all sizes, ranging from small and family-run to large industrial agricultural operations.

Nationality:

A foreign national residing in the United States without legal immigration status. It includes persons who entered the U.S. without inspection and proper permission from the U.S.

Contrary to or forbidden by law, especially criminal law.

This thesis will not describe undocumented immigrants as illegal for the following reasons:8081 1. The act of remaining in the United States without proper documentation is illegal, but people, despite having an illegal presence, cannot be described as illegal.

2. The status of being undocumented in the U.S. is a civil violation, not a criminal offense, and as such the term “illegal” provides an improper connotation in describing immigrants.

Irregular Migrant: Migration activity that takes place outside of nations’ regulatory norms of sending, transit and receiving of people. There is no universally accepted definition of irregular migrant, and for the purposes of this thesis, I will be using it synonymously with undocumented immigrant.82

79. “Undocumented Immigrant Law and Legal Definition”, USLegal, https://definitions. uslegal.com/u/undocumented-immigrant/.

80. “Illegal Immigrant Is a Misnomer”, (CNN, 2012), http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/doc812182.

81. Carmen A. Pacheco, Esq., “Undocumented vs. Illegal.” (Puerto Rican Bar Association, 2014), http://prbany.com/undocumented-v-illegal/.

82. “Key Migration Terms,” (International Organization for Migration, 2016), https://www. iom.int/key-migration-terms.

53

Undocumented Immigrant:

Illegal:

Lexicon

A legal relationship between an individual person and a state, affording the state jurisdiction over the person and the person the protection of the state. This jurisdiction, protection, rights, and duties are varied from state to state. United States nationality law defines some persons born in U.S. outlying possessions as U.S. nationals but not citizens.

government, and those who entered with a legal visa that is no longer valid.79

fig 11

Russell Lee Mexican girls, carrot workers, Edinburg, Texas, 1939

In Equality

SLAVERY IN U.S. AGRICULTURE To focus specifically on the agricultural industry, KnowTheChain, a nonprofit focused on improving corporate supply chain transparency and responsibility, estimates that 5% of all U.S. farmworkers are victims of forced labor.61 Depending on the season, this can mean 53,000 to 135,000 people across the U.S. have been stripped of their most fundamental human rights.

Research 56

As mentioned earlier, many of these individuals will be in the U.S. on the H2-A visa: a temporary visa for agricultural workers performing seasonal work. These workers will stay in the U.S. for an average of 167 days (roughly seven months) to perform jobs such as picking fruit, harvesting crop, and sheepherding.

The program is very popular: in the first three months of 2017 alone, the Department of Labor approved 69,272 worker applications to fill farm worker jobs, an increase of 36 percent year on year.62 In 2016, there were 134,368 H-2A visas issued.63

The program’s popularity is troubling, however, given its reputation as modern indentured servitude—or as former New York congressman Charles Rangel said, “the closest thing I’ve ever seen to [modern] slavery”.64 Many H2-A workers fall victim to extortionist recruitment groups based in their home countries, who charge for the service of helping individuals obtain these jobs in the U.S., which are relatively high paying and competitive compared to the options that are available in many rural villages. This fee is then used as debt bondage to keep victims vulnerable.

The H-2A program technically prohibits recruitment firms from charging recruitment fees, but the program also asks that hiring must happen in the workers’ country of origin. Due to this, American companies must contract out to foreign labor agencies. In turn, recruitment companies in main cities will often subcontract out to rural regions with more unemployed individuals who are willing to work for less. And so on and so forth. There is virtually no enforcement around whether the regulations around recruitment fees are followed. And the more steps between the initial recruitment company and the

61. Elizabeth Grossman. “Did Slaves Produce Your Food?” (Civil Eats, 2016), https://civileats. com/2016/10/25/did-slaves-produce-your-food-forced-labor.

62. Dan Charles, “Government Confirms A Surge In Foreign Guest Workers On U.S. Farms”, (NPR, 2017), https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/18/528948143/governmentconfirms-a-surge-in-foreign-guest-workers-on-u-s-farms.

63. Philip Martin, “The H-2A Farm Guestworker Program Is Expanding Rapidly: Here Are the Numbers You Need to Know.” (Economic Policy Institute, 2017), https://www.epi.org/ blog/h-2a-farm-guestworker-program-expanding-rapidly/.

64. Brian Barth, “The H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Visa Process, Explained”, (Modern Farmer, 2017), https://modernfarmer.com/2017/12/h-2a-temporary-agriculturalworker-visa-process-explained/.

BRAND / RETAILER LOGISTICS FIRM

COMPOUNDING OPPORTUNITIES FOR EXPLOITATION

principal recruiter

Employer

agent agent WORKERS fig 5

Adapted from “Figure 3: Intersecting Labor Recruitment and Product Supply Chains”, Jennifer Gordon, Regulating the Human Supply Chain, 471

worker, the higher the chances of exploitation. (See fig. 4)

65. “Recruitment Revealed: Fundamental Flaws in the H-2 Temporary Worker Program and Recommendations for Change”, (Baltimore, Centro De Los Derechos Del Migrante, Inc), http://cdmigrante.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Recruitment_Revealed.pdf, 16.

66. “H-2A Fees and Costs: At a Glance”, (Brooklyn, Global Workers Justice Alliance), http:// www.globalworkers.org/sites/default/files/feescostb.pdf.

67. Barth, “The H2-A Process”.

68. “Recruitment Revealed”, 16.

69. Barth, “The H2-A Process”.

57

I’d like to step backwards from

Research

The Centro de los Derechos del Migrante reports that 58 percent of surveyed H2 workers paid a recruitment fee, and on average paid US$590 (these data include H2-B).65 Additional costs of temporary work in the U.S. include transportation, border inspection fees, cost of a passport, and other government mandated fees. Some of these are meant to be reimbursed by the worker’s employer, but this right is not often common knowledge—and the migrant has already made the payment upfront.66,67 In the same survey, by the Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, 47 percent of workers reported needing a loan in order to make pre-employment fees.68

And once again, the H2-A is a temporary visa in which workers’ status is contingent on their relationship to their employer. For these individuals in particular, who are most commonly taking on these laborious jobs due to an urgent financial need and lack of economic opportunity at home—and then tagging on the pre-employment loan and its interest—the risk of deportation as a result of reporting abusive labor conditions is much too high. And despite all its criticism, the H2-A remains the only legal method by which foreign workers can come to the U.S. for farm work.69

In Equality

here, and be reminded once again that modern day slavery cannot happen in isolation. John Bowe emphasizes in Nobodies that, “people new to the realm of farmworker mistreatment always get stuck on the notion that modern slavery and farmworker abuse happen because today’s farmworkers often lack work papers or citizenship… Such a short-term view is erroneous. Agribusiness has always been this bad, and it has always been so by design.”70 And truly if we work backwards in time, we can see what he means.

Research 58

We already understand the difficulties of today’s H2 guestworker programs. However these programs are based on two seasonal farm worker initiatives between the U.S. and Mexico, the second and more well-known of which is referred to as the Bracero program, having grown out of a demand for farm labor after World War II. But both heavily controversial Bracero programs laid the groundwork for exploiting labor from Mexico, and still serve as the basis for our guestworker programs today.

Furthermore, most historians agree that the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, through which most laborers were granted the rights we think of as commonplace today, were purposefully exclusive of farm labor. “Like many of the New

Deal’s economic protextions,” writes Risa L. Goluboff, “[the National Labor Relations Act] excluded agricultural and domestic workers. Many of those workers were african American, so their exclusion marked a concession to southern white congressmen.”71 About the Fair Labor Standards Act, Marc Linder says, “Direct legislative history explaining the FLSA’s exclusion of farm workers is virtually nonexistent.... An examination of the predecessor legislation to FLSA, however, reveals the reason for the exclusion.

To enact the social and economic reforms of the New Deal, President Roosevelt and his allies were forced to compromise with southern congressmen. Those congressmen negotiated with Roosevelt to obtain modifications of New Deal legislation that preserved the social and racial plantation system in the South—a system resting on the subjugation of blacks and other minorities.”72 Examples of this discrimination continue, from segregation under Jim Crow laws from the 1890s that leaves former slaves and their descendants in debt and working on fields through sharecropping, to 1886, where seven out of eight farmworkers are Chinese, as the U.S. had been importing Asian labor to replace African slave labor, to the moment of slavery’s abolition in 1865, where Black Codes are immediately established in 1866 to restrict black rights, and require

70. Bowe, Nobodies, 36.

71. Risa Lauren Goluboff, “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights”, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2007).

72. Marc Linder, “Farm Workers and the Fair Labor Standards Act: Racial Discrimination in the New Deal”, (Texas Law Review 65 (7): 1335, 1987).

them to acquire a special permit to work in anything other than agricultural labor, while still prohibiting them from raising their own crops.73 Agriculture in the U.S. has consistently relied upon the importation of workers from countries with disenfranchised, vulnerable populations, and is a system historically intended to control and repress the black body.

While today it is a different group of people, 80% of whom are Hispanic or from Latin America, who suffer its consequences,74 Jennifer Gordon emphasizes that we recognize that “...harms to migrant workers are not generated by anomalous bad actors, but instead are structural.”75 As such the projects that follow will attempt to intervene in the wider system that is the American agricultural industry.

Research 59

73. “Timeline of Agricultural Labor”, (National Farm Worker Ministry), http://nfwm.org/education-center/farm-worker-issues/ timeline-of-agricultural-labor/.

74. National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), 2013-2014.

75. Gordon, Regulating the Human Supply Chain, 450.

In Equality

1866

1886

1890s-1900s

Slavery is abolished

Black Codes established to restrict former slaves from non-agricultural work

7/8 farmworkers are Chinese after the U.S. imports labor to replace slave labor

Segregation under Jim Crow laws leaves former slaves in debt and on fields

Introduction

1865

60

1917-1921

1938

TODAY

Duration of the second Bracero Program

80% of farm workers today are Hispanic

Introduction

1942-1964

Farm workers excluded from minimum wage protections

61

First Bracero Program between U.S. and Mexico

In Equality

HUMAN Supply Chain

(seasonal farmwork)

Mandatory Medical Exams Job Training Required Insurance Bribes to Government Officials

H2-A Visa

H2-B

MIGRATION FEES (FORMAL)

(temporary or seasonal work)

MIGRATION FEES (INFORMAL OR UNSEEN)

Travel Controlled by...

Chance of Exploitation Introduction 62

Chance of Exploitation

SUBCONTRACTOR

SUBCONTRACTOR

PRINCIPAL RECRUITMENT AGENCY Identify and Interview Migrant Labourers Process Visa Documents Job Matching Travel Assistance

a re

PRINCIPAL STAFFING AG ENCY

i at t

(remains legal employer of farm labourer)

me s th

es am ea

r

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Remittance Payments Geographic Boundary

c to

HOME/COMMUNITY

INFORMAL LENDERS

Geographic Boundary

Product Supply Chain

PUBLIC C L ow

o st

Pr

re e s su

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PROCESSOR/MANUFACTURER

60-80% of market

Altria Group Nestle Unilever

EMPLOYER (FARMER)

60-80% of market

Walmart Safeway Albertson’s Kroger

DISTRIBUTOR

SEEDS

UNDOCUMENTED LABOURERS

FINANCIAL I NSTITUTION

60-80% of market

Monsanto Dow Syngenta

FERTILIZER Monsanto Bayer Syngenta

60-80% of market

PESTICIDES

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Price squeeze absorbed in wage cuts

FARM

Introduction

60-80% of market

Monsanto Dow Syngenta

fig 12

JosĂŠ Manuel Mateo and Javier MartĂ­nez Pedro, Migrar, 2011

fig 13

JosĂŠ Manuel Mateo and Javier MartĂ­nez Pedro, Migrar, 2011

In Equality

THE BRACERO PROGRAM

Research 66

To begin describing the Bracero program is to begin discussing, in Professor Wayne A. Grove’s words, “arguably the most significant labor market development in agriculture since slavery.”83 The Bracero program, a forerunner of today’s agricultural guestworker programs, grew out of demands by growers in 1942 to fulfill a World War II-induced labor shortage on farms. The program is officially referred to as the Mexican Farm Labor Program, but widely known as “Bracero” from the Spanish term bracero, meaning “manual laborer”. The agreement was ended on December 31, 1964, after having brought millions of primarily Mexican men, and some women, temporarily to the United States on short-term farm labor contracts.

But prior to the Bracero program of 1942-1964, the United States and Mexico had established “the first bracero program” from 1917 to 1921, terminating at the conclusion of World War I, and also, ostensibly, in reaction to a war-induced labor shortage and a desire for cheap labor. Officially

designated the Temporary Admissions Program of 1917, around 80,000 workers made their way across the border for work, with an estimated 100,000 more undocumented arrivals.84 The Mexican government welcomed the end of this short-lived, initial program in 1921, due to an economic recession in Mexico along with the fact that “many Braceros experienced discrimination in the U.S., and some wound up with few savings because of charges they incurred at farmer owned stores.”85 Even so, the Mexican population in the U.S. continued to rise—from 1920 to 1924, nearly 250,000 more Mexican people migrated to the U.S.86 Then, as the Great Depression swept, unprecedented economic collapse and chaos bred public opposition to immigration and spawned a need for a convenient scapegoat. One million people—out of approximately 1.4 million people of Mexican heritage in the U.S. at the time—were forcibly deported to Mexico. Only at the time, “it wasn’t called deportation,” explained NPR host Terry Gross, “It was euphemistically referred to as repatriation, returning people to their native country. But about 60 percent of the people in the Mexican repatriation drive

83. Wayne A. Grove, “The Mexican Farm Labor Program, 1942-1964: GovernmentAdministered Labor Market Insurance for Farmers.” (Agricultural History 70, no. 2, 1996), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3744539, 303.

84. Armando Navarro, The Immigration Crisis: Nativism, Armed Vigilantism, and the Rise of a Countervailing Movement, (Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 56.

85. “Braceros: History, Compensation”, (Rural Migration News, UC Davis, 2006), https:// migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=1112.

86. Navarro, The Immigration Crisis, 57.

were actually U.S. citizens of Mexican descent.”87 The Mexican Repatriation campaign “sought to save jobs for true ‘Americans’ and reduce the welfare rolls by encouraging Mexicans to ‘voluntarily’ leave the country;”88 which is perhaps rhetoric that may sound familiar to us today.

I will not too greatly recount the psychological trauma that resulted from this mass exodus, but borrow one paragraph from the introduction of Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez’s Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s:

Over the twenty-two years during which the Bracero Program was run, nearly 5 million short-term labor contracts were signed. Many of these contracts were fulfilled by individuals who would return to the U.S. on a regular basis, each time on a different contract. During this period, Mexican workers comprised of about 18% of the total seasonal farm population.

The Bracero program’s strongest supporters were American growers, who were also in turn its primary beneficiaries. Growers maintained that the Bracero program was necessary as American citizens were

87. Terry Gross and Francisco Balderrama, “America’s Forgotten History Of MexicanAmerican ‘Repatriation’”, (NPR, 2015), https://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/ americas-forgotten-history-of-mexican-american-repatriation.

88. Kevin R. Johnson, “The Forgotten Repatriation of Persons of Mexican Ancestry and Lessons for the War on Terror,” (Pace Law Review, 26:1, 2005), 2-3.

89. Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico, 2006), 2.

90. “Braceros, Repatriation, and Seasonal Workers”, Encyclopedia of Race and Racism. Vol. 1.

2nd ed. (Detroit, Macmillan Reference USA, 2013), 316.

67

Even by the mid-1930s, many who tried to return, including those born in the United States, found it difficult or themselves unallowed to recross the border.

Oscar J. Martinez writes that,

In this instance, immigration was restricted until post-World War II—in which a similar labor shortage and ensuing demand for Mexican laborers. This demand grew into the Bracero program as we know it today—intended to be a post-war bolstering of labor, and instead being signed under Public Law 45.

Research

“Across the nation, colonias and barrios literally disappeared as families lost the struggle to survive.

The oft-repeated phase “el diablo nos está llevando,” “things are going to hell,” seemed to aptly sum up the situation. A gnawing, fatalistic sense of apprehension prevailed as families remaining behind tried to hang on to the last vestiges of a normal life. There was little the beleaguered communities could do but wait for the depression to end and for the anti-Mexican hysteria to subside.”89

now, and ever since the 1920s, anti-Mexican sentiment has been a regular occurence. It rises “repeatedly during downturns in the U.S. economy, with attendant demands by the public for wholesale deportation of Mexicans, imposition of legal restrictions on immigration, and stronger enforcement measures at the border.”90

In Equality

not interested in performing the hard and low-paying agricultural work necessary to maintaining the food system of the time. South of the border, the program received support from potential braceros, or ordinary people in need of employment, as well as from the government, who (correctly) saw workers’ international remittances as an important source of income for the nation.

But the Bracero program, for various reasons, remained controversial both in the United States and Mexico.

Research 68

Here, opponents to the program argued that both that braceros served to displace Americans workers, and in doing so depressed wages and deteriorated working conditions. In Mexico, activists shared stories of discrimination and exploitation experienced by braceros while in the U.S., while the Mexican agricultural industry reserved a lack of quality laborers—as braceros were busy in employ elsewhere.

Gilbert G. Gonzalez breaks down some of the ways in which the bracero recruitment process was exploitative, in his book, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?

Mexican Labor Migration to the United States. Some of the issues he found here may sound familiar.

A complex and unenforced recruitment system: The formal plan for how braceros would be hired was that large agricultural corporations determined the demand for braceros in each season. In a situation where there might be a labor shortage, the process would occur as follows: American growers defined their needs (without government oversight) to the U.S. government, who relayed this need to authorities in Mexico City, who from there advised state and local leaders of the change in demand.

These leaders would then inform the workforce of this change in demand, and workers would go back into the pipeline for the chance to be hired.

However, “the government passed the burden, financial and otherwise, of recruiting and transporting the guest workers on to the growers.”91 Thus in practice, villages and towns were instead assigned quotas, where farming districts were targeted as having more “ideal laborers.” Local authorities performed a selection process, and those approved of were given permiso: official identification verifying that an individual had served his military service and was a law-abiding citizen. This identification only showed that the owner was eligible to be a bracero candidate. It did not guarantee a work contract, and roughly 20% of people were rejected during the next step in the process, reporting to a “migratory station”, where

91. Aili, Palmunen, “Learning from the Mistakes of the Past: An Analysis of Past and Current Temporary Workers Policies and their Implications for a Twenty-First Century Guest-Worker Program”, (Kennedy School Review, 2005) 48.

another 7-10% were turned down at the border.92 Throughout this process, Permiso holders were responsible for the costs of their own travel and living. The system at play was markedly similar to historic processes of colonial indentured labor.

Oversupply of workers created a market for papers:

On top of this, local entrepreneurs and U.S. agribusiness interests in the region saw an opportunity to further exploit the waiting men.

Frequently while waiting, men who were offered to be moved to

92. Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor? Mexican Labor Migration to the United States, (London, Routledge, 2016), 59.

93. Ibid., 62.

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid., 66.

96. Elizabeth W. Mandeel, The Bracero Program 1942-1964, (American International Journal of Contemporary Research, Vol. 4, 2014: 1), 173.

69

Limited and underregulated “migratory stations”:

And living conditions and wait times outside of the stations soon grew derogatory and unsanitary: crowd sizes could vary from 1,000 to 20,000, and waiting could last for months. Waiting crowds of men saw escalated conflicts and fights; slow starvation as they ran out of money and food; illness. Juan Zacate, a bracero, said in the film Harvest of Loneliness, “I have seen men eat banana peels, watermelon skin, even newspaper. They were that hungry”96

Research

As alluded to earlier, there were large numbers of men seeking work in the U.S., and many more than were allowed through the quotas.

An oversupply of applicants and an undersupply of permisos resulted in the formation of corrupt markets to buy and sell them. This additionally generated a market for informal loans, as braceros needed to borrow money in order to access just the documentation that made them eligible for candidacy. Studies from 1955 reported that 75% of braceros paid anywhere from 150 to 300 pesos for these papers.93 Most of this population held few assets to offer as formal collateral, and were left to borrow from informal sources at exorbitant rates of 5-10% per month. Gonzalez reminds us here that this only adds to a growing list of costs workers must incur, and “still, there were no promises”94 of receiving a contract.

Many laborers came from rural villages to seek employment as braceros, and as such needed to travel difficult, long distances to access “migratory stations” or recruitment centers, where scerening procedures and candidate reviews were completed. Gonzalez shares the account of a man who was “on the road for thirty-five hours, riding on ‘steel bouncing on steel, the hard straight-back seats providing little cushion between bodies and highway.’ ”95 Not everyone could even afford this small luxury of a third-class bus ticket—others had to walk for days to the nearest station and camp roadside.

In Equality

the top of the waitlist, or even simply offered work papers, if they were willing to take on other jobs.

Gonzalez provides an example that men might be asked to work in the town’s streetcleaning crew for several days, or help out on local construction projects. While this practice may have started out as a win-win situation, in which workers could work over their waiting periods, it quickly grew into situations such one in which a worker was told he would not get a contract if he did not work to pick tomatoes for the town in the meantime.97

Research 70

These are just a few of the ways in which the recruitment stage of the bracero program served as nothing more than a means to generate huge, cheap reservoirs of “labor indentured to wealthy strangers and foreigners.”98 And despite the fact that the program officially instituted means by which workers both Mexican and American would not suffer consquences of the program, we have already seen several examples by which what’s on paper and the reality sharply differ.

In the U.S., farm wages dropped sharply relative to manufacturing wages, in part due to this use of braceros and undocumented laborers, lacking full rights as laborers in America. Bracero workers arriving on farms were already in positions of reduced power, having undergone an exploitative recruitment process that left them demeaned and in debt. On farms, this abuse,

which was well documented, simply continued: Working Conditions Braceros were meant to be limited in work scope to what’s referred to as “stoop” labor, or work that requires a person to be in a squatting position, such as planting or cultivating crops. Tasks such as driving trucks or operating machinery were indicated as requiring more skill, and as such required a higher wage to perform.

However in practice, the prevailing mindset was that the particulars of employment should not be of official concern.

Wages Braceros were meant to receive the prevailing farm worker wage, meaning the average wage paid across the agricultural industry to others in the same position.

However, the method by which workers were to be paid was not specified. In the industry, there are two main methods: by the hour, or piece-rate, meaning that a worker’s wages are tied to their production.

It has been documented that farm workers would manipulate this payments schedule in order to pay workers the minimym possible: “as a result, the wage schedule was often changed from day to day at the whole—and to the benefit—of the employer.”99 Housing The Bracero agreement, as well

97. Gonzalez, Guest Workers or Colonized Labor?, 70.

98. Ibid., 80.

99. Mandeel, “The Bracero Program”, 175.

as most guest worker programs today, included a provision that shelter should be provided free to these workers. Worker housing could be found in qualities ranging from converted chicken coops to barns, to shacks without running water or other hygienic facilities. When thesis living conditions resulted in illness, health authories at the time “stigmatized Mexicans as carriers of disease with unhygienic living habits.”100 Food The standards for food provision were that $1.75 would be deducted, daily, from workers’ pay, to provide for foot at cost. If the bracero decided to opt out, the worker would be able to receive another $1.50 per day instead. Many were not give this option to opt out, and instead were necessitated to eat in a mess-hall-style format with food prepared by a vendor.

There were few methods for workers to report or access help in instances of abuse. When workers took the risk of making a complaint, it was easy for farm owners to deport or decide not to renew the worker’s contract.

And as described earlier, most workers came onto farms already having accrued a lot of debt. As such, this was simply not an option for many.

100. Mandeel, “The Bracero Program”, 176.

101. Ibid.

71

Reporting Concerns

Research

Food quality and quantity were constant sources of dissatisfaction among workers, where Dr. Ernesto Galarza explains that food vendors were incentivized to keep quantity and quality low because they profitted from the difference between growers’ budgets and the cost of the food they provided.101

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Introduction 72

“We used to own our slaves.

Farmer, CBS’ Harvest of Shame, 1960

Introduction 73

Now we just rent them.�

fig 14

Sid Avery, Mexican laborers show their ‘permission to work’ papers in California, 1957

fig 15

Sid Avery, After the various medical examinations, the men are dusted with DDT, 1957

fig 16

John Ewing, Mexican laborers cut broccoli stalks for Smith Farms’ crew, Portland Press Herald

fig 17

Don Bartletti, Migrant family of 14 travels the road to a farm pueblo near Leon, Guanajuato, Los Angeles Times

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Introduction

78

Introduction

DESIGN METHODOLOGy

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The MFA Products of Design program is a two-year multidisciplinary design program, with a mission to educate and motivate a generation of designers to consider the implications of their work in social, political, and cultural contexts.

Projects

Each student completes a year-long thesis, comprising their second year of schooling, and is a design investigation of their chosen subject matter or territory. Work takes place across a wide range of forms, including speculative design, expert research, product prototyping, information architecture, service, interaction, and experience design, user testing, branding, and business modeling.

80

This thesis has used the above methods of creative ideation and production. It is additionally informed by interviews with forty subject matter experts, ranging from farm labourers to food policy leaders; as well as with social workers, international development and aid workers, lawyers, medical trauma professionals, researchers, and educators, involved in and around migration and human rights. It includes lessons and ideas from a co-creative workshop with nine participants of various social advocacy backgrounds.

The design research, prototypes, and proposals presented altogether advocate for a holistic and critical approach to creating the products of design.

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Introduction 82

“But all our phrasing— racial chasm, racial ju white privilege, even w serves to obscure that experience, that it dis blocks airways, rips m organs, cracks bones, must never look away always remember that history, the economic charts, the regressions violence, upon the bo Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015

Introduction 83

—race relations, ustice, racial profiling, white supremacy— t racism is a visceral slodges brains, muscle, extracts breaks teeth. You y from this. You must t the sociology, the cs, the graphs, the s all land, with great ody. ”

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R(ALLY)

Projects 84

As mentioned in earlier sections, from the late 1930s, farm workers have not had legal access to the rights thought of as common to all jobs—such as collective bargaining or unionization. This is not to say that they haven’t unionized and striked in spite of this restriction, but that there is no legal guarantee that their voices are even heard and demands negotiated. This was especially important to me in light of today’s political climate, as it has become harder and harder for immigrants to be in the public eye, for heightened fear of detention or deportation. The presence of immigration authorities has increased in border towns, and for some farm workers, this means they’ve lost the ability to travel freely; to drive or travel to many public places for the increased fear and stress of deportation.

And for the many workers who already endure unjust treatment in the workplace, this pressure just continues to escalate.

I imagined r(ally), a service that allows members of the public to “proxy-protest” on behalf of specific grievances collectively determined by the farmworker community, to try and draw attention to some of the challenges that these workers face.

First, the service collects stories of undocumented farmworkers through an encrypted messaging service, such as Whatsapp. It would then facilitate a community

platform to converse and “upvote” stories, in order to reach a consensus on which grievances are most pressing to the workers. r(ally)’s network of citizen journalists could then translate these stories into their most digestible formats, highlighting in particular the personal and urgent elements of the stories. The public is then able to easily sign up, and r(ally) would organize a time and place for the protest to occur.

This project has two goals: first, to keep the momentum of large-scale public sentiment going through personal, evocative stories of injustice. And second, to ensure those stories are properly representative of the farmworker community’s perspective

Farm worker-facing screens

Protester-facing screens

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In Equality

Two-thirds of 88 surveyed immigrant dairy farmers in New York have experienced physical injuries in the workplace.

Why is this a problem?

Training received was insufficient or not received at all.

Dairy farmworkers’ jobs are inherently dangerous

Some feel uncomfortable because they are too afraid.

Projects

Why?

Undocumented workers have little power because of intensive immigration enforcement activity, and are willing to endure more labour violations in order to keep their jobs.

Why is this a problem?

90

48% report workplace bullying or discrimination

Some feel pressured to be seen as good workers Why?

20% report explicit reference to their ethnicity or citizenship in a demeaning or intimidating manner

88% feel that farm owners care more about the well-being of the cows than the workers

American workers will do easier work for better pay (have and know their rights in the system)

Why?

Cows are perceived as the source of profit

Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is prohibited from regulating small farms, even when someone dies on the job.

Some workers feel uncomfortable telling their boss about their injuries.

Why? Some feel uncomfortable because they are not confident in their English.

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Why?

91

73% speak little to no English

Most workers feel they are the ones who bear the burden of ensuring their personal safety on the job Why? Workers do not have a specified safety protocol to follow

Why? Many do not apply for workers’ compensation because they don’t know it’s an option for undocumented workers (in New York) Workers cost less $ to replace than cows

Why?

Limited physical access to informative resources and limited time to look for them

In Equality

GRIT

well as use a unique form to evoke a sense of ownership over the safety equipment.

I designed GRIT, a milking glove attachment, after learning that the dairy industry is actually semiautomated—meaning that there are still many, small tasks on farms that are still performed manually.

In turn, GRIT is also an online community inspired by the Open Prosthetics Project. I envisioned a platform and forum open to farm workers, makers, and funders, where DIY farm hacks, for jobs big and small, could be aggregated.

Its goal is to crowdsource ways of incrementally improving working life on farms, with the hope of finding widely useful, mass manufacturable concepts that can be sold in accessible locations, where more and more people can find little ways to make their jobs easier.

Projects 92

Over the course of my research for this project, I was fortunate to speak to a number of dairy farmers, and particularly was able to visit and receive feedback from a dairy farmer in Washingtown county. While there, he shared that his farm goes through 300 single-use gloves in one week. Dairy as an industry is highly sensitive to sanitation, with this particular farm performing regular checks for contaminants in their milk, on top of receiving third-party checks at least once a day. This leads that nearly all tasks must be performed with some sort of health and safety protection.

However, nearly everyone I spoke to that performs manual labor on a regular basis, admits that regular safety equipment—thin plastic gloves, goggles, flimsy face masks—are a pain to take on and off. For someone whose job is round-the-clock, and who does not immediately see the damaging effects of their work on their health, it can be more trouble than it seems to be worth to use safety equipment.

With the GRIT milking glove attachment, I hoped to increase the lifespan of single-use gloves by introducing a washable and more heavy duty rubber material, ass

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Projects 100 LIVESTOCK CARE

Glove at t ac hment f or pr emilk ing ma s s age

The EZTrakâ„¢ Zero-Turn Mower. Speed meets precisio

L AT E S T

GUIDE S

SHOP

JOIN

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Homemade udder s alve

PLANTING

Row mar ker mod f or r ake s

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on.

P R O JEC T S

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COMMON CENTS It’s no secret that immigrants often migrate for the explicit purpose of supporting their families and communities in their home countries, and that they do so through international money transfers called remittances. I chose to intervene in the remittance space with the understanding that employers can withhold wages or abuse process without recourse in the payment process, and workers would likely not complain in order to continue paying off their debt or support their families.

Projects 102

In addition, given that many low-income or undocumented individuals will not participate in the formal financial system, most will send money using Western Union’s services. However this large market share also means Western Union’s fees can skyrocket—it can cost up to $189 to send anywhere between $1500 to $3000. One of my expert interviewees also shared stories of how implicit bias and stereotyping can impact in-person transactions, in which a user was deemed suspicious and whose whose transfers were capped, after a Western Union employee grew suspicious that his regular transfers were a case of money laundering.

In speaking to our professor, Bill Cromie, I learned about the concept of informal lending circles, that exist all around the world, where a group of people pool savings together to help each other out financially. In Latin America,

these are called “tandas” and in West Africa and the Caribbean, they’re called “Susus”.

As such, I designed Common Cents: an app that helps users make remittances in groups, and by doing so, to send money overseas at a lower cost. We would aggregate deposits from a group of users to be sent as a single transaction, taking advantage of existing international transfer services that are designed for larger sum transactions at a lower fee. For example, I could use the services of World First, who is able to transfer any amount above $10,000 for just $10. In comparison, with Western Union, users would need to multiple transactions to send over $5,000, with fees each time.

For unbanked individuals, the service would include partnerships with local groceries. Similar to how prepaid phone cards work, to deposit into Common Cents, individuals visit their local grocer to exchange cash for a 10-digit deposit PIN. And similarly to withdraw, an individual would present a barcode to their grocery store to receive cash, after which their balance is automatically updated. To remain sustainable, Common Cents proposes a fee of 2.75% per transaction, as well as dividing between them the cost of the final remittance fee.

I want to reiterate how important remittances are to developing economies. For example, the United States directs an average of $320 million worth of foreign aid a year to Mexico, whereas Mexican immigrants send about $24 billion.

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BANK

DEPOSIT Projects 108

Grocery Store Partner

10-digit deposit PIN

BANK

WITHDRAW Projects 109

Grocery Store Partner

Cash Pick-up Code

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Introduction

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Introduction

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ALMOST FREE Almost Free took the form of a Churn-It-Yourself ice cream pop-up attempting to engage members of the public both physically and mentally in some of the struggles faced by immigrant farmworkers in the New York dairy industry.

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Participants were invited to simulate churning their own ice cream using old-fashioned handcrank buckets, while listening to recordings of immigrants telling stories about different aspects of their work, daily lives, and journeys.

There were two long benches to which the ice cream makers were attached, where visitors could sit and listen alone, or share the experience with another person.

Visitors had the option of listening to three 60 - 90 second stories, and as a reward for their participation, were given a voucher to receive a free cup of ice cream from a nearby 16 Handles.

In putting together an event that focused on first-person storytelling as the primary medium of information sharing, I wanted to create a space where the public could empathize with and “meet” people who they’d likely not cross paths with otherwise. I tried as much as possible to remove my own voice in crafting the space, and rather kept all the information I wanted to share within the stories or as part of a large-format systems map that illustrated how milk is produced and travels from farms to our grocery stores.

It was important to me, in this final project, to make room for migrants’ voices rather than my own for two reasons: first, I had my own point of view about these workers’ treatment, but wanted to visitors to draw their own conclusions from the information presented. For this reason, the stories included were also not necessarily the darkest examples I’d heard of farm worker abuse. There were also a number of different reactions to the work as a result: from participants who chose to focus primarily on how milk was produced, to those who called out the isolation and control of undocumented workers as modern slavery before I did.

Second, the design process was a constant negotiation between creating an event that was educational and informative, yet trying to ensure that the message would not come across as didactic.

Several of my early iterations of the experience metaphorized the specific tasks workers would perform on farms, or tried to humanize the costs of produce in work hours. I finally settled on sharing stories as, for me, the least invasive way of getting migrant voices out into the public realm with a point of view, but not necessarily an agenda.

I was lucky to receive space for the event in Turnstyle Underground Market: a refurbished extension of the Columbus Circle subway station hosting an array of food and retail vendors. The market was beautiful, modern, and chic: and lent to an unintentional dissonance between Almost Free’s aesthetic

and content. I realized over the course of the day that this dissonance highlighted one of my primary personal tensions throughout the course of the thesis work: the vast distance between urban lifestyles and the food systems that sustain them.

“Almost Free” references both that participants “paid” for their ice cream by listening to immigrant stories, and that the living conditions and treatment of these migrant workers is rooted in systems and attitudes that are unavoidably exploitative.

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ON THE DAIRY FARM Most dairy farmers and farm workers will begin their day around 3AM.

Cows at dairy farms are milked 1 - 3 times a day

Workers will use “pushing� or other herding methods to move cows from the barn to the milking parlour

Milkers massage the udder; Strip them of foremilk (meaning they squeeze out a bit of milk); Wash and dry teats with a germicide solution; And attach the milking machines

Workers put out morning feed mixtures.

This may include types of hay, alfalfa, grains, corn, grass silage;

Cow bedding needs to be fully refreshed every 4 - 5 days (new sand or straw) and cleaned daily

And clean and refresh the water troughs Calves also need to be fed with milk or milk replacer and water

Their pens may also need extra cleaning and new straw; Some calves begin to eat calf starter, an equivalent to cow baby food

On a mid-sized farm, there may be one or two births every day

Workers monitor and intervene in the birthing process when necessary

FROM (DAIRY) FARM TO TABLE A refrigerated tanker collects milk from the dairy farm every 24 - 48 hours, and transports it to a processing factory

Milk is tested to ensure it has been properly chilled, and is free of bacteria

Every dairy farm operates dierently. The routine illustrated here roughly outlines the tasks dairy farmers perform in a day, and has been very much simplified.

Milk is pasteurized and homogenized at the processing factory, and is stored in refrigerated silos before and after processing

The actual machine milking process takes about 5 - 7 minutes /cow

Milkers then apply another round of germicide solution to protect the teat

Milk typically moves from the cows through the milking machines to pipes connected to cooling storage tanks

Milk is tested to ensure it’s free of bacteria at regular, randomized points in the day

Workers will use pushing or other herding methods to move cows back to the barn

An average 1400 lbs Holstein cow produces 115 lbs of manure per day

Cows are checked for health: many wear pedometers to track activity, and are otherwise monitored for sickness and related treatments, birthing schedules and more

At the same time, calves should be checked for colds or other health indicators

The farmer normally separates the calf from the cow after a few days

Milk can be then sold as fluid (drinking) milk; It’s also processed into other retail forms here: cheese, yogurt, ice cream etc; And its packaging is also typically done by the dairy processor

Calves must be monitored closely for the first few weeks, before being moved into hutches, or little stalls with other calves around their age

Distribution companies transport the processed product to retailers in refrigerated trucks

Milk and dairy products are available at 38,441 grocery stores across the U.S., of all shapes and sizes; Not to mention all the restaurants, convenience stores, and more, that stock milk and milk products

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“That on the first day of of our Lord one thousan sixty-three, all persons h State or designated part whereof shall then be in United States, shall be th forever free; and the Exe the United States, includ naval authority thereof, w maintain the freedom of do no act or acts to repre of them, in any efforts th actual freedom.”

President Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863

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January, in the year nd eight hundred and held as slaves within any of a State, the people rebellion against the hen, thenceforward, and ecutive Government of ding the military and will recognize and f such persons, and will ess such persons, or any hey may make for their

WHAT’S NEXT I recently read an article in the Huffington Post, offering criticism of President Obama and Martin Luther King Jr’s rendering of the quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. The author argues that whereas abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker’s initial offering implied a sense of responsibility, the punchier, modern adaptation could be interpreted to mean we might be “off the hook” (as in, if the arc inevitably bends toward justice, we do not have to participate).

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The author is quick to emphasize this is not a criticism of either Obama or MLK, and that rather, this is his call to action. Having had to redefine my own understanding of justice over the last year, I venture to agree with him.

It has never been clearer to me that I have been privileged by my country and my education; by the systems of food and culture that have fed my body, mind, soul. And as I have continued to criticize all that has given me all that I have, the question I inch ever closer toward is, what next? Where can I go from here?

The MFA thesis has been an incredible learning journey, both personal and professional, and truly, it is just the beginning.

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“I do not pretend to u universe. The arc is a reaches but little way the curve and comple experience of sight. I conscience. And from sure it bends toward

From a sermon by Minister Theodore Parker in Lexington, Massachusetts, 1853

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understand the moral a long one. My eye ys. I cannot calculate ete the figure by can divine it by m what I see I am justice.�

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