Ending farmworker slavery
By
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Sue Davis
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!”
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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