I’m afraid you misunderstand my references to slavery. CIW has been involved in exposing and working to change two distinct things in southern Florida (and the Southeastern US broadly):

1. Extremely low wages and harsh working conditions

2. Enslavement of migrant farmworkers by large farming operations

I agree with you that (1) isn’t slavery in any but the metaphorical “wage slavery” sense, and that metaphorical phrases like “wage slavery” conceal at least as much as they reveal and usually don’t belong in serious analysis. But when CIW says “slavery in the fields” they don’t mean (1). They mean (2). As in, farming operations where bosses threatened to torture or murder immigrant workers if they left their jobs and pistol-whipped passenger van service drivers who had given enslaved workers rides out of the area. Here’s what CIW says about it:

Q: What does the CIW mean when it uses the term “slavery”?

A: When the CIW uses the word slavery, we do not mean “slave-like” or “resembling slavery” —- rather, we are referring to conditions that meet the high standard of proof and definition of slavery under US federal laws.

Modern-day slavery is a violation of the 13th Amendment. The cases we have helped bring to justice have been prosecuted by the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division either under laws forbidding peonage and indentured servitude passed just after the Civil War during Reconstruction (18 U.S.C. Sections 1581-9) or under the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which prohibits the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

In our latest case, three Florida-based agricultural employers convicted in federal court on slavery, extortion, and weapons charges were sentenced to a total of nearly 35 years in prison and the forfeiture of $3 million in assets. The men, who employed over 700 farmworkers, threatened workers with death if they were to try to leave, and pistol-whipped and assaulted — at gunpoint — passenger van service drivers who gave rides to farmworkers leaving the area. The case was brought to trial by federal authorities from the Department of Justice (Civil Rights Division) after two years of investigation by the CIW.

You can find out more about cases of straight-up slavery that the CIW has helped expose from the Feds or from from the CIW.

Because I agree with you that neither (1) above (sucky pay and harsh labor conditions), nor my definition (3) of “capitalism” (a boss-directed labor market) constitutes slavery, I also agree with you that neither is coercive, and that they can’t legitimately be met by government force (or any other kind of force). But that doesn’t answer the question whether or not it’s O.K.; it just answers the question of whether or not you can use force to stop it. There are lots of things that you have unquestionably legitimate authority to do that are nevertheless absolutely despicable ways to act. Justice is the only virtue that’s enforceable but it’s not the only virtue!

What I hold is that there are good reasons to think that we should be concerned—I mean that it is virtuous to be concerned, not that we should be forced to act concerned—about the living and working conditions of the people that make things we enjoy, and that it’s perfectly reasonable for the sense of solidarity that that concern entails to affect the decisions we make in a free market for goods. That’s a preference that most people act on, at least when it comes to family—few people are such scrooges that they wouldn’t help a child or a relation out in business, even at some economic cost—and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that you can (indeed, ought) to have and to act on a similar attitude—though weaker, and for different reasons—for all your fellow human beings. Also that it’s an attitude worth encouraging in other people, as long as you do it not through coercion but through education, persuasion, and peaceful incentives. Which is what the CIW has been doing.

As for the price of tacos—Jesus, do you really eat so many tacos in one sitting that a penny-per-pound increase in the cost of tomatos is going to make a difference in price on the margin to you? :)

Let’s say you’ve got a group of people who are trying to get a company to change the way it does business. There are two different ways in which their efforts might qualify as “political”:

1. … they might be trying to coerce the company by bringing down the government to enforce their demands against the will of the company decision-makers (or by getting the company to accept those terms under threat of government action).

2. … they might be trying to encourage the company to voluntarily accept their demands by coordinating conscious efforts to change people’s decisions in the market so that they intentionally act in such a way as to give the company an incentive to change how it does business—e.g., strikes, boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, shareholder actions, etc.

Now, whether (1) is objectionable from the stand-point of Austro-libertarian principle or not depends on whether the resort to government force would be defensive or aggressive. There are cases where it has been defensive (the CIW, for one, has exposed and broken up some honest-to-God slavery rings in the Southeastern US in the course of its work over the past few years), but clearly the demand for Taco Bell to work with its contractors to secure higher pay for tomato-pickers isn’t one you could legitimately get the government to enforce. Fortunately, the CIW has never, as far as I know, followed any kind of strategy under heading (1). The Taco Bell Boycott, specifically, was certainly never a “political” campaign in that sense. (And you can’t run the standard “government-sponsored cartel” objections to unions against CIW, either. CIW doesn’t have any government recognition as a union and couldn’t get it if it wanted it.)

Whether (2) is objectionable from an Austro-libertarian standpoint is a lot more complex and I can’t see any plausible principled reason to say that “political” campaigns in sense (2) are always unjustified. It’s not enough to just point out, “Hey, group A is placing demands on firm B and engaging in market activities that hurt B’s bottom line until B complies with the demands” and close the books on group A’s campaign; people—and for that matter firms—do that all the time, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. People boycott contributing to their alma mater to get foolish policies changed; firms and individuals refuse to deal with companies that deliver shoddy goods or engage in sharp dealing unless or until those companies show that they’ve changed; workers leave firms—sometimes en masse—if they aren’t treated right or aren’t paid enough. Whether these are good or bad ideas depends in part on whether the complaints that the people have are legitimate, and in part on whether the tactics do more harm than the good that can be reasonably expected from them at the end of the day.

You could, of course, try to make a case that the CIW’s specific demands are unfair and/or stupid, or that the strategy they adopted was more destructive than constructive, but what’s the argument for that conclusion?