Letters of note

Sunshine hero (FW, March 10)

Roger:

Relentless, challenging, sometimes off but mostly right on, Lee Melsek was/is very much missed in the world of investigative reporting. He is a true original. Some of the cases our office has prosecuted over the years have come from his work. Thank you for your article on Lee.

— Doug Molloy, chief assistant United States attorney, Middle District of Florida

Whatchu gonna do — ignoring slavery or not (FW, March 3)

Mr. Roger Williams:

I was a small tomato farmer for many years. My wife and children worked with me in the summers farming and packing our fruit. We never had a paid vacation, paid sick leave or a pension plan. We were never guaranteed minimum wages. Nobody provided us with free housing. Nobody picked us up and took us to the grocery store and the Laundromat. We got our hands dirty and worked as hard as any other “stoop laborer.” We managed as well as we could and today have shiny granite counter tops in our home (column Feb. 3).

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, three-quarters of Florida’s farmworkers were born outside of the U.S. with onethird being undocumented workers. Their average education is sixth grade. Thanks to our Fair Labor Standards Act, even with no training and little education farmworkers in the U.S. are guaranteed a minimum wage.

It goes against my grain as a farmer, admittedly slightly overweight, to be implicated in the slave trade. Have you actually walked into a labor camp? Most of them start off nice and new with mattresses on cots and screens in windows.

Often the mattresses go out the windows, and the screens are used to cook tortillas over an open fire in the yard, as in Mexico. It’s difficult to keep a labor camp neat and clean, but we do have laws in place forcing us to fetch diapers out of toilets and shovel feces off the kitchen floors when the tenants head north in June.

I’ve never actually seen a slave.

There are some bad people who take advantage of the weak, but it’s rarely the farmer, shipper or the grocery store owner. It’s just politically correct to point fingers and call them ugly names.

It’s a case of biting the hand that feeds you.

Farmers aren’t selling you cars that accelerate unexpectedly. We’re not running off with your life savings. And we are not selling dope to your children. We do drive big trucks, but that is not a hate crime.

A farmer risks everything every year. He provides jobs to more than two million farm workers in the U.S. The farmer puts food on your table. “Little Jose Frio” does not do it all by himself.

The next time you sit down to your supper table (it’s supper, not dinner in South Florida where tomatoes are grown), say a thank you prayer for your local farmer.

— Elmer the Farmer

(Elmer Mott, DeSoto County)

Roger:

As usual you are wrong and take the side of those you wrongly perceive as victims.

First, your nasty comments on the Anglo driving a large pickup truck. The bumper sticker against “change” is a putdown of Obama, nothing to do with Hispanic farmworkers.

As far as your question how do we stop slavery, I submit we can start by enforcing immigration laws, not giving special visas for agricultural workers and throwing out the estimated 10-30 million illegals from south of the border. If they are not in this country they can’t be abused.

As far as what the workers themselves can do, I submit they spend more time in the Immokalee Library and less time hanging out on street corners or bars. I recommend they stop having more children than they can financially take care of. I submit that their church leaders that tell them to have more kids than they can afford and then shuffle them off to the public dole be fined and tried for sedition. I was told long ago by a judge that we all make choices in life and we are responsible for the choices we make. If they don’t like the job of vegetable/fruit picking, they should quit and find another job, just as a judge told me to quit a job I had and find another job. I submit that by treating those who chose to be farmworkers as victims you are not helping them but you are destroying them in a traditional liberal manner of pretending to help those you want to destroy.

I also noticed that the names of those who hold people in slavery, such as the Immokalee man arrested (recently) for enslaving a Guatemalan girl seem to be as Hispanic as those they victimize. So in the future, leave your nasty remarks about Anglos in the gutter where you hang out and blame the Hispanics for their own problems!

— Sue Lann

Mr. Williams responds:

As much as I admire hard-working farmers, I want to point out that most farm owners who rely on migrant labor aren’t complaining about immigration.

Mr. Mott fails to note that a guarantee of minimum wage by law and a guarantee in the fields are two very different things.

Farm owners or contractors frequently undercount hours, reducing a 10-hour day to six or eight hours on the books and eliminating the need to pay a minimum wage “build up” above and beyond what workers picked. So workers are paid only for the number of buckets or bins they’ve filled. That’s documented, not make-believe.

The larger point is that farmworkers who do much of the work usually remain poor. They don’t get to have granite counter tops, often because they weren’t born and raised in a place that gave them a chance to do so, like Mr. Mott, or Ms. Lann.

Scoffing at their plight, therefore, is wrong.

As for squalor, pick any migrant farmlabor camp in the 1930s, where nobody came from Mexico or the Americas, and you would have seen just as much squalor as Mr. Mott describes — but also just as much love and sacrifice, and as much warmth and thoughtfulness and good cheer as you can see, and I have seen, in labor camps here. 