A Trump-aligned company wins a pardon for labor violations in sugar production.

April 16, 2025
The Bitter Taste of Labor Violations

By Melissa Ditmore

From the park closest to my home, I can see the former Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn, where cane sugar from Florida and the Caribbean was refined for decades. Some of the cane refined there was grown on plantations in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Florida, owned by companies like the Central Romana Corporation. The Domino Sugar logo lights up brighter than ever each evening, but the factory is now a deluxe residential building where the penthouse condo costs $7 million and a one-bedroom apartment rents for over $6,200 per month. The building is a symbol of the transformation of an industrial area into a posh residential zone, the rebirth of the formerly working-class Williamsburg neighborhood as a gentrified hipster playground.

In 2022, the Biden administration placed an import ban on products from the Central Romana Corporation, based in the Dominican Republic, after advocacy by multiple nongovernmental organizations in the United States and the Dominican Republic concerning claims of labor abuses. A 2023 report from the US Department of Labor alleged the use of forced labor, a form of human trafficking, on Central Romana plantations. The report acknowledged some improvements since 2022 but concluded that they were insufficient to justify the lifting of the ban. Since the ban was first enacted, the company has spent millions on political donations and lobbying legislators to regain access to US markets, including a $1 million donation to a political action committee supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and more than $400,000 in additional donations to the Republican National Committee. These efforts finally paid off. The New York Times reported on Wednesday, March 19, 2025, that the Trump administration had lifted sanctions banning imports from Central Romana.

Laborers working on sugar farms in the Dominican Republic such as Central Romana’s are predominantly of Haitian ancestry. Many lack any regular legal or social status in the Dominican Republic, even though many were born there or have worked on the sugar farms for many years.

Lack of regular immigration status and documentation renders these workers vulnerable to human trafficking. Most are uneducated and many are not even able to read their work contracts. They are housed in rudimentary and overcrowded shelters in isolated rural areas near the fields where they work, intimidated by the armed guards that patrol the fields. They are paid a pittance if they are paid at all; some are in debt to the company despite working extremely long hours. Nearly all those interviewed in December 2023 for the Department of Labor report said that they would leave if they could. Their situation has many of the typical hallmarks of human trafficking, including exploitation of the lack of legal status, debt, isolation, and threats.

FULL story: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/labor-violations-trump-regulations-working-class/


Workers pack a school bus, riding from one of Central Romana’s sugar cane fields to their company housing, dank shacks that often lack electricity and running water, in El Seibo, Dominican Republic.(Salwan Georges / The Washington Post via Getty Images)