Migrant Workers Claim Modern Slavery In Florida

In Florida, illegal aliens pick tomatoes in labor conditions worse than slavery
In Florida, illegal aliens pick tomatoes in labor conditions worse than slavery

Florida

In Florida’s tomato fields, a Hispanic helot underclass toils in the burning sun to pick tomatoes for McDonald’s and Taco Bell in slavery-like conditions.

“Slavery” is being used here in the pejorative sense as “a labor system which we dislike.” It is extremely irritating when people who know nothing about slavery attribute the pitfalls of the “free labor” system to slavery.

In the Old South, slaves on large plantations had better access to healthcare than most poor Whites. They enjoyed a form of social security on plantations, sick leave, and lived longer lives than “free laborers” in the Northern states. In fact, the diet of slaves was superior to the diet of modern blacks, and slaves on cotton plantations only spent around 34 percent of their time per year on the cotton crop.

Since slaves were the property of their masters, the costs of educating them, housing them, policing them, feeding them and providing for them in sickness and old age, not to mention the costs of raising them from childhood until they were old enough to become profitable laborers, were all absorbed by the planter. The “free labor” system privatizes the profits of exploitation while offloading all the costs onto the public.

These tomato farmers in Florida can rely on an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor from Latin America and the Caribbean. In the Old South, the slave trade was banned, so slave labor was quite expensive. These “modern slaves” more closely resemble the Irish “free laborers” who were used to dig canals in the North or the Scots-Irish mineworkers who were exploited in early twentieth century Appalachia.

Note: Barry Estabrook has an interesting book about Florida’s tomato industry and the “slaves” who are picking them, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit.

In 2011, Florida’s Arizona-style immigration law was killed by opposition from the Florida Farm Bureau, largely because of the threat it posed to the blueberry crop, which is driven by diet fads and which is equally senseless to grow in that environment.


About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

10 Comments

  1. ‘It’s genes that count not religious delusions’

    Faith in the Three-in-One Who created genes ‘counts’ infinitely more than the delusions of atheists.

    ‘The best thing Whites can do for their survival no matter where they live is to have White children’

    Without righteousness, though they breed like flies they will all be swept away, and the godly offspring will inherit the earth. The best thing Whites can do for their survival, temporally and ultimately, is to repent and believe the Gospel, now.

    ‘I was correcting Mosin Nagant’s misinformation’

    Read my foregoing comment, and then re-read and finally comprehend my earlier comments. You will find they are not incongruent with Census statistics, and I was responding to comments citing percentages that seem to imply African Americans are not increasing and Northwest European non-RC Whites are not declining in numbers.

  2. ‘RC true believers are just as crazy as Prots like Mosin’

    That covers the whole spectrum of anyone who truly believes. Anyone who truly believes is ‘crazy’ then, and some are even ‘maniacal’, ‘psychopathic’, etc.? Whereas normal, rational people DON’T take the ‘claims’ of ‘religion’ seriously? ‘Religion’ is not factual, not true in itself, but only a ‘useful tool’ for various carnal purposes?

  3. You are one sick puppy Mosin if you prefer useless logical absurdities like the Trinity to healthy White children whom you scurrilously refer to as “flies.”

  4. I did not mean for anyone to take it like that! White children are not ‘flies’ in any sense! Every one is born/created in the image of God, though stained with sin.

    What I intended to convey, Rudel, was that even if white ‘breeding’ (as many WNs call it) could take place at the RATE of flies (by means of future artificial, mechanical-electronic wombs, perhaps?) it would all be futile in the end, producing more souls to be lost, if Christ is still rejected. We live in the age of deepest apostasy, where true Christian conviction is considered ‘the most dangerous madness’.

  5. various carnal purposes

    You are verging on the psychotic. Objective reality exists. Supernatural entities, illogical metaphysical abstractions and “miracles” don’t. I believe in natural law not religion.

  6. ‘Objective reality exists. Supernatural entities, illogical metaphysical abstractions and “miracles” don’t’

    Sounds like quoting ‘Ayn Rand’ Rosenbaum. ‘Objective reality’ = godless delusion.

  7. Tell me that the next time someone in your family uses a motor vehicle or employs anti-biotics to cure a serious infection. Better yet, stop believing in your internet connection because then we won’t have to see your pig-ignorant posts any longer.

    BTW, the concept of objective reality precedes Ayn Rand by several millennia.

  8. Let me amend that. The concept of objective reality is inherent in all life forms so it is something on the order of 3.5 billion years old.

  9. Christianity isn’t a bad idea. It stabilized the situation in Wessex when all appeared to be lost. However at the time religion was the carrier of literacy and learning at the time. Bishops like Asser (Welsh) mentored Alfred on Boethius.

    Yet there is a nagging feeling that adopting a religion that us based on events in Jerusalem is corrosion. Personally I don’t see Christianity as closely connected to Judaism as is commonly supposed. It’s natural home is the European heroic/epic.

  10. “Christianity isn’t a bad idea. It stabilized the situation in Wessex when all appeared to be lost.”

    It’s not all that bad today either. All those churches in the Bible Belt do help to dampen the natural proclivities of the descendants of the Scotch-Irish to be murdering, thieves, rustlers, and meth-heads.

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