Resistance to Wage Hike Fuels Resolve of Farm Worker Advocates
21 February 2008
Burger King and the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange push back on a plan to raise the wages of tomato pickers by one penny per pound. Advocates liken conditions in the fields to sweatshops.
With high hopes, Florida farm workers last year celebrated when McDonald’s followed the lead of Taco Bell and agreed to a deal that would pay field hands in their supply chain a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they picked in the Sunshine state—a deal that could have helped to nearly double the sub-poverty wages many of them get.
But their hopes are now on hold.
Those pennies—so vital to struggling workers earning $10,000 a year—are piling up in an escrow account while the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange digs in its heels and Burger King balks at a plan fellow fast food giants have embraced.
That plan, promoted by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an Oxfam America partner, called on the restaurant chains to pay the pickers the extra money through an outside firm. And for two seasons, Taco Bell did just that.
But this picking season, that little bit of income growth has ground to a halt, slowing, for the time being, the spread of CIW’s campaign for fairness in the fields.
The industry’s resistance to the plan is an indication of how powerful—and right—CIW’s message about labor conditions for field hands is, said Guadalupe Gamboa, an Oxfam program officer working with CIW.
“The measure of our success to this point is not so much the additional dollars put into the pockets of the workers, but the potential for a total sea change in terms of wages, working conditions, and the workers’ voice that the Taco Bell and McDonald’s agreements represent,” said Gamboa. “That potential is why the grower’s exchange and Burger King moved so dramatically to undermine the agreements.”
Growers Decline to Participate
In November, the growers exchange, which represents producers who grow about 90 percent of Florida’s tomatoes, announced that its members had chosen not to participate in any pact in which a third party set wages for their employees. And if growers won’t participate, neither can the food chains that buy the tomatoes.
“We are a cooperative, and we have a number of legal opinions that indicate there are serious legal consequences for participating in the penny per pound scheme elaborated by CIW,” said Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the exchange. He ticked off potential violations of anti-trust and racketeering laws as examples.
For growers, defying the exchange has consequences: According to the Associated Press, the exchange intends to charge a $100,000 fine to any member who violates that November decision.
Like the tomato growers, Burger King said it’s the legal considerations that are standing in the way of its participation in the penny-a-pound program.
“It’s not true to say that Burger King is not interested. Burger King is not aware of a functioning mechanism to transfer funds to the workers,” said Keva Silversmith, a company spokesman. “It’s a very complicated process to pass money to workers in a different industry. There are legal and technical hurdles.”
To Gerardo Reyes, a former tomato picker and CIW organizer, all of this smacks of the same old dirty business that has kept wages stagnant and conditions grueling for the vast labor force that toils in the fields.
“Burger King, instead of working with us to find a solution, they chose to work with those who exploit us every day in the fields,” said Reyes.
Gamboa called Burger King’s legal arguments nothing more than a smokescreen for its unjustified refusal to sign the penny-per-pound agreement.
“If there were any real legal problems with the agreements YUM! Brands and McDonald’s would have refused to sign,” said Gamboa. “If Burger King truly has concerns about these agreements, the best way to address them is to engage in a constructive dialogue with the CIW.”
Workers Wages
The growers exchange insists that pickers are faring quite well. In a November press release, the exchange said that payroll records showed harvesters were earning an average of $12.46 an hour—nearly double Florida’s minimum wage of $6.67 an hour.
“We are paying very competitive wage rates,” said Brown. “We are seeing workers return to our operations year after year for the opportunity to make competitive wages harvesting this crop.”
Brown estimated there are 33,000 migrant farm workers in the state. And during the 2005-2006 season, many of them helped pick 53.6 million cartons of tomatoes at 25 pounds per carton. The value of that harvest was about $551 million.
But CIW said the real picture for workers is nowhere near that rosy. It says that field hands earn on average 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick—a rate that hasn’t climbed much since 1978. At that piece rate, workers have to pick nearly two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes to earn the minimum wage. When it rains and the tomatoes are wet, they can’t be picked—and workers are sent home without having earned a penny. Other days, conditions are such that workers can only haul in 100 buckets a day—an effort that gets them barely $4.50 an hour, on average. Farm workers don’t get sick days. And they don’t get overtime.
“I don’t know of any industry that hasn’t increased its wages in 30 years, and that’s something that needs to change—right away,” said Reyes. “When your voice is being ignored, when you have no benefits and no protections and you’re viewed only as hands to do the job, that’s when abuses like slavery happen. Sweatshop conditions in the field are ground zero for slavery to flourish.”
And in Immokalee, Florida, it already is, say some authorities. According to news accounts, officials have recently arrested six suspects in connection with an operation that was allegedly keeping workers in involuntary servitude. The chief US attorney working on the case, Doug Molloy, reportedly called the situation “slavery, plain and simple.” It is the seventh such case of Florida-based farm labor servitude prosecuted in federal courts in the past decade.
Campaign for Fairness
So far, the strides it has made toward forcing a sea change in attitudes toward farm laborers have been significant, says CIW—despite the bumps in the road set up by Burger King and the growers exchange. The agreements CIW reached with Taco Bell and McDonald’s have helped to make a direct link between players at the very top of the fast food industry all the way down to workers in the fields.
CIW is determined to expand that precedent across the food industry, and now it may get some help from Congress, too. US Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont made a trip to Immokalee in January to throw his weight behind CIW’s mission to increase wages and working conditions for the tomato pickers.
“The American people need to understand why it is that huge multinational corporations that earn billions of dollars in profits are unable to pay people who supply these products a living wage,” said Sanders at a press conference during his visit. He added that Congress should hold hearings to probe local working conditions for farm laborers.
Will Wiquist, Sanders spokesman, said the lawmaker has spoken with US Sen. Edward Kennedy about the possibility of holding those hearings but that no date has been set yet.
Meanwhile, Sanders and Kennedy have joined forces with Senators Richard Durbin and Sherrod Brown to write letters to both Burger King and the growers exchange urging them to increase the piece rate for tomato workers.
“According to your website, Burger King Corporation is the second largest fast food hamburger chain in the world, recording $2.23 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2007,” the senators wrote. “As a large, profitable corporation and a significant buyer of tomatoes from the region, we urge you to revisit your position. Most estimates suggest the penny-per-pound program would cost Burger King less than $300,000 a year.”
An Oxfam-initiated campaign is urging Burger King to do the same thing. More than 35,000 people have signed Oxfam America’s on-line petition calling on the company to work with CIW to improve the wages of farm laborers and enforce a code of conduct for human rights in the field.
“We are hopeful we can reach a comprehensive solution with CIW on ways to help the farm workers,” said Silversmith, the company spokesman, noting that Burger King had recently made a $25,000 donation to the Redlands Christian Migrant Association to support social services for Immokalee families. Matched by state and federal funds, he said the grant enabled the association to receive $425,000.
But farm worker advocates are not impressed.
“We need justice not charity”, said Reyes. “ If farm workers got paid a decent wage, we would not have to depend on the charity of others to be able to afford daycare for our children. From a campaign like this, the future is being shaped. It’s going to change the way businesses are existing today. They must take into account the human costs of their purchasing practices.”
