NEW TARGETS FOR TOMATO PICKERS
By Dick Meister
Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food restaurants have
done it. Now it’s time for other fast-food chains to do it. And for WalMart,
Whole Foods and the other large supermarket chains to do it.
It’s time for them to join the drive to guarantee decent pay and decent
working conditions to the highly exploited farmworkers who pick most of the
country’s tomatoes.
The pickers work in the Immokalee area of southern Florida. Most of them are
undocumented Latinos who have had little choice but to accept the truly
miserable conditions imposed on them.
They work under the blazing sun in open-air sweatshops -- usually from
sunrise to sunset --for up to seven days a week. During a typical day, each
of them picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. .
For all that, the pickers rarely get more than $10,000 a year. They have
no paid holidays or vacations, no overtime pay, no health insurance, no sick
leave, pensions or other benefits. No union rights.
Most of them are forced to live in crowded, dilapidated trailers. that rent
for as much as $50 per person per week. After paying their rent and other
expenses, they may net as little as $20 for a week of very hard labor.
Some of the workers are held in virtual slavery by the labor contractors who
hire them for the tomato growers. The contractors make deductions from the
workers’ wages for transportation, food, housing and other services that can
force them to turn over their entire paychecks and continue working against
their will until their debts to the labor contractors are paid off.
It’s been like that for years. But finally a coalition of workers, student,
labor, community and religious activists, lawmakers and others has mounted a
nationwide drive aimed at raising the workers’ pay and improving their
miserable working and living conditions.
They’ve been holding marches, rallies and other demonstrations, petition
drives, and arguing their case before legislative committees. The coalition
-- the Coalition of Immokalee Workers or CIW -- has been scoring some
important victories.
The first victory came in 2005 after a four-year-long boycott against Taco
Bell, which is owned by a corporation, Yum Brands, that also owns Kentucky
Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, A & W, Long John Silver’s and All America Food
Restaurants.
Yum Brands agreed to the CIW’s demand that fast food restaurants increase by
a penny what they had been paying growers for a pound of tomatoes and give
the extra penny directly to workers. That would nearly double their pay of
just a little over one cent per pound picked -- a piece rate that had not
increased since the 1970s. That would add as much as $7,000 a year to the
average picker’s pay -- enough to provide a living wage.
The coalition also won the right to monitor the payment and treatment of
workers, to investigate complaints about poor treatment, and to confer with
growers on improving conditions.
Last year, the CIW won a similar agreement from industry leader McDonald’s,
just as it was about to carry out its threat to wage a nationwide boycott of
the chain.
Just this month, the world’s second largest fast-food chain, Burger King,
came to terms. But reaching that agreement did take another nationwide
boycott. Burger King, with annual revenues of well over $2 billion, held out
for nearly a year.
Burger King didn’t go down easily. It hired a private security firm that
specializes in union busting to secretly obtain information about student
and farm labor organizations that helped wage the boycott. The corporation’s
vice president actually posted derogatory comments about the coalition on
You Tube and other internet outlets under an assumed name. Burger King also
tried to pressure McDonald’s and Yum Brands to rescind their agreements with
the coalition.
But Burger King is singing a different tune now. The corporation’s CEO, John
Chidsey, apologized “for any negative statements about the CIW or its
motives previously attributed to Burger King or its employees and now
realize that those statements were wrong.”
What’s more, Chidsey pledged that Burger King will now work with the
coalition “to further the common goal of improving Florida tomato farm
workers’ wages, working conditions and lives” and to seek “industry-wide,
socially responsible change.”
The CIW’s Lucas Benitez also had something important to say. Once, he noted,
the tomato pickers were treated as “just another tool and nothing more. But
we aren’t alone anymore. There are millions of consumers with us, willing to
use their buying power to eliminate the exploitation behind the food they
buy.”
That’s very likely to be proved once again at supermarkets and other
fast-food outlets that have yet to do what desperately needs to be done.
Copyright © 2008 Dick Meister