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Sweet Victory: Coalition for Immokalee Workers Wins
In March 2005, I started a weekly feature called "Sweet Victories." The idea was to chronicle progressive victories --electoral wins, protests and boycotts, the launching of new ideas, fresh organizations and initiatives, and successful organizing efforts. I hoped that these stories would serve not only as a source of information, but inspiration. The victories might be small, but they were always sweet.
On May 23, we celebrate a sweet victory for social justice. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) will join representatives of the Coalition for Immokalee Workers (CIW) and the Burger King Corporation at a press conference in the U.S. Capitol to announce that the corporation has agreed to work with CIW to improve wages and working conditions for the farm workers who harvest tomatoes for Burger King.
This victory is testament to the tenacity and discipline of the Coalition,a community-based worker organization, which has exposed a half-dozen slavery cases that helped trigger the freeing of more than 1000 workers. It has also advocated for better wages, living conditions, respect from the industry, and an end to indentured servitude. In this last year, CIW scored victories in negotiating a penny-per-pound surcharge--so workers would receive about 77 cents per 32-pound bucket--with McDonald's and Yum! Brands (owner of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC). (The corporations also agreed to work with the Coalition to eliminate slavery from the fields.) And the corporations --not the tomato growers--agreed to pay the 40 percent salary increase. Astonishingly, Burger King, until today, refused to go along with a deal that will cost them less than $300,000 annually; last year, the corporation raked in $2.23 billion in revenues.
The Coalition won this agreement because it had the facts on its side; it never exaggerated or distorted the truth. As a result, none of the lies told by Burger King or the growers could stick. In patiently hewing to the high road, its members were finally rewarded.
In April, Sanders chaired a Senate Labor Committee hearing devoted to exposing the low wages and harsh working conditions faced for decades by farm workers in South Florida. (The hearing came on the heels of Sanders' fact-finding trip to meet with the workers--a trip in which he saw first hand the grueling and brutal conditions of their lives.) At the April hearing, investigative reporter and author of Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser, who traveled with Sanders to visit the Coalition workers, laid down a marker: "The exploitation of farm workers should not be tolerated in Florida. It should not be tolerated anywhere in the United States. There are many social problems that are extremely difficult to solve. This is not one of them."
This victory is the result of years of struggle and highly disciplined organizing work by the courageous members of CIW. (It is a struggle I have reported) As such, it is a marker of real progress in exposing and addressing the injustices and abuses suffered by workers in our imperfect union. It is also an agreement that is good not only for Florida farm workers, but also for Florida farmers; it increases wages without taking money out of the pocket of farmers.
One historic measure of the Coalition's victory comes from Lucas Benitez, its indomitable co-founder and former tomato worker. At the Congressional hearing in April, he recalled how during a 1997 worker hunger strike a grower said that they would never meet the workers' single demand for dialogue. "Let me put it to you like this," the grower said. "The tractor doesn't tell the farmer how to run a farm." Benitez continued, "That's how they've always seen us, just another tool and nothing more. But we aren't alone anymore. Today there are millions of consumers with us willing to use their buying power to eliminate the exploitation behind the food they buy. And a new dawn for social responsibility in the agriculture industry is on its way. With the help of Congress and with the faith that the complicated will be made clear under the purifying light of human rights, today, just as was it 200 years ago, we will witness the dawn of that new day."
Eric Schlosser also sees enormous significance in this win. On the eve of the settlement's announcement, he told me "This may be the most important victory for American farmworkers since passage of California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975. That bill heralded a golden age for farm workers. But the state government apparatus it created, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, got taken over by the growers in the 1980s and watered down the reforms. In Florida, the Coalition has chosen a different path, avoiding government and putting pressure on the corporations at the top of nation's food chain. The strategy clearly works and can be emulated by other workers in other states. In the absence of a government that cares about the people at the bottom, here's a way to achieve change."
Yet the CIW's organizing victory is also a marker of how much more needs to be done. The settlement of the dispute over wages and working conditions does not relieve Burger king of the obligation to come clean about the corporate spying which has been exposed. What exactly did Burger King do, and to whom, and who knew about it? Those questions still have to be answered; and if Burger King doesn't provide the answers, Congress should investigate.
This is no time for complacency. Conditions in the field are still appalling. And now that the deal with Burger King has been signed, it's a moment to leverage that agreement to go after WalMart, Whole Foods and the other big supermarket chains. If McDonalds and Burger King can agree to take care of farm workers, there is no reason other companies shouldn't spend a few extra pennies for their tomatoes.
In the statement announcing the agreement, the Coalition's Benitez eloquently laid out what is at stake in the fight ahead: "Today we are one step closer to building a world where we, as farmworkers, can enjoy a fair wage and humane working conditions in exchange for the hard and essential work we do everyday. We are not there yet, but we are getting there, and this agreement should send a strong message to the rest of the restaurant and supermarket industry: Now is the time to join Yum! Brands, McDonalds and Burger King in righting the wrongs that have been allowed to linger in Florida's fields for far too long."
Katrina Vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.
© 2008 The Nation
5 Comments so far
Show AllKatrina Vanden Heuvel is not one of my favorites, but she is so right on this.
The conditions and pay in our fields are mostly shameful. Back breaking work for slave wages. Many of these people are illegal aliens and I oppose allowing anyone to come here illegally. But till the employers that use these people to drive wages down for Americans and exploit them because they are not legal are thrown in jail, I'd even approve of anything that improved pay and conditions.
The companies and their CEO's and management should be ashamed to face their families after their dishonorable actions. They are directly responsible for death, disease and injury. If they didn't hire these folks, non would die in the desert and thousands of peoples blood is on their hands and anyone that assists them.
Its a National disgrace that some fund manager should take home 1.8 Billion dollars and pay 15% in taxes on it while these people can't support their own families. It makes me ashamed that we have allowed this to happen over the last 20 years or so.
Yes, us....no good blaming it on Bush or Clinton or Congress or the Senate. Its our responsibility, we allowed it. and its time to it clean up.
In the world of labor relations, we should be extremely careful about declaring "victory" too early, or even using the term at all.
What the CIW and Sen Sanders have achieved should not be underestimated and they should be congratulated, especially the folks in CIW.
While bringing a corporate giant like BK to the bargaining table is no small feat, hammering out real gains -- which seems to have happened in this case -- and enforcing those agreements is much harder work and will take even more aggressive militant action by the workers and their supporters.
Unless there as been an actual power shift away from total dictation by BK and their contracted farmers, the gains will be short-lived, if they are actually delivered at all.
As for the workers having the facts on their side, workers almost always have "the facts" on our side because we're always getting screwed by the corporate gods and their employees in the political realm and the media.
In this case, the folks at CIW organized on the ground and joined in coalition with other groups to push BK into a corner and embarrass them, at least in the short term. It was a text-book case of power organizing and took alot of really smart and courageous work.
Let's see where they are in a year, or even a few months. Hopefully, this great gain will not go the way of the California ag law that went silent as soon as there was no force powerful enough to enforce it.
Good for the Immokalee workers, whose petitions I first learned of and started signing during, I believe to recall, the 1990s.
HOWEVER, their gains are dwarfed by critical events of continuing GENOCIDES of Canadian First Nations peoples, and due to the criminal Canadian govts, federal and provincial, the Canadian thugs unit, the gangsters known as the RCMP, and the three main Canadian Churches; RCC, Anglican, and United (in evil) churches.
"First Nations: Why an Apology is Wrong, and Deceptive: Bringing Humanity to Bear on the Residential School Atrocity
by Rev. Kevin Annett
Global Research, May 25, 2008
www.mohawknationnews.com "
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9066
"25.05.2008 20:37:51
RCMP evict hereditary chief from B.C. 'band' office
Breaking News on attacks on our people for asserting our rights and jurisdiction:
RCMP EVICT HEREDITARY CHIEF KIAPILANO AND SUPPORTERS FROM SQUAMISH BAND OFFICE, VANCOUVER
Squamish Nation territory ("Vancouver, Canada")
May 24, 2008"
http://www.mohawknationnews.com/news/news3.php?cat=-1
I'd provide the homepage url, instead of the above one to the News index page, but just had three browser sessions (for articles from different sources) totally crashed, and I don't know if it's related, but MNN was crashed sometime back. There's an article for that linked in the above news index.
In March, Chief Kiapilano and Kevin Annett (provided of the critically important website, hiddenFromHistory.org ), who I now learn is the person the Canadian FN call 'Eagle Strong Voice', and who's former United Church of Ca minister, OUTED due to having denounced and exposed the genocidal crimes of these three Canadian churches; well, the justly posted eviction notices, to evict all three of these churches from the Squamish's land.
So the response of the Canadian govts, thug, gangster RCMP, along with the "blessings" of these three churches evicted Chief Kiapilano and members of this FN Rights movement from THEIR LAND!
Imperialist, ... wars of aggression for natural resources on FN lands are happening "all over the place" in Canada; except in places where there are NO FN living, or where they've already been genocidally expropriated.
And, as a side note, only fantasy dreamers can believe that there is any hope of justice ever being provided for the Iraqis, Afghans, Haitians, Africans and South Americans that the Imperialist, colonialist, hellbent capitalist West's elites want the natural resources from.
MNN was deliberately crashed, and that was accompanied by the LIE that the MNN hostess had given up her website; all LIES.
See her article on that. They are trying to clobber the Canadian FN's true Rights activists!
Additionally, Kevin Annett, in his above article posted at GlobalResearch.ca, opens with stating that the article was submitted to many Canadian newspapers last week, and they all and hellbent IGNORED it!
OH, also, and I believe posted at MNN, but especially at Rev. Annett's website, visitors should look for much there, but while I'm presently mentioning only the relatively new information about many MASS GRAVES of Canadian FN children having been found.
That's surely something that the Canadian govts and the three main churches will want to try to totally suppress, and sending in troops to try to "see" to this is not something that the Canadian imperialists, ... are unlikely to do; they've done it before and in the early 1990s, when the FN of Oka, Quebec, refused to allow their sacred burial grounds from being stolen and for the hellbent sake of the white elites' having an additional golf course.
The natural resources obviously are of far greater material value to these hellbent elites, than a golf course is, so I figure that sending in the troops is something that may possibly happen.
I strongly recommend reading what Rev. Annett greatly provides on the many (28) mass graves that have been discovered, and the considerable amount of evidence that's been, so far, obtained from these. Quebec (the province) is not innocent, but it's good to see that there's only one of these mass graves here; situated behind McGill University and due to the genocidal (extreme too) crimes of some church located there.
Will U.S. activist, rights, ... writers and analysts ever pay any attention to the ever ONGOING GENOCIDE of the Canadian FN? They haven't yet, always focusing on unrelated problems or injustices in the USA, and then other countries; South American, Palestine, and so on. Those definitely warrant our very careful attention and activism, but we have a whole LOT to be concerned about here, what's continuing to be done to the indigenous peoples of North America!