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Authors, sign in!There are almost 2 million fieldworkers in this country. On average, these workers make less than $12,000 a year. Almost a third of migrant workers' families are officially poor. These workers often fail to receive the same legal rights and benefits granted to other U.S. laborers.
Case in point: Florida tomato pickers. Their wages have stayed almost the same in real dollars for nearly 20 years -- a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each worker picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. That's 125 buckets per day which, at $.45 per bucket, equals $56.25 for a ten- or twelve-hour day of backbreaking labor.
In recent years, a concerted effort to raise these wages and improve these workers' working conditions has made surprising gains. In the spring of 2005, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a small farm laborers' group in Immokalee, Florida, won a surprising victory against the world's second-largest fast-food company. After a four-year boycott, Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, agreed to pay an additional one cent per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra penny going directly to the farm workers.
In April of 2007, McDonald’s agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket.
But fast food giant Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny. In the face of continued pressure to do so, Burger King has instead told its suppliers that it may stop buying tomatoes from southwestern Florida entirely. Evidence has also surfaced suggesting that Burger King has hired a professional infiltrator to spy on the Coalition's planning sessions and attack it on the web and through e-mail.
In the meantime, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, which represents 90 percent of the state's growers, announced that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers, and will in fact fine its members $100,000 apiece if they do so. According to Eric Schlosser, an investigative reporter and author of Fast Food Nation, who wrote a powerful op-ed about this situation for the New York Times, Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the group, has described the surcharge for poor migrants as “pretty much near un-American.”
The Growers Exchange has even asserted that allowing its members to collect that surcharge might be a violation of federal antitrust laws, even though legal experts suggest that it is the concerted refusal to collect the surcharge that actually violates the law.
There is no reason to think that any of these moves will stop the efforts of the tomato pickers to improve their wages and working conditions. Instead, the Coalition has launched a national petition drive calling on Burger King and other food industry leaders to work with the CIW to improve the wages and working conditions of the men and women who harvest their tomatoes.
The petition serves notice that those who sign are “prepared to stop patronizing Burger King now, and other food industry leaders in the future, should they fail to do so.” The Coalition plans to deliver the petition and signatures to Burger King at the company's Miami headquarters on April 28, 2008.
Published April 20, 2008 by Dmitri Iglitzin |
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Agricultural Workers
Agriculture
Exploitation
Justice
Labor
Wages
Workers Rights
Comments (1)
This is thoroughly unfair and callous, I agree. I wonder whether BK hasn't painted itself into this unreasonable corner through its dollar menu war with MacDonalds. When McD's announced that it would have to raise the price of what was once its dollar menu, BK saw an opportunity and began advertising that unlike McD's, its dollar menu would stay a dollar menu -- something that it could probably barely afford to do, unless the ad campaign paid off. But it didn't pay off, because McD's responded by delaying the rise in cost of its dollar menu. Consequently, BK is locked into a price war which requires much more belt-tightening on its part than on the part of much wealthier McD's.
Posted by Peter Tramel
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April 20, 2008 10:54 PM
Posted on April 20, 2008 22:54