… while last week’s protest at Naples, Florida store opening (above) keeps local pressure on Florida supermarket giant!
The outstanding new, two-minute video from the Campaign for Fair Food, “A Tale of Two Holidays,” has caught the attention of some of the largest, and oldest, national media outlets — new media giant the Huffington Post and the oldest continuously-published weekly magazine in the United States, The Nation.
In the Huffington Post, Katrina vanden Heuvel penned a piece entitled, “Must-See Farmworker Video Takes on Supermarkets, Holiday Season Food Industry Hypocrisy.” She begins:
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“The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the remarkable farmworker organization in Florida that I have written about many times over the years as they continue to win victory after victory in their Campaign for Fair Food, has done it again. This time they have put together a must-see video that is mandatory watching this holiday season…” read more |
Following a passage in which she embeds the video and discusses the progress made under the Fair Food Program — and the rejection of that progress by the majority of the supermarket industry — she includes an inspiring quotation from best-selling author Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”):
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“This may be the most important victory for American farmworkers since passage of California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975. That bill heralded a golden age for farm workers. But the state government apparatus it created, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, got taken over by the growers in the 1980s and watered down the reforms. In Florida, the Coalition has chosen a different path, avoiding government and putting pressure on the corporations at the top of nation’s foodchain. The strategy clearly works and can be emulated by other workers in other states. In the absence of a government that cares about the people at the bottom, here’s a way to achieve change.” read more |
Meanwhile in the pages of The Nation, Peter Rothberg also picked up on the new video in an article entitled “Pressuring Publix,” writing:
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“… Watch and share the video, then add your name to this open letter to Publix imploring the supermarket giant to join eleven major food retailers including McDonald’s, Whole Foods and Chipotle in the Fair Food Program. It would require only a small increase in the price it pays for tomatoes, compliance with a new Code of Conduct and the implementation of a system of Health and Safety volunteers on every farm to give workers a structured voice in the their work environment. Even if you throw out morality, the PR benefit could be invaluable. The Fair Food Program is viable, it’s working and, with our help, it could eventually fulfill its enormous promise as an unprecedented collaborative model for farm-labor justice.” read more |
Finally, last week also saw another exciting action (photo at top of this post) at another Publix store opening, this time in nearby Naples. Naples Daily News photographer William Deshazer was there and caught the remarkable photo, below. The photo captures the moment when the CIW’s Oscar Otzoy, who rode his bike 42 miles from Immokalee to Naples for the protest (in an echo of last year’s Bike Tour to Publix Headquarters), offers to share a recent Washington Post op/ed on the Fair Food Program with Publix’s spokesperson Shannon Patten so that Publix might learn more about the changes being forged every day under the Program:
Oscar also invited Shannon to visit Immokalee, to learn more about the reality faced by the workers who pick Publix’s tomatoes. There was no indication that she planned to take him up on the invitation.