My latest essay at PajamasMedia:

Slave-labor conditions at Sherrods’ farm?

Shocking new allegations against Shirley Sherrod (the USDA employee recently embroiled in a controversy over a speech she gave to the NAACP) and the communal farm she ran with her husband Charles Sherrod have been confirmed by an article published 36 years ago in a farm workers’ newspaper.

Combined, the new 2010 allegations and the original 1974 allegations accuse Shirley and Charles Sherrod of:

• Paying farm workers as little as 67¢ per hour, far below minimum wage for the era
• Employing underage children to perform hard labor
• Compelling their employees to work in unsafe conditions, including getting sprayed with pesticides
• Firing any workers who acted as whistleblowers
• Forcing employees to work overtime in the fields at night with practically no advance notice
• Having a capricious payscale under which employees doing the exact same jobs were paid different amounts according to the whims of the managers
• Being unwilling to address the abuse even after it was raised by union representatives
• Seriously mismanaging the farm to such an extent that it went bankrupt

Let’s first look at the new allegations, and then at the original allegations.

Ron Wilkins accuses Sherrods of Exploitation and Mistreatment

On Monday, August 2, 2010, Ron Wilkins, who was a black Civil Rights activist and organizer in the ’70s and is now a professor specializing in African-American history, published an incendiary article in the magazine CounterPunch in which he describes how he infiltrated the Sherrods’ “New Communities” farm commune in 1974 and discovered horrifying circumstances where black farm workers labored in near-slavery conditions, often being paid as little as 67¢ per hour (far under the minimum wage at the time) and facing intolerable conditions:

Read the rest HERE!