Beaten down worked up, p.32
Beaten Down, Worked Up, page 32
Wages were inching upward, but working conditions remained as awful as ever. In 1999, the coalition organized a third strike, a five-day walkout that failed to get the growers to negotiate. Dozens of tomato workers then participated in a two-hundred-mile, two-week protest march from Fort Myers to the Orlando headquarters of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association. A pickup truck, with a ten-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty standing tall in its cargo bed, led the procession. By the time the march arrived in Orlando, hundreds of demonstrators, including students from across Florida, had joined the protest, which drew substantial press coverage. Nonetheless, the growers’ association still refused to negotiate, not on rest breaks, foul drinking water, or crew leaders abusing female workers. Its spokesman dismissed the march as “a transparent attempt to start a labor union.” The Coalition of Immokalee Workers had run into a wall.
“The growers were so effectively insulated from pressure that they could withstand any assault that a dirt-poor community like Immokalee could muster,” Asbed wrote in an essay. The growers didn’t have to worry about traditional unionization because farmworkers are exempted from the National Labor Relations Act. Nor did the growers need to fear pressure from consumers because they sold to retail and restaurant chains, not to the public.
Asbed, Germino, Benitez, and the others cast about for new strategies. “You beat your head against the wall long enough, and you decide that that hurts, and you want to find another way to get around the wall,” Asbed said. Just then, the industry magazine The Packer ran a story about Taco Bell’s multiyear deal to buy tomatoes at a discounted price from a major grower, Six L’s. Suddenly several lightbulbs went off. Why was the coalition focusing its pressure on the growers to raise pay when tomato-buying giants like Taco Bell were pushing down the price of tomatoes? Mightn’t their protests be far more successful if they targeted image-conscious behemoths like Taco Bell instead of little-known growers? Further pushing them to target Taco Bell, one farmworker noted that its commercials, featuring a cute Chihuahua that spoke with a Mexican accent, milked Hispanic culture for Taco Bell’s benefit even as its growers exploited Hispanic workers. So the coalition decided to take on giant Taco Bell, which has seven thousand restaurants worldwide.
The CIW repeatedly asked for a meeting with Taco Bell, but the company refused. The coalition escalated its pressure, announcing a national boycott against Taco Bell for its role “as a major buyer of Florida tomatoes, in perpetuating farm worker poverty.” The coalition had two demands: that Taco Bell require its tomato growers to adopt a code of conduct and that it pay a penny more per pound for its Florida tomatoes, money the growers would pass on to the pickers. The demands would cost Taco Bell $100,000 a year for the ten million pounds of Florida tomatoes it purchased while substantially boosting the pickers’ pay, potentially from forty cents per thirty-two-pound bucket to seventy-two cents.
The coalition mobilized and marched. (By this time, it had twenty-five hundred members and support from several foundations.) Seeking to harness consumer power to its cause, the CIW sponsored a coast-to-coast caravan that stopped in dozens of cities and college towns to urge consumers to shun Taco Bell. It adopted the slogan “Boot the Bell” to counter the chain’s advertising theme, “Ring the Bell.” Asbed proved a wizard at spreading the word nationwide by writing daily dispatches for the coalition’s website and posting videos of its protests.
Taco Bell still refused to negotiate, insisting the dispute was between the growers and the farmworkers. “This labor dispute is four steps removed from us, and we’re not going to get involved,” said Jonathan Blum, a senior vice president for Yum! Brands, which owns Taco Bell, as well as KFC and Pizza Hut.
The coalition turned up the heat even more. Recognizing Taco Bell’s focus on the youth market, the CIW got students at three hundred universities and fifty high schools to call for “booting the Bell,” with twenty colleges closing or not letting Taco Bell open campus outlets. The coalition spawned an offshoot, the Student/Farmworker Alliance, which further spread the word. The boycott also won the backing of the National Council of Churches, the Presbyterian Church, and dozens of synagogues. Rabbi Joel Sisenwine from Wellesley, Massachusetts, visited with a delegation of rabbis and was moved by what they saw. “We Jews were slaves in Egypt,” and “we find it hard to understand that there is still slavery in Florida,” he said. Noelle Damico, the Presbyterian Church’s boycott coordinator, told me, “We’re involved in this effort because Jesus calls us to love others, not exploit people.” Adding to the pressure on Taco Bell were three federal prosecutions of forced labor on Florida farms. (The CIW’s work in exposing forced labor, led by Germino, had helped federal officials send a dozen crew leaders to prison and free hundreds of migrants being held against their will.) To highlight that issue, the coalition held a ten-day hunger strike outside the company’s headquarters, with workers holding signs saying, “Can Taco Bell guarantee its customers that the tomatoes in its tacos were not picked by slaves?”
Its image taking a beating, Taco Bell finally relented in 2003, two years after the boycott began, agreeing to start talks. A year passed without an agreement. The coalition grew impatient and began planning a huge protest for Yum! Brands’ 2005 annual meeting in Louisville. Martin Sheen, the star of The West Wing, and Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of Robert F. Kennedy’s, were scheduled to speak. The week before Yum! Brands’ annual meeting, eighty Immokalee tomato workers boarded buses for Louisville, stopping in fifteen cities along the way to spread their message that Taco Bell perpetuated farmworker poverty.
Facing more damage to its brand and with Jimmy Carter again intervening, Taco Bell, in March 2005, reached a groundbreaking settlement with the coalition on the eve of its annual meeting, four years after the boycott began. Taco Bell agreed to pay a penny more per pound and have its tomato growers adopt a code of conduct. Jimmy Carter hailed the accord, saying, “I now call on others in the industry to follow Taco Bell’s lead to help the tomato farmworkers.”
* * *
The Immokalee workers next called on McDonald’s to agree to the two demands that Taco Bell had accepted, as well as a third demand: that McDonald’s help set up a monitoring system to ensure that tomato growers complied with the code of conduct. (At the same time, the coalition gave its effort a name: “the Campaign for Fair Food.”) McDonald’s rejected the CIW’s demands, asserting that its own code of conduct ensured fair working conditions at its tomato farms. The coalition scoffed at McDonald’s claim, maintaining that business-created codes of conduct aim mainly to burnish a brand’s reputation and rarely have the rigorous monitoring needed to truly improve working conditions.
The coalition staged protests at McDonald’s headquarters outside Chicago, rallied student groups and clergy, and organized the multi-city “Truth Tour.” It scheduled a major protest outside McDonald’s shareholders’ meeting, a protest to be headed by the AFL-CIO’s president, John Sweeney. Also worried about its image, McDonald’s agreed to the coalition’s demands just before that meeting.
Even before winning that fight, the coalition had begun a campaign against Burger King, kicking it off with a protest at the company’s world headquarters in Miami. The company responded with contempt, saying there was no way to assure that the extra penny a pound would ever get to the farmworkers. The company’s CEO, John Chidsey, said, “It’s not our job to tell the growers how much to pay their workers.” Making no headway, the coalition organized an eighty-mile march from Immokalee to the Miami office of Goldman Sachs, a major private-equity investor in Burger King. During that march, tomato workers wore yellow T-shirts with a refashioned corporate logo, saying, “Exploitation King.” Steven Grover, Burger King’s vice president of food safety and regulatory compliance, belittled the marchers, saying, “This protest is a colossal waste of resources and time that could be focused on helping the migrant workers in Immokalee.”
Three months later, a woman named Cara Schaffer contacted the Student/Farmworker Alliance, saying she was a student at Broward Community College and wanted to get involved. Schaffer was invited to join several meetings and conference calls to plan further protests. She raised suspicions, however, and CIW officials discovered in an internet search that she owned a private-security firm, Diplomatic Tactical Services. Its website said it placed “undercover operatives” and did “all types of investigative activity during strikes” and “unionization drives.” When the coalition exposed Schaffer, Burger King, which had hired her to do undercover work, terminated its relationship with her.
Around the same time, someone with the screen name surfxaholic36 repeatedly attacked the coalition in comments on web stories and YouTube videos. One comment said, “The CIW is a self-serving attack organization with no real members or workers [that] creates conflict and spreads overly simplistic misinformation to unquestioning students….The CIW has fooled thousands with its slick internet stories, collected millions in return and given the workers nothing.” Another comment accused the coalition of “lining the leaders [sic] pockets.” (The CIW didn’t collect or touch the money for the penny-a-pound increment.) Journalists and the coalition uncovered that those attacks came from Burger King’s Grover, who was using his middle-school daughter’s screen name. Soon after Grover was outed, a badly embarrassed Burger King fired him and agreed to the coalition’s demands.
Now the coalition faced an unanticipated fight from the growers’ association, the Florida Tomato Exchange. The exchange’s executive vice president, Reggie Brown, denounced the penny-a-pound program, saying, “It is just un-American for a third party to be involved in establishing workers’ wage rates.” (Don’t tell that to any labor leader.) The exchange threatened a $100,000 fine to any grower that participated in the penny-a-pound program, effectively shutting it down. The penny-a-pound effort remained suspended through 2009, even as Subway and Whole Foods joined the Fair Food Program and agreed to pay a penny more per pound. The exchange dug in, even though the growers were taking a public-relations drubbing because federal prosecutors had brought new forced labor cases, including the 2008 indictment of the Navarrete brothers. When the food writer Barry Estabrook shone a harsh light on the tomato growers in a powerful article in Gourmet, America’s “food community” also turned against the growers.
At last there was a breakthrough. Pacific Tomato Growers—one of the nation’s five largest tomato producers—defied the tomato exchange’s threat of a $100,000 fine and broke the more-than-decade-long logjam of growers refusing to negotiate or cooperate with the coalition. After quietly meeting for weeks with Asbed, Benitez, and other CIW representatives, Jon Esformes, an operating partner of Pacific, a fourth-generation, family-owned company, agreed in October 2010 to the coalition’s new, expanded list of demands. They included the penny-a-pound increment, an elaborate monitoring system, a health and safety program, and a training program to teach workers about the code of conduct.
For Esformes, whose company employs fifteen hundred farmworkers in Florida, the agreement was an occasion to acknowledge the industry’s sins. He pushed to clinch the deal right before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. “It’s the time of year when you’re supposed to put your sins behind you,” Esformes said. In announcing the settlement, he quoted the late rabbi and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel, saying, “Few are guilty, but all are responsible….The transgressions that took place are totally unacceptable today and they were totally unacceptable yesterday.”
Within days, the nation’s largest tomato grower, Lipman, which used to be called Six L’s, also reached an agreement with the coalition. At the time, Lipman was badly embarrassed that the Navarrete brothers had dispatched some enslaved pickers to work in its fields. Within a month, the Tomato Growers Exchange signed on, too. Finally, the CIW’s vision would turn into a reality.
* * *
In a clearing just yards from Lipman’s tomato fields, 150 pickers sat at plastic picnic tables listening intently, with tarps overhead to protect them from the sun. As field supervisors looked on, Gerardo Reyes, a tall, strong-voiced immigrant from Mexico, held forth in Spanish about the coalition’s Fair Food Program and its code of conduct. Now rest breaks and shade tents are required, explained Reyes, who began working in Immokalee’s fields in 1999 and is now on the CIW’s staff. Now when the pickers reach the fields at 7 a.m., their hourly pay is to begin, he continued. Now the pickers have a right not to work when they feel unsafe, whether because of lightning, heat, or pesticides. In the past, some workers had been required to finish picking during thunderstorms.
The farmworkers listened attentively as Reyes continued. “We all have a right not to face verbal abuse,” he said, explaining that supervisors are not to threaten, yell at, or swear at workers. “And this is an important right we all have—the right to be able to work without sexual harassment. We all have a right to work with dignity.”
Reyes was the leadoff speaker at an hour-long training session on worker rights and safety, a key part of the groundbreaking Fair Food Program that the CIW has created with growers and with restaurant and retail chains that have signed on. Beyond banning sexual and verbal abuse, the code of conduct requires growers to comply with all laws and make accurate payments for all hours worked. The code, developed with extensive input from farmworkers, includes a complaint-resolution process and bars growers or supervisors from retaliating against workers who assert their rights. The code requires that all pickers be direct employees of growers and prohibits growers from using independent crew leaders, because crew leaders often exploited and sexually abused the pickers they hired. It also calls for ending a long-detested practice known as cupping, in which crew leaders required pickers not just to fill their buckets to the brim but to pile another ten or so tomatoes in a small mound above the rim. That meant picking an extra three pounds beyond the standard thirty-two-pound bucket, more or less giving away 10 percent of one’s labor for free.
Reyes urged the workers to report violations to the program’s enforcement arm, the Fair Food Standards Council, which has thirteen employees, most of them investigators. There’s a twenty-four-hour hotline, which has bilingual staffers who answer calls and investigate complaints within days. The hotline’s number is written on every pay stub, and callers can remain anonymous. Since the Fair Foods Standards Council was created in 2011, workers have lodged more than eighteen hundred complaints, and seventeen supervisors have been fired for sexual abuse, harassment, hitting workers, or other offenses.
The Fair Food inspectors do a far more rigorous job than similar inspectors in corporate social responsibility programs. They conduct an in-depth audit of each grower’s payroll, and they interview every supervisor and at least 50 percent of each grower’s workers (one strategy to ensure that workers have more of a voice). When violations are found, the council prepares a “Corrective Action Plan,” and if a grower doesn’t fix the problems within six months, it gets suspended from the program. Most growers are quick to correct violations, but several have been suspended. The Fair Food Program is unusually effective because its participants, including major corporations such as McDonald’s and Taco Bell, have pledged to stop buying tomatoes from any grower that doesn’t comply with the code. McDonald’s and other companies serve, in effect, as the workers’ enforcers.
Since the code went into effect, “things have changed a lot,” said Angelina Velasquez, who arrived from Guatemala in 2003. She said she gets paid from the moment she gets to the field, and “they don’t yell at us like they used to.” Nelly Rodriguez, her co-worker, said, “It used to be commonplace for bosses to force relations with women. Now we have a right to report it, and supervisors have been fired. People used to turn a blind eye to these things. Now there are consequences.” Sexual abuse and forced labor have been eliminated on Fair Food farms, the workers say.
Janice Fine, the professor who called the Immokalee of a decade ago “the closest thing possible to hell on earth,” now has a very different view. “This is the best workplace-monitoring program I’ve seen in the U.S.,” said Fine, a labor relations professor at Rutgers. “It can certainly be a model for agriculture across the U.S.” Susan Marquis, dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, said that when she first visited Immokalee, she heard “appalling stories of abuse and modern slavery.” “But now,” Marquis said, “the tomato fields in Immokalee are probably the best working environment in American agriculture. They’ve gone from being the worst to the best.” (Marquis was so moved by the coalition’s accomplishments that she wrote a book about them: I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won.)
The CIW scored a huge victory in 2014 when Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, well known for being vehemently antiunion, joined the Fair Food Program on its own accord. Not long before, some Arizona tomato growers that Walmart relied on had their tomatoes rot in the fields because they couldn’t attract enough pickers due to their dismal wages and working conditions. Walmart turned to the CIW’s Fair Food Program because it was looking for both a dependable supply of tomatoes and ethically sourced produce. Walmart then helped to extend the program to tomato fields far from Immokalee: in Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey—an enormous boost to the program. In fact, Walmart has spread the program to some bell pepper growers (and Whole Foods to strawberry growers). Thus far fourteen companies have joined the Fair Food Program, including the giants Chipotle and Trader Joe’s. Wendy’s has steadfastly resisted pressure to join, and CIW launched a nationwide boycott against it in 2016.
