Every morning, in parking lots and street corners throughout Wimauma, Ruskin, Dade City, Immokalee and numerous other towns throughout Florida, dozens of shadowy figures approach slowly moving vans, pick-up trucks and makeshift school buses. Their hoped-for reward: a spot in a work crew and a return home after dark with a little cash. It's a routine that has been repeated for decades, some aspects of which have remained frighteningly unchanged.
"Prices have been stagnant for over 30 years, there is no overtime, there is no right to organize, there is no sick leave, no health insurance," says Oscar Salas of Immigrants United for Peace and Freedom.
Salas knows the routine. Until a few years ago, the Dade City resident picked oranges; now he's moved into the construction business. Wages for picking oranges in Central Florida have remained stagnant for decades. At 80 cents a box, Oscar Salas says a picker could hope to earn only $50 or $60 for a 10-hour workday.
"Barely minimum wage," calculates Salas. "Besides the sun and the fatigue. And don't forget you have to get up the next day and do it again, and do it again, which makes it even worse."
A week after Thanksgiving, Salas tried to advance the cause of higher wages by marching in Miami with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a group of Mexican, Guatemalan and Haitian immigrant farm workers from the impoverished town of Immokalee, 40 miles east of Naples. Their goal: convince Burger King, which is headquartered in Miami, to raise tomato pickers' wages a penny a pound.
The CIW has reason to believe they can win this fight. After all, they have already taken on Taco Bell and McDonald's — and won.
But Burger King is proving to be a formidable opponent. And now, as presidential candidates amp up their anti-immigrant rhetoric, the CIW's agreements with the other fast food giants is endangered as well.
Friday, November 30, 10 a.m.: The CIW's march through the streets of Miami is an activist's dream-mix of demographics. Wearing yellow T-shirts with "Exploitation King" branded across the front, the marchers are white college students, out gay teenage black kids, immigrant Latin American laborers, church-going seniors and families of all colors with toddlers in tow. They're Miami casino workers, day laborer organizers from Virginia and anti-sweatshop activists from D.C. and Mississippi, all in solidarity with the farm workers.
A similar rally took place in Louisville, Ky., almost three years ago; that time the T-shirts read "Boycott the Bell." Farm workers aren't legally allowed to organize a union, so they are powerless to negotiate with growers. But the CIW knew that 80 percent of America's winter tomatoes are picked in Florida. Upon discovering that Yum Brands, Taco Bell's parent company, had bought tomatoes from an Immokalee-area grower, the CIW organized a nationwide boycott of "the Bell" in 2001, urging consumers to get their burritos elsewhere. The protest grew in size until 2005, when Yum Brands agreed to a pay increase for pickers. McDonald's signed on in April of 2007, before the campaign reached the boycott stage.
The agreements with Yum and McDonald's mandate that when the chains buy tomatoes from Florida, they will pay an extra 1 cent for every pound they purchase. The growers will then have to pass on that 1 cent to the tomato pickers who worked for them. An independent auditor oversees the process, and makes sure the money is being passed on. The agreements with the CIW also guarantee a higher standard of working conditions in the field, and direct Yum and McDonald's to investigate any violations brought to their attention by the CIW.
One payoff of the CIW's organizing strategy has been that its large mobilizations end up feeling more like family reunions than protests. After launching the Taco Bell boycott, the farm workers went on several "truth tours:" a 40-mile march and hunger strike from East L.A. to Irvine, Calif. (Taco Bell headquarters), and bus trips from Immokalee to Louisville (Yum Brands' HQ) and Chicago (McDonald's). Along the way, they would stop and speak to school groups and church congregations, and invite local activists to picket with them outside a nearby outlet of a targeted fast food chain.
"Their mission is not only about getting themselves and the farm workers a raise," says Joline Elbers, a third-year New College student who marched with the CIW in both Chicago and Miami. "It's about creating a consciousness in everybody.
"A lot of these kids are not the type to get into 'activism,'" adds Elbers, who came to the demonstration with a group of 25. During their fall break, New College students went on a field trip to Immokalee, and what they saw compelled them to get involved.
"I felt it was my obligation to come to this event," says Sam Chiron, a New College sophomore. "What sealed the deal for me was going there and seeing the actual living conditions."
Those conditions have been reported as far back as 1960, when Edward R. Murrow's acclaimed Harvest of Shame TV documentary exposed the brutal lives of Florida's migrant farm laborers. Little has changed over the years. Immokalee's main drag is a dusty, pothole-filled street lined with a smattering of rundown taco joints. Immokalee workers have helped the U.S. Dept. of Justice prosecute six cases of slavery.
"I've been over there to Immokalee and I've seen how they have to live," says Jim Sullivan, a member of Just Faith Catholic Church in Miami, who says he hasn't marched in the streets since the Vietnam war.
"There's no way that people getting a fair wage would live like that, so obviously they're being shortchanged."
Closer to Sarasota, the conditions for farm workers are not much better than in Immokalee. In the tomato fields of Wimauma, workers take a 15-minute break to eat lunch — if they can afford the time.
"If you've ever seen people actually picking, they're running, they're like Speedy Gonzalez. Running all the time."
Ana Sanchez isn't just talking about any farm workers; she speaks from her own family's experience. Growing up, Sanchez would spend her weekends picking oranges, strawberries and tomatoes in Florida, and her summers traveling to Ohio and Virginia with her parents to find seasonal work. Fortunately, they encouraged her to attend high school during the week rather than join them in the fields.
Sanchez now runs a health education program in Wimauma through the Florida Institute for Community Studies. She sees Mexican, Honduran and Salvadoran farm workers come to her clinic with ailments they've let go for far too long. Diabetes is high because of poor diet and lack of medical attention; routine injuries and colds can also become dangerous if untreated.
"A lot of them come in with things that are really, really serious and could have been prevented," explains Sanchez.
"If they miss a day of work, they'll lose their jobs. So a lot of them don't go to the doctor until they are feeling really, really ill, like they can't walk anymore."
A poor tomato season makes every day of work even more crucial not to miss, and for the tomato pickers in Wimauma, this year has been particularly bad. Because of a lack of rain, many of the crops are too dry to harvest; as a result, many pickers can only find work one or two days a week.
Friday, November 30, 1 p.m.: The march gains people as it winds through the streets of Miami, a cacophony of singing, chanting and drumming. Although several dozen police on bicycles are standing between the protesters and passing traffic, they are virtually ignored by the marchers, who have taken a vow not to break any laws.
"It's not that tense environment that was created in other marches in Miami," says Hugo Mirando, a Bolivian American from Miami's Little Havana, who came to the CIW march with his wife Sonja. "It's exciting, it's emotive, lots of music, and lot of people in good moods."
One protester reaches over the top of a chain-link fence to hand a bilingual brochure to an interested security guard. Mirando says it's important that the march is passing through some of Miami's barrios; as we walk along 20th Street, he explains that most of the people working in the wholesale clothing shops are immigrants often paid minimum wage or less.
"The workers from Immokalee are not the only ones going through similar situations here," he says.
As the marchers approach a park for a lunch and shade break, 16-year-old Geovany Rojas, who came down to the march from Town 'N' Country, says he's surprised at the turnout.
"I can't see the beginning and I can't see the end!" he says of the 500-plus marchers.
"It makes me think, if you are the owner of Burger King, how do you feel right now? Having all these people march towards you and protesting, and yet you wouldn't come to an agreement with them? That's amazing."
Burger King's counter-campaign has been relatively predictable. Like Yum and McDonald's in the past, BK has issued statements defending their treatment of farm workers and claiming the CIW is misleading the public. Although a spokesman refused requests for an interview, a BK statement e-mailed to Creative Loafing called the penny-a-pound raise demand a "public relations gimmick that fails to address the real issues facing farm workers."
Two days before the protest, BK executives came to Immokalee and donated $25,000 to the Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RCMA), an organization down the dusty street from the CIW's offices that provides childcare and education for farm workers' children.
According to Jordan Buckley, who lives in Immokalee and works with the CIW, the donation by Burger King reveals the hypocrisy in their public statements. In a letter to the Southwest Florida Newspress, Buckley writes that "given Burger King's consistent claim to the media that Immokalee's farm workers, including those in their tomato supply chain, are not, in fact, poor — then why did Burger King donate $25,000 to an agency whose clients are supposedly already making so much money?"
But Burger King has found an ally in the Florida tomato industry. The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), a statewide cooperative, has threatened any grower who passes on the extra penny per pound to a farm worker with a $100,000 fine. FTGE executive vice president Reggie Brown would not say whether the fine has been enforced, but he believes that the CIW's penny-a-pound agreements with Yum and McDonald's are illegal.
In a phone interview, Brown refused to give specifics, beyond saying that the FTGE has "had numerous legal opinions" that the CIW agreements with Yum and McDonald's violate anti-trust and racketeering laws.
Brown also is fighting back in the press by claiming that farm workers in southern Florida earn an average of $12.46 per hour, a statistic that Gerardo Reyes, a tomato picker and CIW member, calls a "straight lie."
Doing the math, it's hard to believe the FTGE numbers. At the going rate of 40 cents for a 32-pound bucket of tomatoes, picking one ton of tomatoes earns a worker about $25. Thus two tons must be picked to equal the state's minimum wage of $6.67 an hour, and by doubling that, would have to pick almost 10,000 pounds of tomatoes in an 8-hour day to earn the $12.46 an hour the FTGE claims. Add to this the seasonal nature of the work, and the fact that any given day you might not get chosen to work, and it's easy to see why the U.S. Dept. of Labor estimates that farm workers earn about $10,000 a year.
The CIW is blunt about the attacks on their campaign coming from BK and the FTGE. "Lies, Lies, Lies" read the sign carried by the giant crowned Burger King puppet that took part in the march, and Reyes is uncompromising in his criticism, especially of FTGE's move to penalize growers who honor the already existing agreements with Yum and McDonald's.
The penny-a-pound increase was supposed to show up in workers' paychecks in mid-December, but Yum and McDonald's were still unable to find growers willing to risk the FTGE fine and pass the increase on to the tomato pickers. Potentially, the CIW can sue if Yum and McDonald's try and back out, and at press time, those two fast food giants were putting the extra penny into an escrow account, with the money to be passed on to the workers when a willing grower is found.
Reyes is sure that BK is in cahoots with the growers, an issue that Brown from the FTGE refused to address.
Burger King is "not only moving in this campaign against us, attacking our campaign because of pride, they have a clear intention of destroying what we have done [with Yum and McDonald's]. And I don't know where that is coming from," says Reyes.
"They are playing a dirty game with human rights."
Friday, November 30, 5 p.m.: "The bigger they are, the harder they fall," yells Lucas Benitez to a cheering crowd. Benitez, who founded the CIW in 1993, is the organization's most public face. He's soon joined by Robert F. Kennedy's daughter Kerry, who compares Lucas and the CIW to César Chavez and the United Farm Workers in 1970s California. Kennedy invokes God several times in her speech, and then, along with representatives from the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church and others, walks across the police line to Burger King property to hand a giant parchment asking for justice to a Burger King representative.
Support from the religious community was a huge asset in the Taco Bell campaign. When the National Council of Churches endorsed the boycott, it meant than 50 million parishioners left church the following Sunday having been told that by not eating at a particular fast food chain, they were serving God. The CIW's message seems to appeal because of the righteous way they frame it — essentially, "we are poor, we work hard, we put the food on your table, and we deserve to be treated with common decency and respect."
The highlight of the rally comes as dusk falls on Miami, and the temperature finally dips below 85. The CIW has brought a small flatbed trailer full of worn workboots and shoes, donated by the farm workers who couldn't come to the rally; the shoes are backed by a signboard saying "DOUBT OUR POVERTY? WALK IN OUR SHOES."
Reyes removes three pairs of boots from the trailer and begins to cross the police line and present the shoes to Burger King. The crowd begins chanting, "Let them pass! Let them pass!" louder and louder, for several minutes straight, until Burger King representatives appear outside the building. A few moments of whispered negotiations later, Reyes and two other farm workers are allowed to pass by police, and the crowd is nearly hysterical. The volume of the shouting doubles; the chant has changed to "Take the shoes! Take the shoes!"
Burger King, for its part, has sent a public relations underling named Denise to smile and nod while Reyes explains to her why they are giving her three pairs of dirty workboots. When she finally accepts them, the rally erupts.
Reyes returns to the crowd triumphant — the message, he says, has been delivered.
"We, the farm workers of Immokalee, are not willing to take the same miserable wages anymore," Reyes tells the crowd, repeating what he has just told Denise. "And we're not alone. People in this county and the entire nation are going to be protesting more and more and more, this is only the beginning of a long journey. And it depends on Burger King."
Francisca Cortes, one of the three workers who carried the boots across the street, reports back that as Reyes was speaking, the Burger King representative almost cried.
The next day, at a post-march rally at a Miami community center, a question hovers in the air: Will there be another boycott? Many activists seem eager to take on Burger King. But Reyes makes it clear that the decision will come from the workers themselves, after careful discussion back in Immokalee.
The question of why Burger King is resisting the CIW doesn't have an obvious answer. It was understandable that Yum Brands ignored the movement; they had no reason to think it would succeed. But McDonald's learned from the lessons of the Taco Bell campaign and, with prodding from former president Jimmy Carter, came relatively quickly to the bargaining table. (The Carter Center helped broker the deal between the CIW and McDonald's.) Burger King, it seems, is banking on the notion that somehow their fate will be different.
Judging by newspaper coverage of the CIW's Burger King campaign, the media is essentially taking the farm workers' side. Possibly as a result of having covered the Taco Bell and McDonald's campaigns, journalists and op-ed writers no longer debate whether or not the farm workers are actually poor. Naomi Klein, the noted globalization critic and author of Shock Doctrine, was one of the speakers in Miami. She suggested that the dynamic is shifting; claims by the corporation are no longer being accepted as fact, and in many cases are dismissed with the ease that is usually applied to the whining of activists.
But Klein said race could be playing a role in Burger King's strategy against the CIW. The company's one chance, she says, is appealing to the anti-immigrant sentiment that wasn't as prevalent during the CIW's battle with Yum Brands and McDonald's. If the prior narrative — underpaid farm workers vs. rich fast food restaurant — can somehow be replaced by a public perception that CIW members job-stealing immigrants, it's no longer David vs. Goliath, but Jose vs. Farmer Jones.
Readers' comments on news stories about the CIW support Klein's claim that Burger King is "trying to harness the hate being directed at immigrants."
Following a Naples Daily News article about the march, a reader called "techie" writes: "Why aren't the police there (at the march) arresting any illegals?????"
"Firefly 16" suggests writing to Burger King "… and tell them not to give in to the demands of Illegals. Let them know that taxpayers in Florida are fed up footing the bill for people who show this country and its people disrespect by breaking our laws, yet demand more and more!"
And "Native" has some advice for the CIW: "Whether they're illegal or not … if you don't like our wages go the hell home! Nobody 'asked' you to come here, you low-life trailer trash crime raising morons."
Oscar Salas with Immigrants United for Peace and Freedom says that farm-worker life is worse now than 10 years ago for two main reasons. While prices of everything have gone up, wages for picking oranges, tomatoes and strawberries have remained the same. Then there's the anti-immigrant fervor being whipped up by talk radio show hosts, Lou Dobbs and assorted Republican lawmakers (and presidential candidates).
"Over 90 or 95 percent of the farm workers are undocumented," says Salas. "People are scared to go to town. Most people go either straight to work or straight back and on Fridays go cash their check and go straight home."
But the CIW's Reyes thinks that it's simply "pride" keeping Burger King away from the bargaining table.
"Because by doing so, they would have to accept that a group of farm workers in a forgotten community in Southwest Florida beat them up."
On days they don't work, farm workers stay at home with their families. If they are alone in the U.S., they sit around with their co-workers, crammed as many as 14 to a trailer — the only accommodation they can afford.
Ana Sanchez says that in Wimauma, many tomato pickers are afraid to ask for a raise individually, and lack the time to organize themselves and leverage their power.
She thinks that while farm workers who know about the CIW are enthusiastic about supporting its fight, most workers haven't heard about the Taco Bell boycott, or the penny-a-pound campaign. As for locals starting their own nationwide campaign, Sanchez doesn't see it happening.
"A lot of [the farm workers] are just trying to save up their money and go back. If they knew it's going on, they would show up, but as far as organizing themselves — I don't think so."
In Dade City, however, Oscar Salas has made it a point to spread the word about the CIW; he's also done a lot of organizing work over the past few years on resistance to harsh immigration laws proposed in Congress.
He says success is simply a matter of "organization and faith."
"As [the CIW] organize more and more, the people that they organize with organize with other people, make connections. Sooner or later, the struggle will come out on top."
Can central Florida's orange pickers use leverage from the modest success the CIW has achieved with the tomato campaign, or build their own campaign to confront the corporate orange giants?
"Don't hold your breath, but don't blink," says Salas. "There's a whole lot more orange pickers in Florida than there is tomato pickers. We're organizing, and that's in all of our heads."
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2008.