Some people are real people. Their deaths get nationwide attention. Kevin Duckworth is one of them. Famous for playing a child's game of bouncing a ball around on a wooden floor and throwing it through a hoop, his death was mentioned on USA Today and other places, even though his death was likely because of his own behavior -- he was grossly overweight and ate gigantic portions of fatty foods. But if someone had murdered him, you can bet that there would be outrage, and the murderer would get at the very least life in prison.
Meanwhile, consider pregnant 17-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez. Who collapsed in a field where she had been working for nine hours straight without water or shade in 95 degree heat, then died of heat stroke shortly thereafter. The people who deprived her of water and shade in violation of California law? Well, the farmer wasn't even fined. He claims he's not responsible for making sure his farmworkers have water and shade, that it was the labor contractors who were responsible for that. The labor contractors? Fined. Rather than pay the fine, they closed up shop on the corporate entity that got fined, and opened up shop again with a new corporate entity and new business name doing the exact same thing. And the same is true for each of the other seventeen California farm workers who have died of heat stroke over the past four years -- not a single murderer has even seen the inside of a booking room, much less been jailed for murder.
But these are just untermenschen, mud people. It's not like they're real people. Remember, boys and girls, in Soviet America some people are more equal than others, and its okay to murder unseemly mud people, it's just a fine. And yes, it's murder. Nobody should die of heat exhaustion. There are simple and effective methods to prevent this -- provide plentiful water, provide shade and electrolytic fluids for workers suffering initial symptoms of heat exhaustion, have some method of taking worker temperatures, and provide a quick cool water bath if a worker's temperature is too high in order to prevent brain damage that causes death. It works for firefighters, who similarly suffer heat exhaustion -- but who never die of heat stroke. It would work for farm workers too. But farm workers are just unseemly mud people, so it will never happen in AmeriKKKa... remember, boys and girls. Murder is fine. As long as you're a murderer with money, and the people you murdered don't have any. Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Death Penguin
Did you ever read a book titled "Reefer Madness" by Eric Schlosser, the guy who wrote "Fast Food Nation"? Two excellent books, both of which I devoured, and I don't read enough non-newspaper, non-blog material. The Reefer book has a re-working of a great article he wrote about the cruel labour economics of the California strawberry industry. From the tone of your post, I would guess you've delved into the subject.
ReplyDeleteDown here, there are no Mexicans. Crops are picked using people who are paid a decent wage, although it's still grueling work and not a way to get rich. Lots of backpackers come from European countries with which Australia has working visa agreements. They get to bum around the country for six months, doing scutwork on a semi-paid holiday in the sun. But there's not enough manpower between them and the class of citizens that you'll find in every society who have no prospect other than working with their hands.
So there are proposals being floated to make Aboriginals work as croppies in exchange for their dole payments. They used to do a lot of the field labour during the decades when the choice was either slave for food or live a neolithic existence on their desert reserves eating witchetty grubs or roasting goanna lizards.
There's also an effort to have migrant workers from the overpopulated, impoverished, politically fractious Pacific island nations such as Fiji and East Timor come here and pick crops temporarily. It sounds like the bracero program the U.S. had in the 1950s and 60s. So even here, in a land where workers traditionally had rights, the forces of farm fascism are trying to get the government to make a new class of agro-slaves.
We have migrant workers here in NC also, Tux. Some are treated decently and some are mud people. I don't know what's happening with them, but I know that some of the laws concerning their care are enforced here - living quarters with running water, cooking facilities. And, I see large coolers of water in the fields and on the backs of trucks that circle the fields.
ReplyDeleteWe don't do a good enough job of caring for people, but we're working on some parts of that here.
Of course, the School of the Americas is not too far from here and that's another kind of murder - maybe even suicide.
To quote the Clash:
ReplyDelete"Know your rights: all three of them!"