DAILY TRIFECTA: Exploitation. It's What's For Dinner.
Those of us who pay the price come home with the least
TITLE: Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster
https://civileats.com/2023/12/06/diving-and-dying-for-red-gold-the-human-cost-of-honduran-lobster/
EXCERPT: Honduran spiny lobster is a $46.7 million industry, exported almost entirely to U.S. markets. While some of the lobster is trap-caught, it is cheaper to rely on divers. But dive boats and the processors that buy their catch do not invest in training or equipping divers. In the remote region with few jobs, the owners of the lobster boats save money at the cost of the divers, paying poverty wages, offering no protective gear, demanding an unsafe number of dives per day, and sometimes offering divers drugs to increase their tolerance for pain and weariness. When divers are injured, most dive boat owners do not want to pay for their care.
Marcelino, like most divers in the region, always dove without a wetsuit, air gauge, or depth gauge. If his air ran out and he had to ascend quickly or he dove beyond the 130-feet limit for single-cylinder diving, he could get decompression sickness, also called the bends. Of the 9,000 divers in the region, 97 percent have suffered from the bends after ascending too quickly and breathing compressed air that contains nitrogen gas, which can accumulate in the diver’s body tissue, according to the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), a nonprofit human-rights organization that has worked with the divers and their families. Trained divers make safety stops while ascending, the length of which are usually calculated by their dive watch, taking into account their maximum depth. If divers are not taken to a decompression chamber within 24 hours of getting the bends, they can suffer numbness, impaired coordination, paralysis, and cerebral disorders.
The U.S. companies that import spiny lobster and the U.S. organizations that are active in fisheries in Honduras try to avoid the labor rights issues inherent in lobster diving. They say that they only source from and work with trap-caught lobster. Some, including the Walton Family Foundation and Darden Restaurants, the former owner of Red Lobster, have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to turn this lobster into a success story. For the people that live here, it isn’t.
When sharks circled too close, Marcelino would hit them with his air tank. He completed 12 to 18 dives per day for 12 to 14 days in a row, although experts recommend a maximum of three dives per day. He dove for many years, an Olympian athletic feat, surviving conditions that few could, until he could not.
Marcelino perhaps believed, like many Miskito, that when the sickness struck them, they had seen Liwa Mairin, the mermaid spirit of the sea. Liwa Mairin punished them for taking too many lobsters. And yet, to dive or work in the lobster industry was the only way for many of the 78,000 Miskito to make a living. Like their fathers and grandfathers, many Miskito divers end up paralyzed, disappeared, or dead. Like Marcelino.
Marcelino died in 2003. His death occurred in the fishery that conservationists funded by the Walton Family Foundation later called a “success story.”
TITLE: Canada’s migrant farm worker program was founded on ‘racist’ policies, new lawsuit alleges. And today’s workers are still paying the price
https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/canada-s-migrant-farm-worker-program-was-founded-on-racist-policies-new-lawsuit-alleges-and/article_24d3281c-9511-11ee-8c5b-f3ce5c6d54cb.html
EXCERPT: Prior to 1966, Canada relied on white, European workers to fill agricultural labour shortages.
When the government turned to the Caribbean to fill the same jobs, what became known as “tied” employment was suddenly crucial to avoid the potential for what one official called “racial problems.”
This is one of the damning claims in a proposed class-action lawsuit recently filed against the federal government on behalf of migrant farmworkers who worked in Canada in the last 15 years.
The lawsuit uses historical records to argue that employer-specific work permits — which remain in place today — were imposed on Black and Indo Caribbean farmworkers because of their race and that it was “motivated by overtly racist policy objectives.”
The $500-million lawsuit also seeks restitution for the money paid by migrant farmworkers for Employment Insurance despite being ineligible for benefits if they lose their job.
The case is separate from another proposed class-action lawsuit filed earlier this year that seeks to have closed work permits of all kinds deemed discriminatory and in breach of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The new case deals only with farmworkers, and alleges that the original justification for tied employment was explicitly racist.
“The wrongdoing we challenge in this case has been ongoing for more than half-a-century,” said Louis Century, one of the lawyers working on the case for Goldblatt Partners, which has partnered with Koskie Minsky and Martinez Law. “These coercive conditions that were imposed in the 1960s for overtly racist reasons continue to be imposed more than 60 years later.”
The lawsuit will need to be certified by a judge before it can proceed as a class action.
A spokesperson for the federal government did not directly answer questions about the case, saying they could not comment while it was “currently before the courts.”
The spokesperson said the federal government takes its responsibility for protecting temporary foreign workers “very seriously.”
More than 50,000 migrant workers come to Canada each year to work in the agricultural sector. They come through one of two programs: the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), which was created in 1966, and the Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP), which was opened to agricultural workers in 2011.
The freedom to leave a job is “the most important measure of self protection that any worker has,” Century said. Tied employment denies that freedom to migrant workers, he added, because they are deported if they exercise it.
European farmworkers who immigrated to Canada prior to the SAWP were not subject to the threat of deportation, the lawsuit states. By contrast, they were afforded pathways to permanent residency and citizenship.
“Tied employment … was imposed as a means to obtain the labour of racialized workers while subjecting such workers to more coercive conditions of employment,” the lawsuit reads.
The lawsuit highlights some of the policy debates that preceded the SAWP, showing how Canadian government officials were trying to address their need for immigrant labour while guarding against “a substantial increase in negro immigration to Canada” and the “racial problems” they feared would accompany it.
Jean Marchand, Canada’s minister of manpower and immigration in Lester Pearson’s government, stressed in 1966 that any program that brought in workers from the Caribbean would need “strictly controlled conditions” to avoid “large-scale social problems.”
Tied employment was the result.
TITLE: Captive in a chicken coop: The plight of debt bondage workers
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/12/10/1213009464/forced-labor-debt-bondage-india-sugarcane
EXCERPT: Bonded labor — considered a type of forced labor because of its coercive terms — dates back centuries. In India, it arises from the feudal systems supported by the caste hierarchy, which persists despite being outlawed — and that makes it difficult for members of lower castes to find dignified jobs that pay fair wages, said Karad.
Although the Indian parliament banned bonded labor in 1976 for infringing on human rights, it was never fully eliminated. Bodies like the International Labour Organization documented a reduction in the prevalence of bonded labor but found that it continued in various forms in rural areas, often targeting people from communities that were marginalized by India's caste system.
Getting an actual count of forced laborers is a challenge. Since this type of labor is still banned, the data reflects only cases reported to the state police: a total of 2,235 cases of forced labor registered in India in 2021, an increase from 1,141 in 2019. However, Karad says, based on the anecdotal gathered by his organization, the numbers of unreported cases are significantly higher in just the state of Maharashtra alone.
"We have demanded the government to conduct a statewide economic survey of the workforce. Our own studies place this number of bonded workers at [850,000], but considering the migrant nature of the work, it could be higher, perhaps even more than [1.1 million]," Karad said, sharing estimates from a village-to-village survey the organization conducted in 2019. "Nearly 40% of these are women," he added.
Earth's changing climate forced more people to seek these "debt bondage" jobs, researchers say. When local harvests fail due to drought, workers on these farms may feel they have no option other than to travel to places where they can earn a living, even if that means they must agree to forced labor conditions.
And paying back the contractors is more difficult now as well. Record levels of heat may mean the bonded laborers can't put in as many outdoor hours or may have to work at a slower pace, says Shouro Dasgupta, an environmental economist and visiting fellow at LSE, who has studied the impact of climate change on the labor force in the Indian subcontinent.
The sugar industry – India was the leading global sugar producer until last year – has been hit by an increasing number of droughts that have taken a toll on a crop that consumes a lot of water.
In fact, the driest August experienced in 123 years has threatened to reduce sugarcane output in the state for the coming year, expected to be the lowest in four years.
So farm and factory owners, faced with a diminishing yield, often pay workers poorly. "Currently, their advance would work out to Rs 276 [a little over $3] for cutting one ton of sugarcane. This amount, however, is below minimum wage and has not been revised since 2014," Karad said.
At this pay rate, he added, it is unlikely that most families will be able to pay back the amount they receive, forcing them to borrow more money and remain in debt bondage. "It's a vicious circle," Karad said.