April 16, 2025
A Trump-aligned firm wins a pardon for labor violations in sugar manufacturing.
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Staff pack a college bus, driving from certainly one of Central Romana’s sugar cane fields to their firm housing, dank shacks that always lack electrical energy and operating water, in El Seibo, Dominican Republic.(Salwan Georges / The Washington Submit through Getty Pictures)
From the park closest to my dwelling, I can see the previous Domino Sugar manufacturing unit in Brooklyn, the place cane sugar from Florida and the Caribbean was refined for many years. A number of the cane refined there was grown on plantations in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Florida, owned by corporations just like the Central Romana Company. The Domino Sugar emblem lights up brighter than ever every night, however the manufacturing unit is now a deluxe residential constructing the place the penthouse apartment prices $7 million and a one-bedroom house rents for over $6,200 per 30 days. The constructing is an emblem of the transformation of an industrial space into a complicated residential zone, the rebirth of the previously working-class Williamsburg neighborhood as a gentrified hipster playground.
In 2022, the Biden administration positioned an import ban on merchandise from the Central Romana Company, based mostly within the Dominican Republic, after advocacy by a number of nongovernmental organizations in the US and the Dominican Republic regarding claims of labor abuses. A 2023 report from the US Division of Labor alleged the usage of compelled labor, a type of human trafficking, on Central Romana plantations. The report acknowledged some enhancements since 2022 however concluded that they have been inadequate to justify the lifting of the ban. Because the ban was first enacted, the corporate has spent thousands and thousands on political donations and lobbying legislators to regain entry to US markets, together with a $1 million donation to a political motion committee supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential marketing campaign and greater than $400,000 in further donations to the Republican Nationwide Committee. These efforts lastly paid off. The New York Instances reported on Wednesday, March 19, 2025, that the Trump administration had lifted sanctions banning imports from Central Romana.
Laborers engaged on sugar farms within the Dominican Republic akin to Central Romana’s are predominantly of Haitian ancestry. Many lack any common authorized or social standing within the Dominican Republic, though many have been born there or have labored on the sugar farms for a few years.
Lack of standard immigration standing and documentation renders these staff weak to human trafficking. Most are uneducated and plenty of usually are not even in a position to learn their work contracts. They’re housed in rudimentary and overcrowded shelters in remoted rural areas close to the fields the place they work, intimidated by the armed guards that patrol the fields. They’re paid a pittance if they’re paid in any respect; some are in debt to the corporate regardless of working extraordinarily lengthy hours. Practically all these interviewed in December 2023 for the Division of Labor report mentioned that they would go away if they may. Their scenario has most of the typical hallmarks of human trafficking, together with exploitation of the dearth of authorized standing, debt, isolation, and threats.
Sugar manufacturing has lengthy been related to compelled labor and human trafficking, each in the US and elsewhere. Sugar was produced with slave labor within the Caribbean and the colonial states to be used within the colonies and for export to the UK and elsewhere, fueling the slave commerce. Emancipation didn’t convey an finish to abuses in sugar manufacturing; in 1942, a lady named Viola Crosley wrote to first girl Eleanor Roosevelt describing how her son was compelled to work with out pay below guard in a compelled labor camp on a sugar plantation in Clewiston, Florida:
I’m a coloured mom, and I want your assist.
My boy answered an commercial in our Submit paper for a job as he was out of labor and had myself and two youthful boys relying on him. Because it turned out they have been despatched to Clewiston Fla a month in the past and he can’t get away or write. I’m anxious about him as I’ve talked to some white individuals and instructed them simply how they’re being handled, guarded at night time by armed guards and never allowed to put in writing dwelling.
Gained’t you please assist me get my boy dwelling?
There have been many circumstances like Crosley’s from the 1860s till World Struggle II. The federal authorities lastly took motion in opposition to compelled labor not on ethical precept, however as a result of it wanted to ship these younger males overseas to struggle. The contradiction of sending African Individuals drafted from communities ravaged by exploitation and labor abuses to struggle “for freedom” was too obvious to be ignored.
Present Difficulty
As we speak, lifting the ban on imported sugar from Central Romana within the face of the findings of the Division of Labor report units a harmful precedent. US legislation forbids the import of products made with compelled labor, together with little one labor. The legislation forbids the import of cotton from Chinese language work camps the place Uyghurs are interned, and applies sanctions to individuals who profit from compelled labor in different sectors like cryptocurrency and different on-line scams. But when the Republican administration is now basically accepting donations in trade for tacit permission to make use of compelled labor, together with by kids, different corporations are prone to anticipate related therapy. Political donations will probably be seen as purely transactional, an expedient to take away authorized obstacles to utilizing compelled labor.
This resolution by the Trump administration strikes authorities away from laws and the rule of legislation to a system dominated by whim and favors for donors, whatever the penalties for individuals who work in horrifying circumstances. In response, 30 organizations, together with unions, and labor and human rights advocates, have signed a letter expressing dismay on the lifting of sanctions on Central Romana.
The choice demonstrates the administration’s disregard for each staff and US legislation. It forces us to ask whether or not working individuals on US soil may be weak to any such company bribery. Modifications to labor laws may have an effect on not simply staff in different international locations however in the US as nicely. In one other current agriculture case, a trafficker within the state of Georgia was sentenced to a 12 months and a day in jail and required to pay greater than $300,000 in restitution to victims in “Operation Blooming Onion.” Would transactional donations stop fees being introduced in such circumstances in America? Might political donations result in a pardon for the convicted trafficker?
These usually are not rhetorical questions. We dwell in a brand new Gilded Age, throughout which Republicans have proposed adjustments to labor legislation to permit kids to work longer hours, to make use of heavy equipment, whereas the wealthiest give cash to politicians and advocate in opposition to unions in the US. Individuals died combating robber barons for the eight-hour workday, the five-day workweek, the abolition of kid labor, and an finish to hazardous and abusive office circumstances. Each working individual and everybody involved with working circumstances ought to act to forestall the undoing of any of those advances in the US and elsewhere.
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In solidarity,
The Editors
The Nation
Melissa Ditmore
Melissa Ditmore is the creator of Unbroken Chains: The Hidden Function of Human Trafficking within the American Financial system.
