'Slave Labor' truly shocking

NOBODIES: MODERN AMERICAN SLAVE LABOR AND THE DARK SIDE OF THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY, by John Bowe, Random House, 304 pages, $25.95

Slavery as a modern institution in the workplace is no joke.

John Bowe is a Manhattan journalist who pursues social justice in his research and writing, and he has discovered an underside to American commerce. In his view, cheap goods — from orange juice to cut-rate fashions — come at an unacceptable moral cost.

In "Nobodies," Bowe writes that most of us buy goods made by people who are not paid for their work — in Florida, Oklahoma, Nevada, New York, Washington, Minnesota, Indiana and Maine. And the companies that utilize their work include Tropicana, Minute Maid, Taco Bell, Wendy's, Burger King, McDonald's, Kroger, Wal-Mart and every other large retail-food vendor.

This is how Bowe expresses it: "We buy Granny Smiths picked by slaves in New York and Washington state. We buy paper from trees planted by workers in Georgia and Alabama who don't get paid or barely get paid. We buy car parts made of steel fired with charcoal made by slaves in Brazil. We buy binders, cell-phone chips, and leather purses manufactured by slaves in China, and shirts from Wal-Mart made by slaves in Burma.

"Our war in Iraq is conducted to an enormous extent not by Americans, but by foreign migrant workers hired by American companies, several of which have recently been accused of slavery. Our reconstruction efforts in Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina have generated numerous claims of forced labor from the immigrants doing the work."

The author concentrates on slavery as it exists in three different places: El Diablo, a company that harvests oranges with the help of Mexican workers who get no money and who cannot quit; in Tulsa, Bowe made "a psychic biopsy of slavery's guts"; and in the last section of the book, he visits Saipan, an island in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, where slavery is practiced frequently enough to compare with 19th-century America.

Such slavery operates through the exploitation and abuse of foreign workers. This, asserts Bowe, is the true meaning of globalization, the word uttered so often by the wealthy and the powerful as the wonderful wave of the future.

This book is an eye-opening exercise in muckraking, revealing a side of the world many of us would rather not know about. And Bowe does it with genuine expertise and powerful prose. He even inserts occasional doses of humor to drive his points home.

This ought to pop up on all best-seller lists.

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E-mail: dennis@desnews.com