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 As part of the national Student Labor Week of Action, students at Wichita State University are calling attention to the injustices
faced by tomato workers in Florida and helping to build the campaign to demand justice for some of America’s most exploited workers.
On March 31 from 12-1pm at the Rhatigan Student Center Courtyard at Wichita State University they will be
conducting “The Tomato Challenge.” This event will challenge students to experience what the tomato pickers deal with. They will have baskets with 32 pounds of
tomatoes in them, and students will have to run the average 150 feet and back - the prize for completing this task is 45 cents if you run the entire time, 40 cents if you walk.
At 6:00 PM at Hubbard Hall Room 209, the students will be showing a film about the 2007 Truth Tour and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ victory over McDonald's. It features an original song about CIW performed by Rage Against the Machine's Zack de la Rocha & Tom
Morello at the 2007 Truth Tour’s "Concert for Fair Food."
The CIW is a community-based worker organization. Its members are largely Latino, Haitian, and Mayan
Indian immigrants working in low-wage jobs throughout the state of Florida. The AFL-CIO has been deeply involved (and here) in supporting their struggles.
Tomato pickers in Florida’s fields face sweatshop conditions every day, including:
- Sub-poverty wages - Tomato pickers make, on average, $10,000 a year;
- No raise in nearly 30 years - Pickers are paid virtually the same per bucket piece rate
(roughly 45 cents per 32 lb. bucket) today as they were in 1980. As a result, workers have to pick over twice the number of buckets per hour today to earn minimum wage as they did in 1980.
- At today’s rate, workers have to pick nearly 2 ½ TONS of tomatoes just to earn minimum wage for a typical 10-hr day;
- Denial of fundamental labor rights - Farmworkers in Florida have no right to overtime pay, even when working 60-70 hour weeks, and no right to organize or bargain
collectively.
In the most extreme cases, workers face conditions that meet the legal standards for
prosecution under modern-day slavery statutes. Federal Civil Rights officials have prosecuted five slavery operations, involving over 1,000 workers, in Florida's fields since 1997. One
federal prosecutor called Florida “ground zero for modern-day slavery,” while President Bush
traveled to Tampa in 2004 to declare human trafficking “an affront to the defining promise of our country,” citing the case of a young Guatemalan woman “forced to work without pay in
the tomato fields of central Florida.”
Fast-food giants like Burger King and Subway play an active role in creating the
unconscionable conditions in Florida’s fields. These massive chains are able to pool the buying power of thousands of restaurants and leverage that enormous power to demand ever-lower
prices from their tomato suppliers. This in turn puts a strong downward pressure on farmworker wages, as tomato suppliers squeeze their diminishing profits from their workers
through ever-lower wages in order to meet the volume discounts demanded by their fast-food clients. As such, farmworker poverty feeds fast-food profits.
In 2005, after a 4- year boycott, the CIW reached an historic agreement with Taco Bell to
address the ever- deepening poverty and degradation of farmworkers in Florida. On April 9th of 2007, McDonald’s became the second major fast-food leader to work with the CIW to
improve farmworker wages and working conditions.
The Taco Bell and McDonald’s agreements establish a model
designed to enlist the immense market power of the fast-food giants to reverse the damage done over the past several decades to farmworker wages and to demand an end to human
rights abuses, including modern- day slavery, in the operations of their Florida tomato suppliers.
For more information:
http://www.sfalliance.org/
http://ciw-online.org/
http://www.allianceforfairfood.org/
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