Product Description

Most Americans are shocked to discover that slavery still exists in the United States. Yet 145 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the CIA estimates that 14,500 to17,000 foreigners are “trafficked” annually into the United States, threatened with violence, and forced to work against their will. Modern people unanimously agree that slavery is abhorrent. How, then, can it be making a reappearance on American soil?

Award-winning journalist John Bowe examines how outsourcing, subcontracting, immigration fraud, and the relentless pursuit of “everyday low prices” have created an opportunity for modern slavery to regain a toehold in the American economy. Bowe uses thorough and often dangerous research, exclusive interviews, eyewitness accounts, and rigorous economic analysis to examine three illegal workplaces where employees are literally or virtually enslaved. From rural Florida to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the U.S. commonwealth of Saipan in the Western Pacific, he documents coercive and forced labor situations that benefit us all, as consumers and stockholders, fattening the profits of dozens of American food and clothing chains, including Wal-Mart, Kroger, McDonald’s, Burger King, PepsiCo, Del Monte, Gap, Target, JCPenney, J. Crew, Polo Ralph Lauren, and others.

In this eye-opening book, set against the everyday American landscape of shopping malls, outlet stores, and Happy Meals, Bowe reveals how humankind’s darker urges remain alive and well, lingering in the background of every transaction–and what we can do to overcome them.

Praise for Nobodies:

“Investigative, immersion reporting at its best . . . Bowe is a master storyteller whose work is finely tuned and fearless.”
–USA Today

“A brilliant and readable tour of the modern heart of darkness, Nobodies takes a long, hard look at what our democracy is becoming.”
–Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?

“Bowe dramatizes in gripping detail these stolen lives.”
–O: The Oprah Magazine

“The vividness of Bowe’s local stories might make you think twice before reaching for that cheap fruit or pair of discount socks.”
–Condé Nast Portfolio

NAMED ONE OF THE TWENTY BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE VILLAGE VOICE

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #526784 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-12
• Released on: 2008-08-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this eye-opening look at the contemporary American scourge of labor abuse and outright slavery, journalist and author Bowe (Gig: Americans Talk About their Jobs) visits locations in Florida, Oklahoma and the U.S.-owned Pacific island of Saipan, where slavery cases have been brought to light as recently as 2006. There, he talks to affected workers, providing many moving and appalling first-hand accounts. In Immokalee, Florida, migrant Latino tomato and orange pickers are barely paid, kept in decrepit conditions and intimidated, violently, to keep quiet about it. A welding factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma imported workers from India who were forced to pay exorbitant "recruiting fees" and live in squalid barracks with tightly controlled access to the outside world. Considering the tiny island capital of Saipan, Bowe explores how its culture, isolation and American ties made it so favorable an environment for exploitative garment manufacturers and corrupt politicos; alongside the factories sprouted karaoke bars, strip joints and hotels where politicians were entertained by now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The detailed chapter gives readers a lasting image of the island, touted a "miracle of economic development," as a vulnerable, truly suffering community, where poverty rates have climbed as high as 35 percent. Bowe's deeply researched, well-written treatise on the very real problem of modern American slavery deserves the attention of anyone living, working and consuming in America.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The very human impulse to get ahead in life even at the expense of others' suffering encourages and tolerates the slave labor that provides more products at lower prices, argues Bowe. Traveling from Florida to Saipan, Bowe chronicles the connection between American consumerism and modern global slave labor. Instead of chains, modern slavery uses coercion in the form of threats of deportation, beatings, harm to families back home, or even death. Bowe focuses on three cases: a labor contractor named El Diablo, who held Mexican illegals in involuntary servitude, working in Florida orange groves, while ruling with terror and murder; a Tulsa, Oklahoma, man, owner of a steel-cutting plant, who contracted with an Indian-born American to recruit Indian laborers, who were overworked, underpaid, housed in squalor, and threatened with deportation if they resisted; and the U.S. commonwealth of Saipan, which recruits foreign workers, who are abused and exploited while working in sweatshops for U.S. clothing manufacturers. Bowe concludes with a scathing look at the desire for creature comforts and the American notion of freedom. Bush, Vanessa

About the Author
John Bowe has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The American Prospect, National Public Radio’s This American Life, McSweeney’s, and others. He is the co-editor of Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, one of Harvard Business Review’s best books of 2000, and co-screenwriter of the film Basquiat. In 2004, he received the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Sydney Hillman Award for journalists, writers, and public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good, and the Richard J. Margolis Award, dedicated to journalism that combines social concern and humor. He lives in Manhattan.


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

EXCELLENTE READ
John Bowe does it again! In his former book GIG, he discussed various jobs, ranging from detective to technician to writer. In NOBODIES, he addresses the foreign workers at the bottom of the heap. The workers come from far-away countries such as India, China, the Philippines, etc., hoping for a better life. What they find is often quite different, starting with the illicit recruiters in their home countries, and then arriving on American soil to find that were lied to, and then being subjected to subhuman conditions, and for the females, some forced into prostitution. He discusses the Tom DeLay-Jack Abramoff scandals, and how their greed affected the lowly workers who came to the US with high expectations as did the immigrants in the past. What the workers found in Florida, Oklahoma and Saipan, were employers that paid them less than a minimum wage, had shadowy contracts and took money from them for substandard housing and lousy food, and the list goes on. John also notes that certain employers are living high just down the road from the shops, playing golf and taking expensive vacations, while their workers are suffering and need the basics such as health care and housing. What the American consumer needs to know that when s/he reaches for an orange juice or buys a high-end shirt, that some soul was working in un-American conditions on American soil to provide that product. In addition to the information about modern slave labor, the book is a smooth, thoroughly researched, and well written. As John indicates, there a "a dark side to the new global economy." Excellente, and a must read!

Nobodies by John Bowe
I saw John Bowe on the Daily Show talking about his new book and ordered it the next morning. It got here early the next week, and I read it in 2 days. Devoured it.

The book is a series of 3, for lack of a better word, essays. The first two narrate the circumstances of prosecuted cases of foreign workers held captive and forced to work for little or no pay, in deplorable conditions. Their bosses threatened them with everything from being turned over to the authorities to physical violence against themselves or their families. These essays made me feel both guilty and a little paranoid - who exactly is harvesting my food? Are they fairly compensated? (You can bet the answer to that one is `no.') What businesses do I use that profit from slave labor? In each case, a desire for power combined with willful ignorance or collusion led to incredible suffering for many people.

The third essay deals with another situation entirely - that of Saipan, a US Commonwealth in the south Pacific and the source of a large number of labor complaints and allegations of forced labor. I'm not positive I'd even heard of Saipan before reading this book. The story of interaction between locals, migrant workers, a few power players, and the federal government is described in detail. Garment workers, sex workers, local officials, mainlanders, and others are interviewed and help to paint a complicated, and sad, picture of a paradise gone horribly wrong.

The conclusion ties all three stories into a single premise, but in particular, the story of Saipan is used to illustrate a disturbing vision of the future. There's no reason to believe the rest of us are any more high-minded than the natives of Saipan. If that's the case, the current trend of globalization is leading us pell-mell down the path to the lowest common denominator. When humans value other humans less because they are poor, or foreign, or less educated, or brown, or whatever, we all suffer consequences - lower wages, jobs lost to cheaper competition, environmental degradation, loss of ambition and loss of dignity among them.

John Bowe wraps all this up much more eloquently and sensibly than I can. The book is very readable and at times suspenseful. The subject matter was eye-opening for me, and I find myself thinking about it as I go through my daily life. Whether you support globalization or not, or especially if you never really thought that much about it, this book will provide a valuable insight into the very lowest ranks of the workforce in the US today.

A Genuine Reporter at Work
John Bowe's "Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy" shines a cold bright light on labor abuses on American soil, from Florida to Tulsa to a U.S. territory in the Western Pacific Ocean. The author speaks with a moral voice that is never moralistic. Rather he looks at all sides of horrendous situations that might more conveniently, and easily, be seen starkly in black and white. This unique perspective adds immeasurably to the power of the stories he tells, all well-documented. Bowe analyzes the psychological attraction of power and the easy justifications that make abuses of other human beings a common, if not normal, part of the human experience. The book's focus is on farm workers in Florida, East Indian labor abuses in Tulsa, and Saipan and all it stands for. Bowe demonstrates how "globalization" and the actual slavery that results have had the effect of degrading not only foreign workers who are abused in the U.S. but also the character of our society as a whole. Although it reads like a novel and is as funny at times as its all-too-human subjects, "Nobodies" is an uncompromising indictment of labor and immigration abuse and should go a long way to putting the brakes on the proposed "guest worker" program so dear to Bush's heart. It's an invaluable resource for anyone who cares about human dignity.