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The cycle of lawbreaking worries advocates. Last year, a state investigator cited 16 bean crew leaders in Miami-Dade 23 times for carrying pickers in unsafe buses, working without licenses, and not keeping payroll records. Fisteac was nabbed breaking two laws in June. In September, Hyppolite's company was nailed for three violations.

They could face hundreds to thousands of dollars in fines, but the cases are still unresolved. A sole state investigator is charged with policing county fields, and cases are backlogged. Federal labor officials who could punish growers rarely even make rounds.

Jonathan Fried, executive director of WeCount!, a Homestead community organization, says farmers need to start shouldering responsibility for bean pickers. Wage theft is "massive and ubiquitous.... A lot of employers feel like they can act this way in impunity," he says. "It's rare to find an immigrant worker in South Dade who hasn't been ripped off at some point."

All of the state pressure has had some effect. Sinois says Hyppolite gave her son some money several months after the season ended. She continues picking for another crew two to three days a week. "What am I going to do?" she says. "I have to make a little money. I'm not going to sit down."

Write Your Comment show comments (1)

  1. There was a time in The United States when poor, uneducated Americans flocked to the fields to pick the fruits and vegetables.

    There's a book called The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck published in 1939 that tells a moving story about these Americans.

    Now we allow tens of thousands of poor, ignorant workers from Haiti, Mexico and elsewhere in while our own lower economic class of citizens get fat and lazy remaining as dumb as ever while abusing dangerous drugs and having their lifestyle subsidized by the federal Government.

    Corruption, greed and political irresponsibility has led to these alien workers to be thoroughly abused and our own societal structure to be horribly fractured.........Glenn61

    Comment by Glenn61 — March 13, 2008 @ 05:00AM

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