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Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy
Random House
September 2007
On Sale: September 18, 2007
226 pages
ISBN: 1400062098
EAN: 9781400062096
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Most Americans would be shocked to discover that slavery
still exists in the United States. Yet most of us buy goods
made by people who aren’t paid for their labor–people who
are trapped financially, and often physically. In Nobodies,
award-winning journalist John Bowe exposes the outsourcing,
corporate chicanery, immigration fraud, and sleights of hand
that allow forced labor to continue in the United States
while the rest of us notice nothing but the everyday low
price at the checkout counter. Based on thorough and often dangerous research, exclusive
interviews, and eyewitness accounts, Nobodies takes you
inside three illegal workplaces where employees are
virtually or literally enslaved. In the fields of Immokalee, Florida, underpaid (and often
unpaid) illegal immigrants pick the produce all of us
consume, connected by a chain of subcontractors and
divisions to such companies as PepsiCo and Tropicana. At the
top of the chain are stockholders and politicians; at the
bottom is a father of six, one of whose children suffers
from leukemia, who entered America only to become the unpaid
employee of a labor contractor nicknamed “El Diablo” for his
cruelty. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the John Pickle Company reaped profits
for years making pressure tanks used by oil refineries and
power plants. Feeling squeezed by foreign competition and
government regulations, JPC partnered with an Indian and
Kuwaiti firm to import workers from India. Under the guise
of a “training program,” fifty-three workers, including
college-educated Uday Ludbe, came to the United States, only
to have their documents confiscated and to find themselves
confined to a factory building. Pickle laid off Americans
and paid the Indians three dollars an hour. Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific where the
author lived for three years, has long been exempted from
American immigration controls, tariffs, and federal income
tax–a status quo assiduously protected by lobbyist Jack
Abramoff and Congressman Tom DeLay. There, garment
magnates–selling to clothing giants like the Gap and
Target–live in luxury while thousands of foreign factory
workers, 90 percent of them female, work sixty-hour weeks
for $3.05 an hour and spend weekends trying to trade sex for
green cards. The garments they make are allowed to be
labeled MADE IN AMERICA. Nobodies is a vivid and powerful work of investigative
reporting, but it is also a lively examination of the
eternal struggle for power between free people and unfree
people. Against the American landscape of shopping mall,
outlet stores, and Happy Meals, Bowe reveals how humankind’s
darker urges remain alive and well, lingering in the
background of every transaction and how understanding them
may lead to overcoming them.
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