Julia Gabriel: "Como trabajadores y mujeres, tenemos que luchar por nuestros derechos y contra la violencia tanto en la labor como en la casa" "As women and as workers, we have to fight for our rights and against violence both in the fields and in our own homes"
You and your friends -- your fellow students, neighbors, co-workers, or members of your church -- are the very heart of this campaign!
If you have come to this site because you want to help make FAIR FOOD a reality, you can use the tools below to bring the Taco Bell boycott to your community.
But, first... Please consider donating to the CIW!We need your support to keep the boycott, the anti-slavery campaign, and everything else we do going strong!
Click on the Pay Pal link below to send a secure donation now!
Now, here are some great tools for organizing at home:
E-mail Petition send an email to Emil (Emil Brolick, TB's CEO)
Or, send an automated fax to Emil Brolick, Taco Bell CEO, from this link on the United Church of Christ web site - It's easy and a great way to support the boycott without even getting up from your seat!
Thanks for joining us, and don't forget to send us any news, photos, or media reports on actions in your community -- we'll post them as soon as we can and your action can help motivate thousands of visitors to the site across the country!
Coalition of Immokalee Workers
WHO WE ARE
1995 General Strike Immokalee, Florida
The CIW is today spear-heading the Taco Bell boycott. But before we launched the national boycott in April of 2001, we had been organizing locally for many years in an effort to modernize labor relations in Florida's fields, improve wages and working conditions for our members, and eliminate modern-day slavery.
To learn more about the history of the Coalition, you can go to the CIW site where you'll find all the non-Taco Bell info on the Coalition from 1995 to 2001, including past CIW campaigns, Press Archives, Photo Galleries, and more!
1997 General Strike Immokalee, Florida
Or, you can simply click on some of the links here below to go directly to the pages from the CIW site that interest you... just remember to hit the back button on your browser to return to the boycott site!:
What, exactly, is this? It's a pyramid, actually, of 120 tomato buckets, over two stories tall and more than 20 feet wide at its base.
To make $48 in a day at 40 cents per bucket, farmworkers have to pick, haul, and throw 120 of these buckets, which weigh 32 pounds when full of tomatoes -- about two tons of tomatoes, in all.
To give you some perspective on that, $48 is what most fast-food CEO's probably make before their butts hit the leather on their big comfy CEO chairs in the morning.
CIW members took time to build the pyramid right, screwing buckets to boards...
... and taking care to set row upon row of buckets on the growing pyramid.
The pyramid slowly took form, with each subsequent row taking longer than the last...
... and as it grew, several members took up residence behind the wall of buckets, fighting a wind that threatened to bring the whole thing down at any minute...
But finally, the pyramid reached nearly three stories, and there were no longer any ladders tall enough to add the final rows...
And so, with 10 buckets in a mini-pyramid still on the ground (memo to California organizing crew: find two VERY tall ladders for the 5th!), CIW members took a minute to celebrate what is definitely a first - - workers building a pyramid, not to give praise to those in power, but to build power for their own fight for justice. See you soon in California!
