“‘There is slavery in the fields of North Carolina’”

I’ll never forget something that advocate and former farmworker Leticia Zavala said to me during an interview.

“There is slavery in the fields of North Carolina.”…

… abusive and deadly conditions experienced by farmworkers in the state as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program… allows American employers to temporarily hire migrant workers to perform agricultural work. A whopping 90% of these workers hail from Mexico. This is not surprising, given that the H-2A program is an iteration of the Bracero Program…The program was ultimately abolished because of systemic wage theft, abuse, and exploitation…

As a farmworker organizer, Zavala sees it all: the toll that backbreaking and dangerous agricultural labor takes on workers, the substandard and unhealthy living conditions they are forced to endure, the labor trafficking, starvation, and the all-too-common stolen wages. And there’s also the “modern-day slavery.”…

…In the U.S., there is a direct and unbroken line from the economic conditions developed to protect chattel slavery to the legal structures that allow for the abuse and exploitation of migrant farmworkers today…

The deplorable and dangerous conditions we see in agriculture are baked into the industry and labor laws—and the consequences are dire…