Tomato workers win contract with Trader Joe’s

A farmworker organization in Florida has won a major battle in the fight for justice for tomato pickers. Trader Joes’s finally agreed to sign an agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to support the group’s Fair Food Program.

The program requires companies to pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes and ensure better working conditions for farmworkers.

“The agreements give workers a raise from $60 to $80 a day and assure them basic rights that virtually every other employee in the United States enjoys, including accurate time keeping, clearly defined grievance procedures, safety education, and protection from violence and sexual harassment in the fields,” Barry Estabrook, author of “Tomatoland,” said on his blog PoliticsOfThePlate.com.

Based in Immokalee, Fla., CIW is a community-based organization of mainly Latino/a, Mayan Indian and Haitian immigrants working in low-wage jobs throughout the state. They have been campaigning for Trader Joe’s to sign the agreement for the past two years and planned actions against the company’s new store in Naples, Fla., before it signed the agreement on Feb. 9. Trader Joe’s now has 367 grocery stores in nine states.

CIW is continuing to demand that other stores join this program, including Publix, Florida’s largest supermarket chain. CIW and its allies are holding a “Fast for Food” on March 5-10, which will begin at Publix’s headquarters in Lakeland, Fla.

“It’s one thing to passively profit from farmworker poverty, as Publix and other supermarket chains have done for decades, buying artificially cheap tomatoes off the market, no questions asked, unconcerned about how they came to be so cheap,” CIW said on its website. “But it’s something else all together to affirmatively perpetuate farmworker poverty, as Publix and the other supermarket chains are doing when they refuse to participate in the Fair Food Program.”

Trader Joe’s is the second supermarket chain to agree to participate in the Fair Food Program. Whole Foods Market previously agreed to do so, as have eight major food retailers, including McDonald’s and Burger King.