Organize the South

Labor Notes is reporting that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have scored a great win. They've been running campaigns against restaurants for a penny raise for tomatoes and have won. Now they are breaking the back of the growers. In the middle of a recession farmworkers, those workers with the least amount legal protections, have scored a great victory. Yeah, sometimes we win.

Florida Tomato Pickers Score ‘Greatest Victory’ in Decades
http://labornotes.org/node/2488

After two years of delay, farmworkers in Florida will finally start getting a penny more per pound for tomatoes they pick. A powerful lobby group had blocked efforts to pass on the raise to workers, but employers’ unity is cracking. A deluge of worker and consumer pressure may be finally convincing industry leaders to address unconscionable labor abuse in the tomato fields. Photo: CIW.

After two years of delay, farmworkers in Florida will finally start getting a penny more per pound for tomatoes they pick.

Organizing with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), farmworkers had reached agreements over the last five years with Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, and Whole Foods to improve harvesters' wages and working conditions, but the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), a powerful industry lobby group, had blocked efforts to pass on the raise to workers, leaving the money in escrow. Now one of the largest growers has broken ranks and agreed to pass on the extra penny, which gives that grower an edge in selling to the chains.

CIW members were joined September 25 by Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and representatives of the food service company Compass and the tomato producer East Coast Growers and Packers to announce the accord.

With the support of Compass, which had $9 billion in revenues last year, the CIW has effectively broken the logjam of resistance created two years ago by the FTGE.

And with employers’ unity cracking, farmworkers expect that other growers may jump, too—and that the deluge of worker and consumer pressure will convince industry leaders to finally address unconscionable labor abuse in the Florida tomato fields.

Since 2007, the CIW had been unable to secure a large Florida grower willing to meet the higher standards set and funded by the agreements between CIW and the food retailers. East Coast Growers and Packers is the third-largest producer of Florida tomatoes, and Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation author and longtime observer of the CIW campaign, described its announcement to implement the CIW program as “the greatest victory for farmworkers since Cesar Chavez in the 1970s.”

CIW members were joined September 25 by Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis to announce the accord. Photo: Alan Pogue.

The agreement between the CIW and Compass outlines two key areas of reform to be put in place within the retailer’s tomato supply chain.

First, workers harvesting tomatoes for Compass will receive an immediate raise. The accord requires Compass to pay an additional penny per pound for the tomatoes it purchases, as a supplement to the picking piece rate, with the ultimate goal of a guaranteed minimum fair wage for harvesters. This means an extra 32 cents per bucket for tomatoes harvested under the Fair Food agreements, a raise that ranges from 60 to 80 percent depending on where a worker is employed.

Average wages for a Florida farmworker are about $10,000 a year currently.

Second, the agreement provides a framework to improve working conditions at the farm level. Suppliers are now required to cooperate with the CIW to improve wage and hour record-keeping, to establish employee-controlled health and safety committees, to create a worker grievance system, and to permit third-party auditing for full transparency. Significantly, the CIW is allowed to conduct worker education on company time and property.

The CIW contends worker education and participation are essential to the supplier standards’ having a real impact on the agricultural industry. Towards that end, staff and members are creating educational materials that explain the new rights established under the code of conduct, which all workers at the farms where the agreements are in place will receive. Meanwhile, the CIW plans to use an already existing third-party monitor, with the goal of creating an outside monitor to watch over the entire industry.

The industry obviously needs a watchdog.

Exempt from federal protections for overtime pay and collective bargaining, farm workers are among the poorest and least protected in the U.S.

In the extreme, these workers face situations of forced labor. In the past decade alone the CIW has aided the Department of Justice in the successful prosecution of six modern-day slavery cases involving more than 1,000 farmworkers. Twelve farm labor supervisors are currently serving sentences in federal prison as a result of these cases.

The picking piece rate for Florida tomatoes has remained stagnant since 1980. A worker today must pick and haul roughly two and a half tons of tomatoes to earn minimum wage for a typical 10-hour day. Given the seasonal and precarious nature of farm labor, workers experience significant periods of unemployment and underemployment, all of which contributes to sub-poverty annual earnings.

Immokalee, an unincorporated community on the edge of the Everglades, is at the heart of this grueling work regimen. As the central production and distribution hub of Florida's massive tomato industry, the region is responsible for nearly 90 percent of the fresh tomatoes grown in the U.S. between October and June. Tomatoes are one harvest among many, however: Each year, Florida-based growers employ tens of thousands of primarily Mexican, Guatemalan, and Haitian workers to plant and pick crops ranging from tomatoes and citrus to cucumbers and watermelons.

In the months ahead, as the CIW undertakes the intricate task of implementing the agreement, workers in Immokalee and their allies will press ahead in their campaign by targeting supermarkets such as Publix and Kroger and food service providers Sodexo and Aramark, using many of the same tactics—including educational tours and protest actions—honed during its earlier battles with the fast-food industry.

“Much work remains to be done before the harvesting season begins in a few weeks, but we're really excited about the challenge,” says CIW staff member Gerardo Reyes. “We’re finally starting to see the changes that we've been fighting for for so many years.”

This is great news. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has forced Burger King to sign a deal to pay 1 penny per pound more for tomatoes. This is after BK had been trying to get companies that have signed the deal (McDonald's and Taco Bell) to back out of it. Amazing. Congratulations.

Burger King Signs Deal with Tomato Workers

By Bob Dart
Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
May 23, 2008

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/business/epaper/2008/05/23/a1f_tomato_0524.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=6

WASHINGTON

Burger King and an organization of South Florida farmworkers signed an agreement Friday that would nearly double tomato pickers' pay and make it easier for them to report illegal treatment.

But it's unclear how the workers, who were the focus of a Senate hearing last month that described their working conditions as modern-day slavery, will actually get the money because growers are refusing to cooperate with the deal.

By agreeing to pay the Coalition of Immokalee Workers a penny a pound more for tomatoes they pick, Burger King moved to increase their earnings by about 70 percent - from an average of 45 cents to 77 cents per 32-pound bucket.

Fast-food giants McDonald's Corp. (NYSE: MCD, $57.73) and Yum! Brands Inc. (NYSE: YUM, $38.49), the parent company for Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Long John Silver's, already had signed a pact to pay workers the extra penny a pound.

Lucas Benitez, president of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, urged Subway, Wal-Mart and other large purchasers of Florida tomatoes to also pay the extra penny.

"Company by company, we are building a path toward justice," Benitez said at a U.S. Capitol news conference where his words were translated from Spanish to English.

Based on the number of tomatoes purchased last year, the agreement will cost Burger King about $250,000 a year in increased payments to the workers. But the complete cost will be up to $350,000 a year because the company will pay growers for their increased payroll taxes and administrative expenses. The total cost to Burger King will be about 1.5 cents per pound of tomatoes.

Burger King hopes growers will cooperate, as the agreement "won't cost them anything," said Amy Wagner, a vice president of Miami-based Burger King Holdings Inc. (NYSE: BKC, $27.72).

However, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, which represents the growers, said its members would not "participate in any kind of scheme of this nature,"
said Reggie Brown, the group's executive vice president.

"We have a number of legal and business concerns,"
Brown said.

The signing ceremony was hosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has helped broker the labor agreements after visiting the tomato fields and communities where workers live.

Workers' standards of living are falling across America, Sanders said, but "I saw the bottom in Immokalee, Florida."

"Senator Sanders walked in our shoes," Benitez said.
"And he saw our reality."

At a Senate hearing last month, a witness compared the working conditions of the tomato pickers to slavery.

"Today's form of slavery does not bear the overt nature of pre-Civil War society, but it is nonetheless heinous and reprehensible," Collier County sheriff's Detective Charlie Frost told Democratic members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee. No Republican attended the hearing.

At the Senate hearing, Brown said the exchange did not oppose the fast-food chains raising pay for pickers, but that they would have to pay the extra penny a pound directly.

_____________________________________________

This is just weird. A Burger King executive using his daughter's email to take pot shots at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Seems a little juvenile, doesn't it? But it doesn't look like BK is out to make sense. Here's a New York Times piece from March 2007 about how BK was willing to pay more for cage-free eggs and pork. Yes, it seems that BK thinks pigs and chickens should be free but farmworkers can go to Hell. You would think a guy with the same name as a cute Sesame Street character would know better.

You can see Grover in this picture. He's the guy in blue.


Burger King Exec Uses Daughter's Online ID To Chide Immokalee Coalition

By Amy Bennett Williams
News-Press.com (Florida)
April 28, 2008
http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080428/BUSINESS/804280351/1075

As the Coalition of Immokalee Workers prepares to deliver more than 60,000 petitions to Burger King headquarters in Miami today, the daughter of Burger King's vice-president Stephen Grover confirmed her father is responsible for online postings vilifying the coalition.

The Immokalee-based group is asking Burger King to improve tomato harvesters' working conditions and pay a penny more a pound for tomatoes, which could add about $20 to a daily wage of $50, workers say.

McDonald's and Yum! Brands, the world's biggest fast- food chain and restaurant company, respectively, have agreed to the raise. Yum! signed on in 2005; McDonald's in 2007. So far, Burger King has refused, while publicly saying it wants to work with the coalition to improve labor conditions.

Yet often during the past year, when articles or videos about the coalition were posted on YouTube and various Internet news sites, someone using the online names
activist2008 or surfxaholic36 would attach comments coalition member Greg Asbed has called 'libelous.'

This one, from surfxaholic36, is representative: 'The CIW is an attack organization lining the leaders pockets . They make up issues and collect money from dupes that believe their story. To (sic) bad the people protesting don't have a clue regarding the facts. A bunch of fools!'

A father's posts

Although Shannon Grover also uses the name
surfxaholic36 - mostly on social networking sites - she said the anti-coalition posts are her father's alone.

'I don't really know much about the coalition and Burger

King stuff,' she said, reached by phone at the family's Miramar home Friday. 'That was my dad. My dad used to go online with that name and write about them.'

Asked if she'd ever written about the coalition online, she was adamant: 'No, that was my Dad. That was him.'

Steven Grover did not return calls to his home or office, nor did Burger King spokesman Keva Silversmith respond to calls and a request to speak to Burger King CEO John Chidsey.

'This is truly disturbing,' said coalition member Gerardo Reyes. 'It's one thing to imagine that there's some kind of anonymous Internet stalker out there obsessively tracking every story about the CIW, posting these vicious lies about us and calling us things like `the lowest form of life' and `blood suckers," Reyes said. 'I mean, we're a farmworker community fighting slavery and trying to get a fair wage for the work we do.'

The bigger question, Reyes said, is this: 'When you realize the person posting those things is actually Burger King's vice president in charge of the ethical operation of the company's supply chain, it really makes you wonder just how high up does this whole thing go? Does Burger King, as a company, approve of this sort of behavior? If not, we'd expect to see some changes now that this has come to light.'

`The low-road approach'

Last month, activist2008 sent an e-mail to The News- Press almost identical to many of the online postings signed 'Shawn Glass.' The e-mail's Internet address showed it came from Burger King's corporate headquarters in Miami. No one named Shawn Glass works there, according to the employee phone directory.

At the time, Silversmith denied the e-mail was official BK communication, although he didn't deny it came from the company.

'This is a non-corporate sanctioned opinion,' he told The News-Press. 'The strident tone does not reflect Burger King, who wants to cooperate and bring real change to Immokalee.'

Marc Rodrigues of the Student Farmworker Alliance, which works closely with the coalition, says he's not surprised by the latest revelation but frustrated an executive would 'stoop to this level and choose the low-road approach instead of trying to work for real change.'

It was Rodrigues who discovered earlier this year the alliance had been infiltrated by Cara Schaffer, who said she was a student at Broward Community College interested in organizing campus events in support of farmworkers.

In reality, Schaffer owns Diplomatic Tactical Services, a Hollywood, Fla.-based security and investigative firm that advertises its ability to place operatives in the ranks of target groups.

Her application for a private investigator's license was denied last year because she failed to prove she had experience or training. Florida's Division of Licensing told her, 'Your employment must be terminated immediately, or your employer may reassign you to duties that do not require licensure or registration.'

That didn't stop her from listening in on two alliance conference calls. Her company's Web site is no longer online.

Reluctance to cooperate

The coalition, one of the nation's most respected anti- slavery groups, also is asking Burger King to help 'eliminate slavery and human rights abuses from Florida's fields.'

At Senate hearings on farm conditions held by U.S. Sen.
Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., earlier this month, Eric Schlosser, author of the best-selling 'Fast Food Nation,' praised Yum! and McDonald's for working with the coalition and urged Burger King to do the same.
'The admirable behavior of these two industry giants makes the behavior or Burger King . seem completely unjustifiable.'

Schlosser has argued it would take Burger King no more than $300,000 a year to pay the increase.

On its corporate Web site, Burger King, which has more than 11,300 restaurants in the United States and in 69 countries and U.S. territories, reports revenues of
$2.2 billion last year, up 9 percent from 2006. CEO Chidsey made $4.1 million last year, according to Forbes.com.

Given the company's profile and earnings, Grover's behavior is all the more interesting, said John Stauber, executive director of the nonprofit, non- partisan Center for Media and Democracy, based in Madison, Wis.

'I think this shows a deep arrogance that a person at such a high level in the corporation would be directly involved in that type of harassment,' Stauber said.
'This a huge black eye for the Burger King corporation.
It's the type of situation that lands companies in public relations textbooks on how not to engage the press, the public and your critics.'

(c) News-Press.com