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!:
Waiting for the fields to dry in the morning... After getting
work sometimes as early as 5:00 am, workers often don't
actually start picking until 10:00am, until the dew has
dried on the tomato plants. This waiting time, of course,
is all-too-often not paid and has been the subject of innumerable
legal complaints.
The long walk to the truck... The full buckets weigh
roughly 32 pounds -- at 40 cents per bucket, that means
you have to pick and haul 2 tons of tomatoes to make $50
in a day's work.
Working by the piece, there is no time to stop or talk with
co-workers. Every minute counts in the back-breaking tedium
of piece work harvesting.
Readying to throw the 32-lb bucket up to the dumpers..
Tomatoes picked, hauled, and now on their way to the packing
house. Next stop -- a fast-food restaurant near you...
Heading home after a long day.
Back in town, the CIW headquarters sits next to the Immokalee's
central parking lot where workers find work and are dropped
off every day.
The CIW cooperative offers staple foods and necessities
at nearly half the price of the local stores.
CIW art, collected from several years of struggle and reflecting
the evolving focus of our organizing efforts over the years,
is found throughout the CIW's community center. This drawing,
depicting a beating of a worker at the hands of his crewleader,
was a key image in the early years of CIW organizing, and
in the birth of what is today the CIW's anti-slavery campaign.
Lucas Benitez, a CIW organizer and farmworker, stands outside
the office with a bloody shirt worn by a CIW member who
was beaten by a field supervisor in 1996 for the infraction
of wanting to drink water in the afternoon of a particularly
hot day in the tomato fields. That beating launched our
first "Campaign to End Violence in the Fields,"
including a nighttime march of 500 workers to the house
of the crewleader involved in the incident. Since that march,
there have been no further reports of beatings in Immokalee,
where there were a common occurence in the years before
workers started to unite.
