A large part of Lewis Hine’s photographic focus was dedicated
to being a witness to and voice for the voiceless. It would be easy to view the
Hine exhibit with a sense of satisfied finality about horrific labor conditions
and human rights violations, but as described by Renán
Salgado, Human Trafficking Specialist with the Worker Justice Center of New
York, the fight for labor justice in the United States is far from finished.
Salgado toured the exhibition with CITY, commenting on parallels between Hine’s
work and shedding light on some of today’s labor issues taking place right in
our own backyard.
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Salgado says he is familiar with Hine’s work, particularly
because of Hine’s themes of child labor and agriculture. He says that Hine’s
raw images of destitute children, shell-shocked immigrants, and labor
conditions are extremely similar to what he sees today, but are largely hidden
away from mainstream American culture.
There are 36,000 farms in New York, and if the collective efforts
of the team at WJCNY can reach 2000 or 3000 of them, that would be major,
Salgado says. The kinds of labor violations and issues Salgado encounters range
from poor housing conditions, to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse, to
enslavement of workers, or indentured servitude in which the employee must pay
thousands of dollars, plus exorbitant interest, to the party who paid their way
to the U.S.
We’ve made progress on labor laws in this country, and not
every farm is in violation of those laws, Salgado says. But interestingly,
agriculture is the only field in the United States where it is legally
permissible for a child of 13 years to work an unlimited amount of hours. And a
big problem is the selective enforcement of labor laws, Salgado says, with the
disenfranchised humans who migrate from other countries receiving the least
attention (in 1996, the organization Salgado works for stopped receiving
funding from Legal Services Corporation — which was the organization WJCNY was
formed from — because they were not allowed to use the funding to assist
undocumented workers).
For example, Salgado says the fight to make the employer
legally responsible for providing water to workers in the fields was won in the
year 2000, but there are very few resources committed to making sure employers
follow the law. And farms that use chemical agents on fields are legally bound
to post signs that restrict workers from having to re-enter the sprayed fields
for specific time periods. There too, Salgado says he has detected a serious
enforcement issue.
Salgado has worked for the Worker Justice Center of New York
since 2000, and since 2005 has worked in tandem with law enforcement officials
and federal agents, helping to form the Western New York Human Trafficking Task
Force. Though his main work is in identifying those guilty of committing labor
violations in New York agriculture and other industries, Salgado’s work has him
doing a little bit of everything, from cold investigation, to rescue, to
training police cadets.
The primary tactic WJCNY uses is to set new legal precedents, seeking to “bring a case so strong that a judge has no choice but to rule in
our favor, in the name of human rights,” says Salgado. But WJCNY’s foremost
responsibility is to the clients, who would often prefer to take settlement
money home to their native country quickly, over waiting for what could be
years for their case to move through the court system. Roughly 90 percent of
cases are negotiated out of court, Salgado says, with the client legally bound
against speaking out after a settlement is signed.
Salgado finds clients in three ways: through raw outreach — by
driving to camps where workers live and offering empowerment through knowledge
of laws and listening to stories; through tips from people who come into
contact with migrant workers, such as clinic workers trained by WJCNY agents to
detect signs of abuse; and through informants, who become embedded at farms by
gaining employment as workers.
Salgado has to patiently work to gain workers’ trust, since
being caught talking with him can bring repercussions such as being blacklisted
from rehiring, moved to a less favorable job, or beaten.
Human trafficking is more complicated than merely smuggling people into the country. Salgado says that many labor law abusers in
agriculture are the contractors — typically former migrant farmworkers who
learned enough English to communicate with growers and know how to get more
workers for the growers. Contractors may be licensed by the Department of Labor
to recruit workers from their foreign hometowns, and are in a position of
extreme power, with the ability to hire, fire, and “grant” rights to the
workers. Part of Salgado’s job is making sure a background check is performed
on contractors, if not by the Department of Labor, then by WJCNY.
Salgado says the modern and enduring labor problems with
agriculture in America aren’t unique, they are the problems of all
industrialized nations, and they are the legacy of slavery and feudalism, which
have by no means faded away. And he says that the current manifestation of our
economy’s health absolutely depends on the exploitation of immigrant workers’
labor. There is a daunting, tangled covenant going on between industry and
government. Foreign industries gain access to resource-rich land in Central America and destabilize the region. Contractors then displace residents, who become disenfranchised workers brought into America.
Salgado says the invisibility factor regarding farmworker
abuses in American society is largely about the insidious normalizing of the
subhuman status of immigrants. In this sense, not much at all has changed in
the hundred years since Hine was making his photographs. “’40 math teachers
living in a trailer’ sounds a lot different from ’40 migrant workers in a
trailer,'” he says.
We got to this place steadily, through decades of culturally
ingrained, institutionalized racism, Salgado says. He recalls that Mexicans
were the largest victims of hate crimes in New York City when he was growing
up, “even among other Latinos.” Salgado says the reason is that as long as you
were raised in this country, you were “basically microchipped”
to hate Mexicans.
“One of the ways for you to have a very successful empire is
to be 50 or 100 years ahead in your moves,” Salgado says. “The moment they
found oil in Mexico, campaigns started to project onto 2014 how we would be
treating Mexicans.” One example of what he calls a “50-year chess move” is the
depiction of Mexicans as lazy or crafty or drunken rodents in 1960s cartoons.
Farm owners may be unaware — or say they are unaware — of
workers’ undocumented status, which excuses them from legal repercussions. This
allows for what Salgado calls the “charade” of pay stubs: New York State
makes millions
of dollars each week from deductions on undocumented workers’ pay
stubs, money that the workers will never see.
“Big programs that are part of an empire — which this is —
such as Social Security, cannot exist without that,” Salgado says. On the
national level, several billion dollars is taken in annually by Social
Security. In addition, the United States economy benefits from the
purchases that the estimated millions of undocumented
migrant farmworkers — 100 thousand in our own backyard — make at American
businesses while they’re here.
Salgado says that the so-called progressive line that “immigrants
are only taking jobs that Americans don’t want” is a well-manufactured lie, and
that reality is more complicated. With a reported 6.2 percent national
unemployment rate, we have to wonder if the American desire for these jobs has
even been tested.
The US Department of Labor doesn’t offer these jobs to Americans
because the American economy would lose that free money, Salgado says.
Americans also aren’t offered these jobs “because we need them to be open for
the importation of people that we want to displace from their natural
resources,” he says. “It’s wicked, but it works.”
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2014.
