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IMMOKALEE, Fla. -- The best part of the
farm workers' day may be 4 a.m., still pitch black out,
when they gather in a concrete building on the corner
of Third and Main for hot coffee and bread.
Minutes later, hundreds of them, almost
all men, head to a parking lot behind the building to
wait for farm crew chiefs who will pick the workers
who will pick the tomatoes for the day.
If they're lucky, the workers get to spend
12 hours on their hands and knees, filling buckets of
tomatoes for 40 to 50 cents a bucket. To make at least
$50, they scurry to fill 125 32-pound buckets -- two
tons of tomatoes. But if it rains, as it did Friday,
work stops. The workers are returned to the parking
lot in rickety school buses 12 hours after they left,
having earned just a few dollars, maybe none at all.
In short, things have not changed much
in the 45 years since Edward R. Murrow's television
documentary "Harvest of Shame" highlighted
the plight of Immokalee's migrant workers. Today the
Immokalee area, about 40 miles inland from the Gulf
of Mexico in southwest Florida, produces the largest
supply of fresh tomatoes for the nation's supermarkets,
as well as for some of the biggest fast-food chains
in the world. But the farm workers are still dirt poor.
They still work long days with no overtime, no benefits
and no job security, seven days a week. They still live
squished into hovels or packed 12 to a trailer, in trailers
fit to be scrap.
But the Immokalee farm workers, or tomato
pickers, as they call themselves, are making the improvement
of their condition a national cause.
In 2001, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers,
an advocacy group housed in the squat building where
the workers get their pre-dawn coffee, launched a boycott
of Taco Bell, an important buyer of Immokalee tomatoes.
Taco Bell's corporate parent, Yum! Brands Inc., is the
world's largest restaurant company with five restaurant
chains. (KFC, Pizza Hut, A&W and Long John Silver's
are the other four.)
The coalition, made up largely of the
farm workers, says Yum! Brands helps perpetuate the
workers' poverty by pressuring growers to sell tomatoes
at volume discount prices, keeping wages low. But while
talks between the coalition and the corporation have
yielded little -- executives from Taco Bell and Yum!
Brands say the workers are unfairly singling out the
restaurant chain when it alone cannot change their plight
-- the boycott has gathered steam and clout in the past
couple of years.
Campus groups and dozens of faith groups,
including the National Council of Churches, representing
50 million Christians, have endorsed the boycott, with
students taking a strong role. "Boot the Bell"
campaigns by students, part of the company's target
market of 18- to 24-year-olds, have blocked or forced
Taco Bell from 21 campuses, and boycott campaigns are
underway at about 300 universities and 50 high schools.
On Monday, the coalition is launching
its annual "Taco Bell Truth Tour," loading
buses from Immokalee with 100 farm workers, most of
them immigrants from southern Mexico, Guatemala and
Haiti, on a 15-city publicity campaign. The buses will
stop in Atlanta, Nashville, Cincinnati, Cleveland and
other cities before ending with a rally on March 12
at Yum! Brands headquarters in Louisville. The rally
will feature celebrity headliners, including actor Martin
Sheen and Kerry Kennedy, daughter of the late senator
Robert F. Kennedy.
"Yum! Brands has the power to change
the way it does business and the way the workers are
treated," said Lucas Benitez, 29, a picker who
helped found the coalition in 1993.
As the largest buyer of tomatoes of Yum!
Brands' five restaurant chains, he said, Taco Bell should
set an industry example by paying a penny more per pound
of tomatoes, guaranteeing that the extra payment would
go directly to workers, and by demanding that growers
adhere to humane labor standards.
But Taco Bell spokeswoman Laurie Schalow
said that the coalition may be asking the company for
too much. "We have said we absolutely understand
the workers' plight," Schalow said. "We really
do." But, she added, "this is a problem that
goes deep." For that reason, she said, the company
offered to help develop a team that would lobby legislators
-- "all the way to [Republican Florida Gov.] Jeb
Bush" -- to change labor laws.
Contradicting an industry newspaper, the
Packer, which describes Yum! Brands as a major player
in the Florida tomato industry, Schalow said the company's
role is not that big. "We actually are not a very
large purchaser; we're really not," she said, adding
that she does not know what percentage of the crop Yum!
Brands buys. "Taco Bell uses tomatoes, but KFC
really doesn't use tomatoes, Pizza Hut uses more tomato
sauce products."
After two years of the boycott, Schalow
said, Taco Bell last year sent the coalition a $110,000
check, representing an extra penny per pound for the
tomatoes it bought in 2003. The coalition, she said,
returned the check.
"That was just a tactic," the
coalition's Benitez said of the check, "not a systemic
change. How were we supposed to distribute the money?
And how can the company claim that that was an honest
response when they won't disclose how many pounds of
tomatoes Yum! Brands buys from the suppliers?"
He said Yum! Brands President David C.
Novak proposed helping the workers only if they agreed
to end the boycott and only as part of an industry-wide
solution. The proposal prompted former president Jimmy
Carter to scold Novak, in a statement released by the
Carter Center, for missing an opportunity "to take
the lead in eliminating human rights abuses that he
knows exist within his supply chain."
Benitez and other coalition members who
have been spending 18-hour days planning the Truth Tour,
said they realize that Taco Bell, or Yum! Brands, does
not hold the entire solution to the workers' situation.
The farm owners, the slumlords who rent dilapidated
trailers to workers for $350 a week, and the labor contractors
who mistreat and cheat the workers, as well as politicians
who ignore the problems, all need an awakening, Benitez
said.
But, just as major apparel retailers were
forced to confront the conditions of the Southeast Asia
sweatshops where their products are made after student-led
anti-sweatshop campaigns, the coalition says, Taco Bell
and Yum! Brands must confront the exploitation of farm
workers.
No one disputes that Immokalee farm workers
have been subjected to the most extreme injustice. The
coalition has uncovered several slavery rings in Immokalee-area
farms. In one case, based on two years of undercover
work and investigation by the coalition in 2002, three
Florida-based farm bosses were convicted in federal
court of slavery, extortion and weapons charges and
sentenced to nearly 35 years in prison. They were also
ordered to forfeit more than $3 million in assets. The
bosses had threatened more than 700 farm workers with
death if they tried to leave and assaulted passenger
van service drivers who gave rides to farm workers.
In a 2000 case, a farm contractor was
convicted of holding more than 30 tomato pickers under
armed watch in two trailers in an isolated swamp near
Immokalee. When three workers escaped, the employer
tracked them down, running one of them down with his
car.
The coalition's work uncovering slavery
garnered Benitez, of Guerrero, Mexico, and two other
workers the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in
2003. The coalition is working with a federal task force
that continues to investigate slavery rings.
Benitez said he hoped publicity for the
Taco Bell boycott would help inform more people about
the slavery, along with the general conditions of farm
workers.
"What the laborers go through,"
he said, "is the shame of this country."
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