The CIW is based in Immokalee, but our impact reaches beyond the Southwest Florida area to cover the state of Florida as a whole. 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 members are farmworkers who spend 8-9 months of the year here in Southwest Florida then travel north on the season during the summer months.

Many local residents, and thus many of our members, move out of agriculture and into other low wage industries that are important in our area, including the construction, nursery, and tourist industries. The community is split, roughly, along the following ethnic/national origin lines: Mexican 50%, Guatemalan 30%, Haitian 10% and other nationalities (mostly African-American) 10%. Virtually all of our members are low-income.

This campaign, launched in October of 1997, has brought about several historic changes for thousands of Florida farmworkers.

Combining 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 -- the campaign ended over twenty years of stagnant wages in the tomato industry.

Results of the campaign include a first-ever, community-based negotiation process that resulted in a 25% raise for over 450 area workers, and the extraordinary intervention by Governor Jeb Bush to bring about raises for yet thousands of more tomato harvesters. Those raises, taken together, represent several million dollars in increased wages every season since 1997.

In 2001, we launched a new phase of the campaign, announcing a national boycott of Taco Bell for its refusal to meet with farmworkers and discuss its role, as a major buyer of Florida tomatoes, in perpetuating farmworker poverty.

"Anti-slavery campaign " - The CIW's Anti-Slavery campaign is an innovative worker-based campaign to eliminate modern-day slavery in the tomato fields and orange groves of the East Coast agricultural industry. In 21st century slavery operations based on debt bondage, workers are held against their will through violence and threats of violence, ranging from intimidation to beatings to pistol-whippings. In the past five years, the CIW has uncovered, investigated, and assisted the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in prosecuting in three large, multi-state slavery operations based out of Florida, and acted in as consultants on two others. In those few short years, our efforts have resulted in: freedom for thousands of workers in debt bondage, the successful prosecution of various agricultural employers, the education of local and federal law enforcement, the development of a growing base of aware and committed worker activists, and stronger federal laws against trafficking in human beings.

This campaign, launched during the 1996-1997 season, began with a 500-worker march to a local crewleader's house to protest the beating of one of our members here in Immokalee. Since then, it has evolved into a nationally-recognized program focusing on the elimination of modern-day slavery in Florida's fields.

Other accomplishments include... the establishment of a highly successful consumer cooperative, providing staple foods at nearly wholesale prices and breaking the hold of the traditionally overpriced local market; a growing, active, multi-ethnic membership base; weekly radio programs reaching thousands of workers in both Spanish and Haitian Creole; an innovative program of education and leadership development including participatory video, street art, popular theater, and community festivals; an annual scholarship program for the children of local workers and Latino cultural festival in conjunction with an area Spanish-language radio station... and much more!