The Best of the Week’s News

• Florida cops caught using the mugshots of black suspects for target practice.

• The Holy Grail: in search of an organizing model to unite low-wage workers.

• Towards a civil right to organize.

• How the White House kills national security stories.

Richard Marosi and Don Bartletti win the January Sidney Award for “Product of Mexico,” a multi-media package for the LA Times documenting the brutal labor practices on Mexican farms that produce fruits and vegetables for major U.S. retailers, including WalMart.

The story is the product of an 18-month investigation that took the reporters to 9 Mexican states. Marosi’s words and Bartletti’s images tell the stories of the workers who travel hundreds of miles to work on farms that grow produce for export.

Farm owners lure workers from remote villages in Mexico with promises of high wages. The workers travel hundreds of miiles from home. They arrive penniless, and they rapidly fall into debt due to high prices at the company store. They can’t leave as long as they owe money even if the wages aren’t as high as the famer promised. To compound the farm workers’ misery, they may not be able to buy enough food on their meagre wages to feed themselves and their families, who often travel with them. Marosi and Bartletti observed workers picking through garbage for extra food.

Working conditions are dangerous and accidents are a constant threat. One teenage farmworker they met had her ankle accidentally slashed by a machete.

Marosi used public records and reports to prove that produce from these farms found its way to major American retailers including WalMart.

Read our Backstory interview with Richard Marosi for a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this remarkable multi-media package.

Kentucky has 41 counties with no county jail, but the state constitution requires all counties to have an elected county jailer. So, 41 county jailers get paid, often handsomely, to do nothing. The highest earner among them pulls down $69,000 a year, but she has no office, no schedule, and no official duties of any kind.

These counties are some of the poorest in the state, but they collectively spend about $2 million dollars a year on salaries for jailers-without-porforlio and their deputies. 

[Photo credit: Grim Santo, Creative Commons.]

A gripping tale of greed, fracking, deregulation, and murder in North Dakota brought to us by Deborah Sontag and and Brent McDonald of the New York Times.