[Peace-discuss] Ricky's Zmag Article re Tomato Pickers' Victory

[David Green]

Z Magazine Online

May 2005 Volume 18 Number 5

Farmworkers  

Tomato Pickers Win Big At Taco Bell  

By Ricky Baldwin

Amid jubilant tears and hugs, Florida tomato pickers
announced March 8, 2005 that they had defeated all the
odds, and considerable corporate inertia, to win a
clear victory in the first-ever farmworker boycott
campaign against a major fast food restaurant chain,
Taco Bell. Based in Immokalee, Florida, the Coalition
of Immokalee Workers (CIW) represents some of the
poorest, most abused workers in the U.S.  

Taco Bell is owned by the single largest restaurant
corporation in the world, Yum! Brands. After years of
protest, the restaurant “mega- firm” finally agreed to
pay an extra penny a pound for its tomatoes and to buy
only from suppliers who agree to pass along the extra
“one cent for justice” to tomato pickers. Yum! also
agreed to work with CIW to improve conditions in the
fields and called on other restaurant firms to follow
suit.  

Beginning to address these working conditions, for
example, the company says it will now take steps to
ensure that its tomato suppliers no longer employ
indentured servants, immigrant farmworkers who are
locked into squalid labor camps at night until they
pay off certain debts. Corporate spokes- people said
the company would “eat the cost” of the agreement
instead of passing the increase along to consumers.
They also made it clear the agreement applies to Taco
Bell alone, saying their other restaurants don’t buy
enough Florida tomatoes to have an impact on the
market. Last year, Taco Bell purchased more than 10
million pounds of Florida tomatoes, almost one percent
of the state crop.  

Yum! owns over 33,000 restaurants in over 100
countries and territories, including KFC, Pizza Hut,
Long John Silver’s, and A&W restaurants. It employs
more than 840,000 workers worldwide, making it bigger
than McDonalds. Yum! grossed over $9 billion last
year, just shy of McDonalds’ annual revenue.  

The Union Difference  

The farmworkers’ win at Taco Bell was impressive
because of the unusually precarious nature of their
work. As agricultural workers, they are not covered
under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act which
makes it illegal for employers to fire employees for
union activity, certifies union elections, and
oversees collective bargaining. Nor do they enjoy the
protections of other basic labor laws in the U.S.,
such as federal minimum wage and overtime laws. 

Many U.S. farm laborers are immigrants, often
undocumented, and routinely face working and living
conditions that are unthinkable to most Americans.
Conditions may include long hot work days, little or
no access to drinking water or toilets, and beatings
or other harassment. Some workers have even been held
at gunpoint in the fields.  

For this life, farmworkers in the U.S. generally earn
about 40 cents for picking 32 pounds of tomatoes, the
same rate in real terms as they earned 30 years ago. A
picker has to gather fully one ton of tomatoes to earn
$25.  

In the late 1970s wages in the fields began a
precipitous decline and continued dropping throughout
the 1980s and into the 1990s. Then in 1993 a group of
farm laborers in Immokalee, the largest agricultural
center in Florida, began meeting in a local church to
talk about how to bring about change.   

Over the next few years the group organized a number
of work stoppages, combined with public pressure,
including three general strikes, a month-long hunger
strike, and a 230-mile march from Ft. Myers to Orlando
in 2000. By the end of the 1990s the Coalition of
Immokalee Workers had won wage increases of 13-25
percent across the industry, not just for themselves.
This series of victories ended the 20-year plummet of
farmworker pay and raised wage rates back to the
mid-1970’s level, earning farmworker communities
several million dollars a year.  

Lucas Benitez, of the CIW, believes the extra penny
per pound paid by Taco Bell should substantially
improve the wages of about 1,000 tomato pickers
employed by Taco Bell suppliers. He says that under
the new agreement these workers could earn up to 72
cents for a 32-pound bucket, an increase of 80
percent. “It would mean almost reaching the poverty
level,” Benitez told one reporter.  

Outside The Bun  

Taco Bell and its corporate owner had resisted CIW’s
demands for years, saying that the fast food giant was
only one buyer of Florida tomatoes and that it would
agree only if the rest of the industry would also pay
more. In fact, as most union organizers understand,
resistance to unions is rarely about the money alone. 


As if to prove this, Taco Bell at one point offered to
make a direct payment to CIW of $100,000, the same
amount as the company’s estimate of the total cost of
the penny per pound “pass through.” The company said
they intended the payment to help CIW lobby the state
legislature for protective regulations on the industry
as a whole—and of course to stop the protests. CIW
rejected the offer.  

Taco Bell had also argued from the beginning that it
was not the direct employer of the tomato pickers.
This is true, but the additional point and the
implication, that the chain had no control over its
tomato suppliers, is not true. As a huge buyer of
tomatoes, CIW argued, Taco Bell applied constant
pressure on its suppliers to keep costs low, which in
turn exerted downward pressure on the pickers’ wages.
Echoing the company’s own ad campaign, CIW urged Taco
Bell to “think outside the bun.”  

It is a slogan the Immokalee Workers take to heart.
Their strategies show remarkable creativity and savvy,
adapting their organizing to labor markets that
combine 19th century conditions with the latest
innovations in capitalist globalization. Their
internal egalitarianism, too, is almost unique among
modern-day unions. Even Benitez, who often speaks for
the group, avoids using an official title. “We are all
leaders,” he and others in CIW will say, when asked.  

The Immokalee Workers see themselves as part of a
movement, fighting for the rights of an entire
community, not just their dues-paying members. Their
lack of legal rights forces them to rely upon a wide
variety of persuasive techniques, but what it does not
force is the overcautious narrowness of purpose as in
the standard union model. Theirs is a community
unionism—one that wins.  

The CIW strategy also seems to involve widening that
community to encompass concerned individuals and
groups other than farmworkers. The Taco Bell campaign
reached out to churches, labor unions and
student-labor networks established in the
anti-sweatshop movement. They often made this last
connection explicit, calling for an end to “the
sweatshops in the fields.”  

The student campaign hit the company where it hurt.
Taco Bell’s main marketing target is 18-to-
24-year-olds, collectively known in the restaurant’s
market strategies as “The new hedonism generation.” In
the end, students at more than 20 high schools and
colleges—including UCLA, University of Notre Dame, and
the University of Chicago—organized “Boot the Bell”
mini-campaigns to block or kick out on-campus Taco
Bell restaurants.  

CIW also works with the U.S. Department of Justice, so
far forcing at least five federal prosecutions on
human slavery charges, most recently involving 3
Florida citrus growers who had been holding over 700
workers in slavery. Overall, the group’s website
proclaims, “We have liberated over 1,000 workers.”  

Together with some of its allies, CIW co-founded the
national Freedom Network Institute on Human
Trafficking and now serves as Regional coordinator for
the south- eastern U.S. for the Institute. In this
capacity, the group conducts trainings for law
enforcement and social service personnel in
identifying and assisting victims of slavery, in
addition to their advocacy for full prosecution of all
traffickers, both corporations and subcontractors.  

This anti-slavery work continues, as does the overall
fight against poverty in the fields. Both depend
heavily on CIW’s grassroots organizing. Given that
there is no government enforcement agency to oversee
an agreement, such as the new Taco Bell accord, for
example, constant vigilance will be the price of
victory. There are other buyers, too—as CIW noted
before the ink was dry.  

“Systemic change to ensure human rights for
farmworkers is long-overdue. Taco Bell has now taken
an important leadership role by securing the penny per
pound pass-through from its tomato suppliers and by
the other efforts it has committed to undertake to
help win equal rights for farmworkers,” Benitez told
reporters. “But our work together is not done. Now we
must convince other companies that they have the power
to change the way they do business and the way workers
are treated.”  

Benitez said the Immokalee Workers are open to future
protests and boycotts to pressure other produce buyers
into helping the farmworkers. “Anything is possible in
this struggle,” he said.

Ricky Baldwin is a labor activist and frequent
contributor to Z Magazine, Dollars & Sense, and Labor
Notes.