Do you know the history behind your tin canned tomatoes? In Tobias Jones’s article “Are your tinned tomatoes picked by slave labour?”, Jones talks about Italians of the lower class and immigrants from Nigeria, Gambia, Ghana and other African countries picking tomatoes without caring about the conditions of the job just to get some money because it’s hard for them to get a job anywhere else.
“Immigrants are the new slaves.” The country’s interior minister, Mateo Salvini claimed anyone that is desperate for a job and is new to the country, will become a slave somehow. In South Italy, there’s a great variety of working fields, bad sectors controlled by mafias, and abandoned buildings. Immigrants come to the south because that’s where almost all the industries are established. One of them being the tomato industry. The owners of the industry pay the workers a very low wage because they know these people don’t have another alternative and despite how they’re being treated and the conditions in which they live in, they’ll work for anyone just to get enough money to survive. The workers live in the bad sectors near the fields where they work and they are constantly filled with violence and with the little money they receive from work, they hardly have enough to eat, let alone pay for where they live. This situation, in my opinion, is similar to the way things were not to long ago when Mexicans came to America for a better life and worked on the fields as slaves as well. Just like these workers in Italy, they were immigrants and desperate for any job, regardless of the circumstances in which they had to live and work in. In both of these situations, the reasons why slavery thrived was due to the workers vulnerability to exploitation and also the discrimination they suffered upon from being immigrants.
While reading this, I was really trying to see what slavery is in your opinion. In my opinion, true slavery is working in conditions by force and receiving no benefits out of it. This would also include harm happening to the "slave" and their employer literally owning and buying them. In today's circumstances, the term slavery has been skewed to whatever people think are bad working conditions. The debate you just posted more explains how people are having bad working conditions and are getting paid very little, but still being paid. If it is children being used as work, that's illegal child labor, and not slavery. Al in all, I am sure that in some countries there is slavery, but in regards to what I have read here, it is not a problem in society today. It's more of just desperate people being paid little.
ReplyDeleteI see what your saying but that's not really explaining the true meaning of "slavery". Slavery is being force to do a job and not getting anything out of the job. Like what JacobAdams said in his comment. From what I see is people doing a job and is being paid very little. But yes I think that's not fair how their helping us with food but being paid very little. Although their also being benefited by being able to stay in America. So I don't think this is necessarily slavery. But it is other parts in the world that are handling slaves which is sad but it's reality.
ReplyDeleteI recognize your intentions with this post, although I'm a bit confused. Yes the horrible working conditions and ridiculously low wages are atrocious. However were these workers coerced in ay form to forcefully do this job? If not then I wouldn't describe that as slavery.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless modern slavery does very much exist it has just been very good at remaining hidden and working off of people's disbelief on the matter. With media today we're much more aware of how severe and global this issue is. Therefore if the argument were to be made that slavery still is an issue in today's society I believe better examples would be human sex trafficking and the variations of forced labor that still exist in 2019.