BuzzFlash Reviews

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From the publisher, Random House:

Most Americans would be shocked to discover that slavery still exists in the United States. Yet most of us buy goods made by people who aren’t paid for their labor–people who are trapped financially, and often physically. In Nobodies, 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.

Based on thorough and often dangerous research, exclusive interviews, and eyewitness accounts, Nobodies takes you inside three illegal workplaces where employees are virtually or literally enslaved.

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.

Kirkus Reviews:

A disturbing but important book about a shameful practice. Bowe, a J. Anthony Lukas Prize-winner and co-editor of GIG: Americans Talk About Their Jobs (2001), offers a searing report on recent immigrants enslaved as workers in out-of-the-way places in modern-day America. Often covered in national television broadcasts and then forgotten, these forced laborers are not chained or whipped; they are hoodwinked by contractors with the promise of work in the United States, then housed and treated poorly and threatened with deportation or reprisals against families back home if they do not produce. Bowe describes labor situations in three places.

In an isolated southern Florida town, undocumented orange pickers living in trailer camps work for contractors like Ramiro "El Diablo" Ramos, who pay the workers' way to labor camps, force them to work long hours, live in crowded and shabby barracks and shop in company stores. Threatened and gouged with fees, the workers are "free" to complain-though they don't dare. In Tulsa, Okla., John Nash Pickle Jr., 65, a wealthy employer who insists he is helping foreigners, recruits welders from India with a bait-and-switch scheme that forces them to take out exorbitant loans from families so they can "train" in the United States for well-paid Middle-Eastern jobs. Having paid their training fees, the workers must surrender their documents, live in crude lodgings and work for two years amid threats of deportation.

Bowe concludes with a complex tale of labor and immigration abuses in the garment trade in Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth in the Northern Mariana Islands that gained fame when it was brought up during the Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay scandals. Bringing hisaccounts to vivid life with individual stories and courtroom testimony, the author also emphasizes the difficulties federal authorities face when trying to prosecute such cases.

There's much more, all brilliantly reported, and the author lashes into cheerleaders of globalization's promise for the world's workers, advising them to go live like one of these "nobodies."

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