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Ending farmworker slavery

Published Mar 16, 2005 1:09 PM

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers announced a historic victory on March 8: its agreement with Yum! Brands, the owner of Taco Bell and the biggest restaurant company in the world.

This followed the CIW’s four-year national boycott of the giant Taco Bell corporation. The fast-food restaurant chain serves more than 35 million customers each week in over 6,500 locations in the United States.

CIW is led by Florida agricultural workers, mostly immigrants. The group organizes for justice for farm workers and demands that growers meet U.S. and international labor standards. (www.ciw-online.org)

The CIW campaign focused on the 10 million pounds of Florida tomatoes farm workers picked in 2004 for suppliers who then sold them to Taco Bell.

These workers make 40 cents for each 32-pound bucket of tomatoes-the same wages as 30 years ago. To earn $50, a worker has to pick two tons of tomatoes.

Taco Bell’s parent company, Yum! Brands, agreed to buy only from suppliers who up payment for the tomatoes by a penny per pound. This arrangement is precedent-setting as the increase will pass through the local Florida suppliers and go directly into workers’ wages.

Around 1,500 workers will benefit immediately.

In a joint news release Taco Bell Pre sident Emil Brolick said: “We pledge to make this commitment real by buying only from Florida growers who pass this penny-per-pound payment entirely on to the farm workers, and by working jointly with the CIW and our suppliers to monitor the pass-through for compliance. We hope others in the restaurant industry and supermarket retail trade will follow our leadership.”

No to slavery

The CIW campaign also forced Yum! Brands to add language to its supplier code of conduct to require that “indentured servitude by suppliers is strictly forbidden.” Employers keep many immigrant workers in slavery-like conditions, sometimes incarcerating them behind barbed-wire fences. If the workers seek to leave, they are threatened and subjected to violence that includes beatings, shootings and pistol-whippings.

In a March 10 interview with Demo cracy Now! radio, Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a farm worker and member of CIW, said: “Slavery is something that is still happening in agriculture. ... We don’t have any kind of benefits or protections. We don’t have the right to organize in most of the states in this country, so basically the conditions that we face are conditions like sweatshops but in the fields, and here in the United States.”

The CIW helped prosecute five slavery operations, and won decisions against the growers that liberated over 1,000 workers.

Victory!

In early March, during the struggle’s final weeks, the CIW sponsored a “Taco Bell Truth Tour.” Participants traveled from Florida to meetings in 15 states including Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky.

In Atlanta and in Mont gomery, Ala., participants in the tour visited churches where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had served as pastor. They drew connections between the Black civil-rights movement and the farm workers’ campaign today for just wages.

In Memphis, Tenn., the tour members paid their respects to Dr. King’s memory by visiting the Lorraine Motel, the site of his assassination. They honored his coming to the city to support striking sanitation workers in their struggle for economic justice.

In Chicago, they joined local members of UNITE HERE in a picket outside the Congress Plaza Hotel. Workers at the hotel have been protesting for 18 months in a struggle for a fair contract.

Finally, the “Truth Tour” ended in Louis ville, Ky., with a jubilant March 12 demonstration celebrating the farm workers’ victory in their ongoing journey “from slavery to freedom.”

The win was far from easy. It took a relentless nationwide struggle, led by the predominantly immigrant tomato pickers in CIW and supported by United Students Against Sweatshops and various religious groups.

A USAS news release noted, “This unpre cedented victory ... would not have been possible without the hard work of USAS members booting the Bell from college and university campuses nationwide!”