Naples Daily News, 7/19/98

Immokalee Progress

Fighting Back on 2 Fronts

"We're a freight train loaded down and we're going to be hard to stop."

These words can be lodged in two contexts in Immokalee these days.

First, there is a meaning they were given by a stakeholder of the community who attended one in a series of community meetings to rally ideas and support for a $40 million federal empowerment zone grant to jumpstart employment and better housing. Gene Hearn meant there is so much burning desire for economic diversification in Immokalee that grant officials will be hard pressed to ignore the community's request - as they did four years ago.

At the same time, Hearn's "freight train" analogy can be applied to Immokalee's chronic shame - the shabby pay and living conditions of the migrant workers who balance agribusiness on their backs. This economy based on poverty - the "sickness of worker exploitation" as Southwest Florida clergymen call it - has become so entrenched there is no incentive to change it. To the relative few that profit from it, nothing is broken.

Thank goodness a new church coalition called Religious Leaders Concerned is taking up the cause for those snared by Immokalee's insidious cycle of abuse and despair.

Led by Father Bob Tabbert of St. Ann's Catholic Church in Naples and Rhea Gray of Community Congregational of North Naples, Religious Leaders Concerned is training public attention on Immokalee's problems - up close and personal and for the required long haul.

Last week they sponsored a public walking tour of the town's slums where the rents rival some of Naples' finest apartments. Because housing is scarce - and because many of the workers are aliens who need U.S. work and fear deportation - only the bravest tenants will complain to landlords of government code enforcers about conditions that no human should have to endure.

Take it or leave it, says the Immokalee establishment whose agribusiness sector refuses pleas from hunger strikers and even President Carter to discuss pickers' wages better than 40 cents per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes.

Religious Leaders Concerned have faith in the truth. They promise to hold more tours, for citizens to come and see for themselves, from September through the winter harvest.

Good luck to them.

They vow whatever it takes to amass a constituency - locally, then statewide, then nationally - that demands responsible economics and corporate stewardship. They vow this is the beginning of the end of capitalizing on others' misery.

For more information about Immokalee's federal empowerment zone grant campaign, call Barbara Cacchione or Deborah Preston in the Collier County Government planning office at 403-2300.

Both endeavors are uplifting. They demand a stop to grinding up people and spitting them out.

The time is long overdue to strike back at what's wrong in Immokalee and be a part of the lasting solutions.