American Slave Wages
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award – the first time this award has gone to a US-based organization— for their leadership in fighting slavery and unjust working conditions for Florida farmworkers.
by Cynthia Phoel
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| CIW staff, left to right, Romeo Ramírez, Laura Germino, Greg Asbed, and Mathieu Beaucicot outside CIW headquarters. ©Andrew Miller/Oxfam |
November 20th is a big date for CIW, an Oxfam partner based in Immokalee, Florida. Exactly one year prior, the coalition witnessed the sentencing of three Florida growers for holding 700 fruit pickers in involuntary servitude. At a camp in Lake Placid, Florida, people were kept under constant surveillance, crammed four to a single room, denied their rightful pay, and pistol-whipped into submission. "People knew conditions were better in other places, but they were afraid," said CIW's Ramírez, who went undercover to investigate the case. "They knew [the growers] could be violent."
The growers were sentenced to more than a decade each in prison. But US District Court Judge K. Michael Moore recognized culpability was not contained only within his courtroom. "It seems that there are others at another level in this system of fruit picking—at a higher level—that to some extent are complicit in one way or another in how these activities occur."
When Oxfam America launches a US-based labor campaign in February, 2004, it will be targeting that higher level. Centered around the activities of CIW and several other US partners, this campaign will take on US labor laws and companies such as Taco Bell that buy morally-tainted fruit—and look the other way.
Let Freedom Ring?
True, farmworkers can make more money in the US than in Guatemala or Mexico: the $50 or $100 they send their families every month far exceeds what they could earn back home. It's also true that of the 2.5 million farmworkers in the US, the Department of Labor estimates 52 percent are undocumented.
But documented or not, farmworkers are human beings. In US fields, they can be beaten for picking the wrong colored tomato or taking a drink of water. And pay at the end of the day is not a given.
"Behind the shiny, happy images promoted by the fast-food industry with its never ending commercials on TV, fueled by over $3 billion in marketing annually, and behind the supermarket advertising that celebrates the abundance of our harvest each Thanksgiving, there is another reality."
—Lucas Benítez, on accepting the RFK Award. Read the full text of Benitez' speech.art6769.html
This is how we treat a workforce upon which we rely. "Without undocumented workers, there's no food on the table, no service in restaurants, and no bed sheets in hotels," said Oxfam America US Regional Director Minor Sinclair.
It's tempting to point the finger at the countries workers are fleeing. "A lot of talk goes on that slavery occurs because people in other countries are desperate and vulnerable, and they need to leave their homes—which is part of it, yes," said CIW co-founder Laura Germino. "But it is the US' receiving conditions that allows the slavery to flourish in the workplace once they are here."
Keeping Up With the Joadses
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| Farmworkers in Immokalee line up at 4:30 each morning to board bus that takes them to the fields. ©Andrew Miller/Oxfam |
Sixty-five years after John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath exposed the vulnerability of farmworkers in America, little has changed. The pay a farmworker receives for a tub of tomatoes—42 cents for a 32-pound tub—hasn't changed in 25 years.
Comprising migrant workers, foreign laborers, and other very poor people, farmworkers are a voiceless group. As such, they have long been excluded from US labor laws. New Deal protections such as child labor laws, benefits, overtime pay, and minimum wage have never applied to workers in the fields. "It is this historic exclusion which did not allow [farmwork] to develop into a modern industry," Germino said.
CIW has realized great improvements for farmworkers in Immokalee. When a grower beats his workers, CIW workers gather together and peacefully confront the grower. Today, growers know they cannot get away with violence or renege on earned wages.
Yet these changes can only go so far to alleviate the desperate situation of farmworkers in the US. Slavery continues to run rampant in American fields: CIW already has more cases in the works. What's more, earning an average of $7,500 a year, farmworkers—the people who produce the food we eat—are the lowest wage earners in the US.
A Penny More Per Pound
Most likely, Taco Bell doesn't have a single farmworker on its payroll. But as a major buyer of Florida tomatoes, its purchasing practices affect thousands of farmworkers. Since 1999, CIW has asked Taco Bell to pay one cent more per pound of tomatoes. If a farmworker currently receives 42 cents for a 32- pound bucket, another penny per pound would nearly double his income.
In a May 2003 letter to Taco Bell parent company, Yum Brands, Oxfam America pushed for a supplier code of conduct, pointing out that Yum had recently required its suppliers to meet certain basic standards for raising chickens. "If Yum Brands can require its suppliers to meet certain basic standards for animal rights, it seems reasonable that the company could also require its suppliers meet basic standards for human rights."
Yum has been reluctant to accept responsibility, but later in May, 39 percent of Yum shareholders supported a resolution calling for sustainable wages for farmworkers. Since then, Yum has begun talks with CIW to find a solution.
Of course, the issue is more than just a penny per pound. For Taco Bell and too many other companies, it's owning a problem no one wants to touch. For Oxfam America, CIW, and other dedicated partners, it's where laboring for justice begins.