Campaign for Dialogue and a Living Wage in the Year 2000

History of the Campaign

In 1995, the Coalition organized a five-day general strike to fight against a cut in the going tomato picking piece rate and won.

After stopping the pay cut in 1995, we were determined to actually raise wages and turn twenty years of stagnant piece rates around. We forged our Campaign for Dialogue and a Living Wage for area tomato pickers, by planning and mobilizing in the community through our leadership base, and combining popular education with community-wide protests. Collecting more than 2,000 signatures, leading a two-day general strike and, later, an unprecedented 30-day hunger strike by six of our members, we generated national and international interest.

We moved public figures including former President Jimmy Carter, our then governor Lawton Chiles, and Bishop John J Nevins to intervene in our favor.

This campaign included a first-ever community-based negotiation process that resulted in a 25% raise for over 450 area workers, and the extraordinary intervention by then Governor-elect Bush to win raises for thousands more tomato harvesters.

In the process, farmworkers have developed a powerful political voice at the state level. Though we have already gained historic pay raises, the campaign continues today, and we continue to fight for respect, direct talks with our employers, and a truly fair wage. There is no doubt that we have caused a shift at the very foundation of farmwork in Florida, and we are determined to keep pushing until that foundation sits squarely within the ground of modern labor relations.

Last Season

On Monday, December 12, 1999 hundreds of tomato pickers in Immokalee joined in a community-wide strike to protest 20 years of falling wages in Florida's tomato industry, an industry with annual receipts of nearly $500,000,000 state-wide.

The workers called for dialogue between the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the major tomato growers in Southwest Florida to discuss the wage issue and other working conditions. At the heart of the workers' protest was the picking piece rate, or the amount paid for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes that a worker can pick in a day. That piece rate has been essentially stagnant for over 20 years, at 40-45 cents per bucket, and workers say that with the rise in the cost of living they can no longer make ends meet.

[Most (66%) of Florida's migrant and seasonal farmworkers live below the poverty line. During the period from 1992 to 1995, 90% of the farmworkers surveyed in Florida by the National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS) reported individual income from agriculture under $12,500. One third had annual income from farm work under $5,000. Beyond poverty-level wages, virtually no Florida farmworkers receive overtime pay for overtime worked, sick leave or paid vacation, health insurance, or pension.]

"We are fighting for simple justice," says Lucas Benitez of the Coalition at the time of the 1999 strike. "As farmworkers in Florida, we are denied the most basic human rights that workers in most other industries take for granted -- the right to organize and to talk to your employer about wages, and the right to a fair wage, a wage that you can live on, raise your family, and provide a decent life for your children. We work hard," Benitez continued, "but we get almost nothing in return. We are tired of getting treated like machines, and we have decided that now is the time to fight for what we deserve."

The work stoppage in December of 1999 was followed by an unprecedented, 230-mile long march from Ft. Myers to the Orlando offices of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association. The "March for Dignity, Dialogue, and a Living Wage" was a tremendous success, with thousands of workers and supporters pulling together to take the tomato pickers' message of simple economic justice and democracy in the workplace to the streets of South Florida. Workers on the march collected nearly 7,000 signatures from everyday Floridians supporting "the farmworkers efforts to join with their employers in a constructive dialogue on wage and other working conditions" and calling on Governor Jeb Bush to use his "office to help move industry leaders toward a more modern, more humane relationship with workers in Florida's tomato fields."

2000-2001

This season, the CIW will continue its campaign, continue to push for dialogue and a fair wage Florida's tomato industry, and we need your continued support to make our efforts a success. Please read the Action Alert at the top of this page to learn how YOU can best help today. Thanks.