Slavery’s Stale Soil
Slavery’s Stale Soil
Indentured Labor, Guestworkers, and the End of Empire
This chapter presents the story of four Jamaican workers who testified to the human rights commission about the ways they had been exploited during the months they had spent cleaning luxury hotels and condos on Florida's Emerald Coast. The workers alleged that the company where they worked, Mr. Clean, used several crowded apartments as informal hiring halls from which the company selected only a few workers each day. At the end of each fortnight, the workers would receive checks for only a few dollars each. The story demonstrates that workers who labored under the rubric of legal contracts did not necessary get what their contracts promised. Consent could be based on patently false promises. Thus, the line between consent and coercion was, and remains, very blurry.
Keywords: Mr. Clean, human rights commission, legal contracts, consent, coercion
NYU Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
