Witnesses testifying before the Agriculture Committee in February charged that in Louisiana sugarworkers are bound to the plantation by debt just as they were a hundred years ago. Some 15.000 field workers there work with sophisticated. complicated machinery for annual incomes of less than $3.000 a year. Further testimony indicated that thousands of migrants labor from sunup to sunset for poverty earnings in many sugar beet producing areas. and typically. when the work has been completed. these hardworking people leave the areas in the same conditions of poverty as when they arrived. In Florida. sugar producers are permitted to offer a wage so low that U.S. workers will neither cultivate nor harvest the cane in the swamps. The producers need not raise the wage until they attract sufficient American workers.
Keywords matched
migrants