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This past week, McDonald’s and a
group of Florida growers announced what they are calling
“rigorous new practices” that they say will,
in combination with the previously announced “SAFE”
initiative, “equal or exceed one penny per pound.”
One the one hand, it’s good to see that, only
one month later, McDonald’s agrees with us on
the inadequacy of SAFE. SAFE, on its own, was a woefully
insufficient solution to the world of problems faced
by Florida farmworkers.
And it is certainly encouraging to hear Florida tomato
growers saying publicly that, “Agriculture is
taking a closer look at its workplace culture to ensure
that producers are doing the right thing.” Clearly,
our campaign has managed to change the terms of the
debate in Florida agriculture. Where growers and their
clients before talked only about price, quality control,
and food safety issues, today they are talking about
ethical labor standards.
If Florida tomato growers can come to sincerely embrace
these new ideas, they will see that there is value to
be had in treating their labor with respect and joining
with workers in a cooperative effort to eliminate labor
violations and improve working conditions. If so, the
growers could become a force for progress in the industry.
Unfortunately, the standards the growers are now talking
about implementing still fall well short of anything
that can be honestly described as genuine corporate
responsibility. As announced, the “new practices”
lack any real collaboration with workers or provisions
for guaranteeing just wages – both key principles
of meaningful labor standards -- but at least the movement
is in the right direction.
Economic Relief Missing
But none of what has been announced addresses the fact
that farmworkers still desperately need immediate economic
relief, a raise in wages so that they can meet their
basic needs and live free of the degradation that has
been the shame of Florida agriculture for so long.
What continues to puzzle us is why McDonald’s
refuses to pay just one penny more per pound and work
with its growers to ensure that the additional penny
goes to the workers in the form of a raise in the per
bucket piece rate.
The company’s latest announcement at least recognizes
the need to “meet or exceed” the Yum penny
per pound standard, but the package of “new”
benefits being offered in the place of a raise is really
just a combination of basic employment benefits already
required by law and practices already common in the
tomato industry. There’s really not much new here
at all.
In other words, all major tomato growers are already
required to withhold money from their workers’
checks to pay for social security, workers compensation,
and Medicaid, and the vast majority do so, while many
of the major growers already house their workers in
company labor camps and transport their workers in company
buses.
As such, it’s just not plausible that the total
of these “benefits” will somehow exceed
the $6,000 or $7,000 per year that an industry-wide
penny more per pound would put into workers’ pockets.
What’s more, whatever the final value of any new
benefits might be – and that will certainly be
an issue of endless dispute -- it will never be the
same as paying a fair wage that individual workers can
use as they see fit.
Given the choice between being able to rent an apartment
for your family in town, or living on an isolated labor
camp with five strangers in company-owned housing, what
would you choose? The answer is simple, but McDonald’s
latest plan doesn’t even give workers the freedom
to choose.
Is one penny more per pound really too much to ask of
a fast-food giant with over $40 billion per year in
system-wide sales? McDonald’s approach as announced
deflects the entire burden -- and cost – of social
responsibility onto it suppliers. Yet McDonald’s
bears at least some of the responsibility for farmworkers’
poverty. Why? Because through its high volume purchases,
McDonald’s has been able to extract the lowest
possible prices for tomatoes from its suppliers –
and in so doing exert a downward pressure on farmworker
wages – for decades.
In short, McDonald’s profits from farmworker poverty,
and so needs to contribute to its alleviation. Yum Brands
has now clearly recognized this and is today paying
a fairer price for its tomatoes so that workers who
pick those tomatoes can receive a fairer wage. No new
strategy for social accountability will be complete
until McDonald’s recognizes its own responsibility
and contributes its share to help raise farmworkers’
unconscionably low wages, too.
And for a business that moves close to $100 billion
of expenses and revenues around the globe annually,
it certainly couldn’t be too difficult to devise
a system to trace the movement of money down its supply
chain to the workers at the bottom of that chain. Indeed,
money is the easiest thing to monitor – less complex
by far than the byzantine compendium of non-monetary,
discretionary benefits that McDonald’s will encourage
its suppliers to implement, value, and monitor with
this latest initiative. If simplicity is the measure,
a penny per pound beats this latest idea by a mile.
There is today a human rights crisis in Florida’s
tomato fields, marked by modern-day slavery, sub-poverty
wages, no overtime pay, and more. News of the employment
of a convicted slaver by one of McDonald’s key
suppliers just last month – weeks after fanfare
accompanying the SAFE initiative – only underscores
that. But McDonald’s insists on responding to
this human rights crisis as a public relations crisis,
and these problems won’t be solved with a public
relations quick fix.
The CIW is already working in a partnership towards
social responsibility with YUM Brands and its Florida
tomato suppliers that provides a real raise to the pickers
and gives workers a real mechanism for reducing labor
rights violations and improving working conditions.
Genuine labor reform in McDonald’s supply chain
will only begin when McDonald’s stops trying to
sidestep the issues and works with the CIW to make workers
not only a real part of, but a real partner in, how
they do business.
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