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"THE SLAVES WE RENT"

THE PLIGHT of agricultural workers in the U.S. has become rather common knowledge. Whether working on sugar plantations as day laborers or being part of the migratory stream whose home is wherever the next crop happens to be, farm labor is clearly a section of the working population that is kept poor by the giant corporations which own the big commercial farms and agro-businesses. The real social condition of farm laborers in our country with their low wages, the absence of any educational facilities for their children and political powerlessness has to be measured against a society which allows superjet airlines and super-rich families to pay no taxes at all, while big commercial firms and plantation landlords are actually subsidized from the taxpayers' money.

The story of the agricultural workers has been told to the public over and over again in novels like Grapes of Wrath written during the Depression, television documentaries like Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame in the late 1950's and the NBC White Paper television program in 1970. The thing that stands out, through all these years, is that nothing has changed for the farm laborers and their families; only the technology in the fields and in the cultural media. One writer has written a book describing these conditions under the title The Slave We Rent. This is descriptive accuracy at its best for the general social condition of agricultural workers in the United States is as near to slave labor as anything existing anywhere in the 20th Century. This fact of life should highly recommend The American System to the people of the world since official propaganda repeatedly tells us that America is the "leader of the free world" and the "last best hope for mankind" and other such folklore of Capitalism.

Members of the United Farm Workers have been trying to organize to win union recognition and the right to collective bargaining for agricultural workers, particularly in California and Florida. Some have been beaten up on the picket line by sheriff's deputies, sprayed with mace and pesticide; two of their strike leaders have been assassinated this year and over 4,000 farm workers have been arrested for peacefully picketing. Government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations is being upheld in the usual way by the

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