Monday, October 29th, 2007
Wednesday 10/31 CIW event - 12:30 pm - John Bowe on Modern American Slave Labor
It’s just a block from the W. 4th St. stop of the ACE/BDFV ! Please forward to anyone else who would be interested!
Law Students for Human Rights presents
NOBODIES: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy
Discussion with Author John Bowe
Where: NYU School of Law
Vanderbilt Hall Room 201
40 Washington Square South (West 4th St.) at MacDougal St.
When: Wednesday, October 31st
12:30pm
Members of the public should bring ID
Most Americans would be shocked to discover that slavery still exists in the United States — from southern Florida, to Tulsa, Las Vegas, New York City, Washington state, Minnesota, Indiana, and even Maine. Yet most of us buy goods made by people who aren’t paid for their labor—people who are trapped financially, and often physically. Indeed, products made by slaves are fattening bottom lines of companies we patronize every day, including Tropicana, Minute Maid, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Burger King, McDonald’s, Kroger, Wal-Mart, and virtually every large retail food vendor in America. In NOBODIES: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy , award-winning journalist John Bowe exposes the outsourcing, corporate chicanery, immigration fraud, and sleights of hand that allow forced labor to continue in the United States while the rest of us notice nothing but the everyday low price at the checkout counter.
Bowe, co-editor of acclaimed book Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, travels from the agricultural quagmires of Florida to a welding plant in Oklahoma to the factories and brothels of Saipan to file a first-hand report on the working conditions that our government and our corporations depend on but do their best to disavow or ignore. He also explores the rising inequality in the United States and the effects of globalization. Currently, citizens in rich countries earn sixty times more income per capita than citizens of poor countries. Bowe urges readers to start thinking of global human rights and economic justice the same way we think of the environment. In the same way global emissions and temperatures are unsustainable, rising global income inequality creates an imbalance that must one day tip.
Based on thorough and often dangerous research, exclusive interviews, and eyewitness accounts, NOBODIES delivers to readers a sobering look at the moral costs of the cheap goods–from orange juice to cut rate fashions. This is rich and vibrant, and often, humorous reporting – not a polemic but a presentation of things as they are on the underside of American commerce.
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, 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.