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Consciousness
+ Commitment = Change: How and why we are organizing...
The CIW is a community-based organization of mainly Latino, Mayan Indian and Haitian immigrants working in low-wage jobs throughout the state of Florida.
We strive to build our strength as a community on a basis of reflection and analysis, constant attention to coalition-building across ethnic divisions, and an ongoing investment in leadership development to help our members continually develop their skills in community education and organization.
From this basis we fight for, among other things: a fair wage for the work we do, more respect on the part of our bosses and the industries where we work, better and cheaper housing, stronger laws and stronger enforcement against those who would violate workers' rights, the right to organize on our jobs without fear of retaliation, and an end to involuntary servitude in the fields.
From the people, for the people:
Who we are...
Southwest Florida is the state's most important center for agricultural production, and Immokalee is the state's largest farmworker community. As such, the majority of our approximately 4,000 members work for large agricultural corporations in the tomato and citrus harvests, traveling along the entire East
Coast following the harvest in season. Many also move out of agriculture and into other low wage industries that are important in our area, including the construction, nursery, and tourist industries.
We are all leaders: Our history...
We began organizing in 1993 as a small group of workers meeting weekly in a room orrowed from a local church to discuss how to better our community and our lives. In a relatively short time we have managed to bring about significant, concrete change.
Combining three community-wide work stoppages with intense public pressure - including an unprecedented month-long hunger strike by six of our members in 1998 and an historic 230-mile march from Ft. Myers to Orlando in 2000 - our early organizing ended over 20 years of declining wages in the tomato industry.
By 1998 we had won industry-wide raises of 13-25% (translating into several million dollars annually for the community in increased wages) and a new-found political and social respect from the outside world.
Those raises brought the tomato picking piece rate back to pre-1980 levels (the piece rate had fallen below those levels over the course of the intervening two decades), but wages remained below poverty level and continuing improvement was slow in coming. At the same time, the phenomenon of modern-day slavery was establishing a foothold in Florida's fields.
Our Anti-Slavery Campaign...
While continuing to organize for fairer wages, we also turned our attention to attacking involuntary servitude in our state. Our Anti-Slavery Campaign has earned national and international recognition, based on its innovative program of worker-led investigation and human rights education, and a track record of real success.
Our latest victory against indentured servitude came in December of 2008, when employers César and Giovanni Navarrete were sentenced to 12 years each in federal prison for their part in what U.S. Attorney Doug Malloy called "slavery, plain and simple" The Navarrete case was the seventh major servitude case since 1997 in which the CIW has played a key role in the discovery, investigation, and prosecution of the operation, helping to liberate well over 1,000 workers.
The CIW is a co-founder of the national Freedom Network USA to empower Enslaved and Trafficked Persons. We are also co-founders and Southeastern U.S. Regional Coordinator for the Freedom Network Training Network Training Institute, in which we conduct trainings for law enforcement and social service personnel in how to identify and assist slavery victims, as well as advocate for the full prosecution of all traffickers, including corporations and their sub-contractors. At the state level, we are members of the U.S. Attorney's Anti-Trafficking Task Forces for Tampa and Miami, as well as Florida State University's statewide Working Group Against Human Trafficking, through its Center for the Advancement of Human Rights. In June 2010, CIW’s Anti-Slavery Campaign Coordinator Laura Germino was recognized as a Trafficking in Persons Hero by the U.S. Department of State – the first time ever that the recognition was awarded to a resident of the United States.
The Campaign for Fair Food
In 2001, we turned a new page in our organizing, launching the first-ever farmworker boycott of a major fast-food company - the national boycott of Taco Bell - calling on the fast-food giant to take responsibility for human rights abuses in the fields where its produce is grown and picked. The corporate food industry as a whole - including corporations such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Aramark, and Sodexo - purchases a tremendous volume of fruits and vegetables, leveraging its buying power to demand the lowest possible prices from its suppliers, in turn exerting a powerful downward pressure on wages and working conditions in these suppliers' operations.
Over its four years, the Taco Bell Boycott gained broad student, religious, labor, and community support, ncluding the establishment of boycott committees in nearly all 50 states and a fast-growing movement to "Boot the Bell" from college and high school campuses across the country. Large scale national actions also helped move the boycott forward.
In March 2005, amidst this growing pressure, Taco Bell agreed to meet all of our demands to improve wages and working conditions for Florida tomato pickers in its supply chain. The boycott victory was widely celebrated by observers including the 21 members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who said of the accord, "This is a truly historic agreement, marking perhaps the single greatest advance for farmworkers since the early struggles of the United Farm Workers. To the workers and organizers of CIW, we express our deepest gratitude for their determined work for their own dignity and their historic contribution to advancing the cause of labor rights."
Following the Boycott's successful conclusion, the national network of allies that had helped carry that campaign to victory consolidated to form the Alliance for Fair Food, signaling to the corporate fast-food industry that the Campaign for Fair Food would not stop at Taco Bell. In the years since, the AFF has become a powerful new voice for the respect of human rights in this country's food industry and for an end to the relentless exploitation of Florida's farmworkers.
In April of 2007 - in the culmination of a two-year battle with the largest restaurant chain in the world, McDonald's - the Campaign for Fair Food took an important new step forward. With an announcement at the Carter Center in Atlanta, McDonald's and the CIW reached a landmark accord that not only met the standards set in the Taco Bell agreement, but also committed the fast-food leader to collaborate with the CIW in developing an industry-wide third party mechanism for monitoring contidions in the fields and investigating abuses.
The third corporation to enter into an agreement with us - the fruit of a persistent, year-long campaign - was Burger King. In an announcement at the U.S. Capitol in May 2008, Burger King joined the CIW in calling for an industry-wide net penny per pound surcharge to increase wages for all Florida tomato harvesters.
Also in 2008, the campaign broke new ground with its first agreement in the supermarket industry, as leading natural and organic foods retailer Whole Foods agreed to work with the CIW. Just a few months later, we reached yet another agreement, this time with Subway, the largest fast-food purchaser of Florida tomatoes.
We then turned our focus to the supermarket and food service industries, and in April 2009, Bon Appétit Management Co. became the first of these corporations to step up to the plate, working with the CIW to establish an "innovative new model for fair labor standards in Florida's fields." Three other food service leaders, Compass Group (September 2009), Aramark (April 2010) and Sodexo (August 2010), have also come to the table. In total, nine leading food retailers – including the four largest restaurant companies in the world and the country’s three largest food service providers – have joined their voices to the growing call for a more modern, more humane agricul- tural industry in Florida. It is now up to the rest of the super- market industry to follow suit.
Immokalee today: Nothing is impossible...
Over the past several years, through the Campaign for Fair Food and our anti-slavery work, Immokalee has evolved from being one of the poorest, most politically powerless communities in the country to become today a new and important public presence with forceful, committed leadership directly from the base of our community - young, immigrant workers forging a future of livable wages and modern labor relations in Florida's fields.
In recognition of their work, three CIW members were presented the prestigious 2003 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, the first time the award had gone to a U.S.-based organization in its 20 years of existence. In recent years, the CIW and the Campaign for Fair Food have been recognized by several other instituions, including the 2009 Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice; the 2008 Sister Margaret Cafferty Development of People Award by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development; the 2007 Anti-Slavery Award by Anti-Slavery International, the oldest international human rights organization in the world; World Hunger Year's 2006 Harry Chapin Self-Reliance Award; the Freedom Network's 2006 Wellstone Award; and the Business Ethics Network's 2005 BENNY Award.
