“Serfs up, Kings down!…”: THe CIW marched on Burger King on 30 November
P&P meet the tomato workers taking on the fast food giants - and winning!
“Today we know where the real power lies - with the large corporations who dictate prices and therefore wages” Lucas Benitez
Anna Rudge of Reading People & Planet reports:
In November 2007, People & Planet had the opportunity to meet two representatives of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers: Lucas Beitez, and Greg Asbed. The CIW is a worker led organisation, with Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian low-wage Central American and Mexican farm workers who face exploitation within the agricultural industry who have taken on the fast food giants such as Taco Bell, McDonalds and, currently, Burger King.
Read about the CIW’s campaign below, and take action to support their struggle.
Campaign Update
In May 2008, the CIW achieved another fantastic campaign victory!
Burger King (BKC) agreed to pay an additional net penny per pound for Florida tomatoes to increase wages for the Florida farm workers who harvest tomatoes. To encourage grower participation in this increased wage program, BKC will also fund incremental payroll taxes and administrative costs incurred by the growers as a result of their farmworkers’ increased wages, or a total of 1.5 cents per pound of tomatoes.
BKC also joins other fast-food industry leaders and the CIW in calling for an industry-wide net penny per pound surcharge to increase wages for Florida tomato harvesters. Read more
A sample workday for a Florida tomato picker
4:30 AM: Wake up. Prepare lunch in your trailer.
5:00 AM: Walk to the parking lot or pick-up site to begin looking for work.
6:30 AM: With luck, a contractor will choose you to work for him for the day. The job may be 10 miles to 100 miles away. Board the contractor’s old bus to go to the fields.
7:30 AM: Arrive at fields and begin weeding or waiting while the dew evaporates from the tomatoes. You are usually not paid for this time.
9:00 AM: Begin picking tomatoes - filling buckets, hoisting them on your shoulder, running them 100 feet or more to the truck and throwing the bucket up into the truck- all for a token worth 40-50 cents. Work fast because you must pick 2 TONS of tomatoes in order to earn $50 today. This may or may not be possible depending on the time of year and quantity of tomatoes on the plants.
12:00: Eat lunch as fast as you can, often with your hands soaked in pesticides. Return to working under the smoldering Florida sun.
5:00 PM (sometimes much later, depending on the season): Board bus to return to Immokalee.
Between 5:30 and 8:00 PM: Arrive in Immokalee and walk home.
The Problem
In Immokalee, Florida, farm workers work 10 —12 hour days in the heavy sun in gruelling and dangerous conditions, often for seven-day weeks. 45 cents are paid for each full bucket (32 lbs) of tomatoes that are picked; this rate has remained stagnant since 1978. While corporations at the end of the supply chains make claims that these farm workers are able to easily make between $12 and $18 an hour, in reality the workers would have to pick two and a half tonnes of tomatoes in a day — just to meet the minimum wage. On top of the extremely low wages received by the workers, they are given no benefits, are never paid overtime, and are given no paid sick leave or health insurance. The “National Labour Relations Act” Law in the US is useless for these farm workers at the bottom of the supply chain, as they are excluded from its provisions.
“They are the forgotten workers” Lucas Benitez
The workers are picking tomatoes that eventually make their way to consumer’s plates in burgers, salads and sauces.
Modern Slavery
In the most extreme cases this situation has been identified as “modern slavery”, with workers held against their will and forced to work for little or no pay, which meets the legal standards needed for prosecution under the modern day slavery statutes. One federal prosecutor called Florida “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” In the last ten years there have been five slavery operations prosecuted by the Federal Civil Rights officials involving over 1,000 workers in Florida.
The farm workers are caught in a trap -on one side are the input companies selling the pesticides and machinery to them and dictating high prices, on the other are the output companies who buy the tomatoes and dictate the low prices they will pay for this commodity.
The “middle of the hamburger”
Lucas Benitez explained that in the past the farms were smaller scale family-owned operations, but now most are now operated by huge agri-businesses. But even these companies don’t have the strength to negotiate prices with buyers. Lucas likened the growers’ situation to “the middle of a hamburger.”
The bottom half of the bun is the input companies - companies such as John Deere supplying machinery, and Monsanto supplying chemicals. The growers don’t have the power to negotiate with them. The top half of the bun is the companies the growers are selling to. The companies buying the tomatoes are huge - companies like McDonalds, Subway, and Walmart.
“They don’t come to negotiate; they come to say what price they will pay. Workers are the only ones that pay the full price.”
Success
A four-year national consumer boycott of Taco Bell led to an agreement with Taco bell’s parent company Yum! Brands. As a result workers are paid 1 cent more per pound of tomatoes, and this is going directly to the workers. Yum! Brands is the biggest restaurant company in the world; it also owns A&W All American Food, KFC, Long John Silver’s and Pizza Hut.
In April this year the CIW achieved a further agreement with McDonalds, and they are now campaigning for Burger King to do the same. These agreements outline the following:
- The right for farm workers to participate in the development and implementation of an enforceable code of conduct for agricultural suppliers in the US fast-food industry.
- Supply chain transparency and a zero-tolerance policy on modern-day slavery.
- The development of an independent monitoring system.
The CIW - advancing farm workers’ rights
Lucas explained the significance of their victory:
“Workers have gone from being under the table, to being at the table .. In one sense the changes so far are small; in another sense they are huge. It’s only a small change in terms of the overall size of the problem; but the precedent set with the agreements, with enormous corporations taking money from their profits and passing it down the supply chain, straight to workers, is something for all workers in supply chains everywhere.”
Background
A small group of farm workers began the coalition in 1993. A month long hunger strike in 1998 and a 230-mile long march in 2000 ended over twenty years of declining wages in the tomato industry. But these wages were still below the poverty level.
The fast-food industry as a whole — including industry giants such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, and Wendy’s — purchases a huge volume of fruits and vegetables, using its market power to demand the lowest possible prices from its suppliers.
In 2001 they launched the first farm worker boycott of a major fast food company (Taco Bell), calling on the fast-food giant to take responsibility for human rights abuses in the fields where its produce is grown and picked.
In March 2005, amidst growing pressure from students, churches, and communities throughout the country, Taco Bell agreed to meet all of the coalition’s demands to improve wages and working conditions for Florida tomato pickers in its supply chain.
In April 2007 after a two-year battle with McDonald’s the largest restaurant chain in the world, the fast-food leader agreed, just days before a boycott was publicly announced, to collaborate with the CIW in developing an industry-wide third party mechanism for monitoring conditions in the fields and investigating abuses.
On 22 November 2007, representatives of CIW received an award from Anti-Slavery International for their exceptional work tackling modern-day slavery in the United States.
What we can do
Similarities in our work
- Campaigning for workers rights
- Taking on giants in the industry
- Importance of ongoing pressure
- Like Philip Green the CEO of Arcadia, John Chidsey the CEO of the Burger King, is wealthy beyond imagination (worth $50billion), and an injustice exists here. The costs of a recent party held for him would have been enough to increase pay per bucket for these workers by 1 cent - for 50 years.
- The coalition brought attention to McDonald’s dirty laundry by taking old clothes from farmers in Immokalee to be hung outside a store — like we are creating washing lines for Topshop’s dirty laundry.
- Burger King, like Topshop, targets young people in the 16 — 24 age group. Not only are both these companies (and industries) exploiting the workers in their supply chains, but the CIW claim that they exploit young people’s minds, cramming them full of advertising.
Now the CIW is trying to negotiate with Burger King. But Burger King show no signs of responding - in fact they are trying to reverse the hard-won gains of the last few years by putting counter pressure on the growers already participating in agreements with workers.
Students in the US play an important role in the CIW’s campaign - during the Taco Bell campaign they successfully removed or blocked the company from 22 campuses. Lucas said “the alliance between workers and consumers was absolutely vital.”
Europe is an important market for Burger King; Lucas told us that UK students’ support now would really help their campaign.
To show support from students in the UK for these low waged and exploited farm workers you can write to Burger King’s CEO, at:
Mr John Chidsey CEO
Burger King Corporate Office
5505 Blue Lagoon Drive
Miami, Florida 33126
You can also email Burger King now. Use the form below to send a message to Burger King’s CEO, John Chidsey, and Burger King’s board members, David Bonderman, head of the Texas Pacific Group, and Andrew Balson and Stephen G. Pagliuca of Bain Capital (Texas Pacific and Bain Capital are two of the private equity companies that recently bought Burger King). You can use the text below or write your own message.
This action is no longer active.
When the action was active, this was our suggested text.
Fair wages for farm workers
I am writing from the UK in support of the farm workers who pick the tomatoes for Burger King's Whoppers, sandwiches, and salads. I ask you to recognize that they deserve fair wages, real rights, and a voice in the protection of those rights.
I am disappointed by Burger King's rejection of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' (CIW) offer to work together to ensure fair wages and conditions for the workers who pick your tomatoes. McDonald's and YUM! Brands have already shown that improving farm worker wages and conditions is possible, despite Burger King's claims to the contrary.
I urge Burger King to seize the opportunity to work together with the CIW to improve farm worker wages by paying a fair price for your tomatoes and enforcing a code of conduct for human rights in the fields.
Find out more
- Coalition of Immokalee Workers - a membership-led organization of mostly Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian low-wage immigrant workers based in Southwest Florida.
- Student/Farmworker Alliance - a network of students and youth organizing with farmworkers to eliminate sweatshop conditions and modern-day slavery in the fields. You can also download campaign resources.
- Alliance for Fair Food is “a network of human rights, religious, student, labor, and grassroots organizations who work in partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). We promote principles and practices of socially responsible purchasing in the corporate food industry that advance and ensure the human rights of farmworkers at the bottom of corporate supply chains.”
- Anti Slavery International - the world’s oldest international human rights organisation and the only charity in the United Kingdom to work exclusively against slavery and related abuses. Anti Slavery International work at local, national and international levels to eliminate the system of slavery around the world.