Immokalee, Fla., a source of our winter tomatoes, is a place that few Massachusetts residents would recognize.

Surrounded by vast orange and tomato fields, it is a community organized solely around agriculture, and home six months of the year to an immigrant farmworker population of 15,000 people.

This migrant labor force, which moves northward to the vegetable fields in the Carolinas, Virginia, and New York in the summer months, consists of Mexicans, Guatemalans, and other Central Americans who have left desperate conditions in their home countries to try to make it permanently in the United States or, alternatively, to earn money to send back to a family to which they intend to return someday.

But what they find in Immokalee are horribly abusive living and working conditions. They endure them simply because they have no better option. Their perseverance is heroic.

Every day at 5 or 6 in the morning, derelict school buses owned by the growers drive the workers out to the farms. Trapped at the fields, the migrants must pick unceasingly until the crew boss ends the day. Oftentimes, the days are 10 or 12 hours long.

On the job, the farmworkers must cope with intense sun and heat, flagrant pesticide exposure, lack of drinking water, bodily pain and back injury, and an environment of intimidation and pressure from the labor bosses.

Workers must be constantly vigilant to receive the weekly piecework pay that is due them, to avoid the most abusive labor contractors, and to stay free of the actual slave-labor camps that are uncovered periodically.

As bad as the pay and conditions are, the situation would be even worse were it not for the efforts of a local, grassroots, labor rights organization called the "Coalition of Immokalee Workers."

Founded in 1993 by six workers who began to meet weekly to discuss the brutal mistreatment migrants were being subjected to, the organization by 1997 was able to mobilize thousands of workers to conduct community-wide work stoppages, hunger strikes, marches, and other attention-getting actions.

By 1998, the coalition had persuaded growers to raise wages by approximately 20 percent, and had started to halt the most egregious behavior, including the beating of workers, by the labor contractors.

Now representing 4,000 members and gradually educating thousands more, the coalition has broadened its agenda to fight for workers' rights legislation, the "Fair Food" movement, and an end to indentured servitude and slavery.

Although it is hard to believe, real slavery still exists in the backwaters of Florida. In the past 10 years, with the coalition's help, seven slavery operations have been exposed and legally prosecuted, which put 12 employers in prison and freed more than 1,000 workers.

All of those cases involved contractors who used violence, intimidation, and threats to control the laborers and force them to work in the fields. The workers were too terrified and disempowered to flee.

As a participant in the "Fair Food Alliance," the coalition is working to educate wholesalers, retailers, and consumers about the human-rights abuses in the food industry. The Coalition and Alliance have been successful in getting most of the fast-food industry and one grocery chain — Whole Foods — to sign an agreement which promotes a more stringent supplier code-of-conduct regarding farmworkers.

Additionally, the agreement calls for the growers to institute a penny-per-pound surcharge (which consumers would pay) on tomatoes, which would have the effect of nearly doubling the piecework wages of the pickers. So far, the growers have refused to do this.

Immokalee's farmworkers earn an average of $9,000 a year at piecework rates that are well below minimum wage. Some Americans are apt to think that these poverty wages exist because many of the migrant workers are illegal immigrants. But we should be aware that crop workers have always been the least paid, most exploited, workers in America, even at times when the majority of them were U.S. citizens.

Lucas Benitez, one of the earliest leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, told me that there are no economic realities necessitating the bilking of the tomato pickers. He said growers' resistance to supporting even minimal pay increases — even when it would cost them nothing — and modest improvements in working conditions, is based on their inability to see the farmworkers as human beings.

He pointed out that wherever sweatshop conditions exist — in the U.S. and anywhere else in the world — citizenship is not the key factor. The drastic imbalance of power between workers and employers is what permits exploitation.

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Brian T. Watson of Swampscott, a regular Salem News columnist, is a member of the Salem Award committee. Contact him at watson@nii.net.