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Fast food fight

A farm workers group has a new target. But McDonald's and growers have their own reform ideas.

By KRIS HUNDLEY
Published March 5, 2006

IMMOKALEE - For more than a decade, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been demanding higher pay for Florida's tomato pickers.

The group, a media-savvy band of farm workers and student activists, has staged hunger strikes, letter-writing campaigns and splashy "truth tours" to take its case to college campuses and churches throughout the country. Its efforts have attracted high-profile supporters including former President Jimmy Carter and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights.

A year ago, the CIW scored a major coup when it persuaded fast-food giant Taco Bell to pay Florida farm workers a penny more per pound for their harvest, the equivalent of about a 75 percen t raise. Now the group, which has more than 3,000 members here, is taking the same demand to the world's largest fast-food chain, McDonald's Corp.

But since the CIW's stunning agreement with Taco Bell in March 2005, fast-food companies and Florida tomato growers have realized it is better to act than to react.

Growers have pulled together new workplace standards for everything from workers compensation to health screenings. Now they're hustling to ensure that their farms can be certified under the program known as SAFE, or Socially Accountable Farm Employers.

McDonald's, which has had plenty of experience deflecting bad press for its fatty foods, has been similarly proactive. Unlike Taco Bell, which ignored the CIW's demands for nearly four years, McDonald's has responded - but on its terms.

The fast-food behemoth hired an independent expert in January to study the economic effect of various farm-worker benefits and said it will require growers to meet even stiffer workplace standards than the growers' group.

"We're going to look at all benefits, not just wages," said Lisa Howard, a spokeswoman for McDonald's in Oak Brook, Ill. "We think the overall benefit will meet or exceed the penny per pound the coalition is calling for."

The CIW is not mollified. Neither group included the coalition in developing its workplace standards. Lucas Benitez, the CIW's co-founder, said the proposals simply hold growers to existing labor laws that exempt farm workers from many traditional benefits, such as overtime pay and health insurance.

"If they want to talk about giving us real rights, that's one thing," he said. "But these standards are nothing new. I believe in them like I believe in Santa Claus."

More important, neither the growers nor McDonald's addresses what's known as workers' piece rate, which has been stagnant for nearly three decades. Pickers earn 40 to 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes; they have to pick two tons to make more than $50 a day.

Adopted across Florida's tomato industry, which has annual receipts of about $500-million, the CIW's proposal would mean millions of dollars in additional labor costs.

Ray Gilmer, spokesman for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association in Maitland, said giving in to the CIW's demands would make Florida tomatoes "the higher-priced alternative" in a competitive global market. "We think we should let the price be decided by the marketplace," he said.

For McDonald's, which buys about 1.5 percent of the state's crop, the CIW's demand equals less than $200,000 a year.

"What is that to a $20-billion-a-year company?" asked the CIW's Benitez, speaking rapidly in Spanish. "It is nothing. It is like a hair on a cat."

Immokalee is in the middle of South Florida's farm country, hemmed in by citrus and tomato fields, just north of Big Cypress National Preserve. It's at the inland apex of a triangle, about 30 miles from Fort Myers and Naples. Though those cities are sprawling eastward, they've yet to touch Immokalee, which remains an isolated outpost where the population doubles during winter harvest season.

Stores along Main Street advertise tarjetas telefonicas (phone cards) so workers can call home. The most impressive building in town is a school complex run by the Redlands Christian Migrant Association, a nonprofit child care group.

Just off Main Street, a few blocks from Seminole Casino, sits the CIW's office. The outside is decorated with a mural showing trucks full of tomatoes traveling from fields to packing houses to fast-food restaurants. Inside, the atmosphere is a blend of off-campus housing and a Mexican bodega, or store. The walls are covered with placards from past CIW marches, pictures of Che Guevara and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The coalition operates on a budget of less than $500,000, donated by people and foundations such as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. Seven staffers, including Benitez, are paid $6.40 an hour. Several travel north in the summer, picking watermelons up the East Coast.

Benitez, who came to Immokalee from Guerrero, Mexico, 13 years ago, started the CIW with a handful of other pickers and two Brown University graduates, Greg Asbed and Laura Germino, who were working as paralegals. Asbed and Germino are still involved, but they push forward people like Benitez, 30, who said he has a master's degree in tomato picking and a "Ph.D. in citrus," as spokesmen for the group.

While the CIW has been active in a half-dozen slavery cases that resulted in jail terms for several labor contractors, the group never strays far from its focus on higher wages. The CIW even refuses to take a position on immigration reform, though most of the workers are illegals, and the membership turnover is more than 80 percent a year.

"This is not an immigration issue," said Benitez, who has U.S. residency. "When agricultural workers are paid a fair wage for hard, dirty, dangerous work, like workers are paid in the mines, then you will see generations of farm workers here."

Though the CIW had been a thorn in the side of South Florida growers for years, the group catapulted onto the national scene when it bypassed the supply chain and targeted a high-profile buyer of the state's tomato crop, Taco Bell. Despite the insistence by the chain and its parent company, Yum Brands, that it had no responsibility for what happened in the fields, college students organized to get Taco Bell booted off 22 campuses. Religious groups supported the boycott, which culminated in a hunger strike in front of the chain's Irvine, Calif., offices. Eventually, Yum and Taco Bell signed a deal agreeing to raise pay and work to improve field conditions.

A spokesman for Taco Bell said the new relationship is working well.

"We are very pleased," said the chain's Rob Poetsch. "We have regular discussions with the CIW and administered our new program last growing season with no flaws."

During the harvest, Taco Bell sends the CIW a weekly report with the number of pounds of tomatoes picked by its two suppliers, along with the names of the workers. A third-party cuts a check for each picker, which amounts to $10 to $30 more a week per person.

Taco Bell, which buys about 10-million pounds of Florida tomatoes each year, said the agreement costs about $100,000. The CIW said it has meant more pay for about 1,000 workers, just a fraction of the estimated 16,000 in the area.

Having made the link from field to fast-food consumer and proven that a system of putting more pay directly into workers' pockets is possible, the CIW wants more.

"If McDonald's did this, the number of workers affected would be double," Benitez said. "But they're resisting working with us to change the industry. They have the mentality they can do it without the workers being involved, and we're not going to accept that."

McDonald's and the growers are rushing to prove that their new standards will improve working conditions far more than the CIW's strategy. Though details are being worked out, both plans call for workers to be paid directly by the grower, rather than through a labor contractor.

McDonald's is requiring growers to use pickers who are employees rather than independent day laborers. Today, more than half of the crop is picked by day laborers.

"Our goal here is to drive broad-based industry change," said McDonald's Howard.

Jay Taylor, president of Taylor & Fulton Inc., which has farms in Palmetto, Immokalee, Quincy and on the eastern shore of Virginia, said the growers' SAFE program is quickly expanding to include most of McDonald's requirements.

"When your customer demands change, there's no greater power," said Taylor, who sells to McDonald's suppliers. "I don't know how much it will cost to comply, but it isn't an option if I want to compete in the marketplace."

Taylor, a second-generation Florida farmer, said his company has used employees, not day laborers, to pick its crop for more than 20 years. Taylor & Fulton provides housing and transportation for its nearly 1,000 employees, who often follow the crop north. And in Immokalee, the grower pays pickers an hourly wage of $6.40, plus an incentive for the amount picked. He's searching for a bilingual ombudsman who will handle complaints and suggestions from the field.

"I have to give CIW credit for bringing this issue to the forefront," Taylor said. "We're being brought into the 21st century in the labor relations arena. And it's the perfect time to prepare us to compete for this labor."

While the CIW has rejected SAFE and McDonald's initiatives, other migrant advocates think the moves could signal substantial change. Susan Reyna, head of MUJER, a Hispanic women's group in the Miami area, is one of three worker representatives on the five-member SAFE board.

At her first meeting a week ago, Reyna insisted on changes in the way workers were being interviewed by outside auditors to reduce the possibility of intimidation.

"I don't want to be part of anything that is a rubber stamp," she said. "But I think SAFE is a great concept. For growers to invite us in and say, "I want to be socially responsible' is most definitely a breakthrough."

Greg Schell, managing attorney for the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project in Lake Worth, said SAFE's requirement that checks go directly from grower to picker, eliminating the crew boss as paymaster, is a big step forward.

"There are still ways crew leaders can cheat workers, but it reduces the problems by three-fourths or more," said Schell, who has been working with migrants for nearly 30 years. "SAFE is clearly a reaction to the coalition's work, so the coalition should take credit for it, not trash it."

For Benitez and others at the CIW, however, the changes proposed by growers and McDonald's are not enough. Wednesday night, more than 70 farm workers packed the CIW's storefront for a regular weekly meeting. When Benitez asked the standing-room-only crowd of mostly men how many receive their checks directly from growers, nearly all raised their hands.

"Nobody here gets a check from contractors," Benitez confirmed. "So where's the change?"

As heads covered with ball caps nodded, Benitez said the CIW is pushing for fair food, not just fast food. It wants to make sure workers have a place at the table with growers and buyers to ensure real reform. And it intends to travel to Chicago at the end of the month to place its demands on McDonald's doorstep.

At the end of the nearly two-hour meeting, Benitez closed by shouting out the CIW's rallying cry, ""Coalicion!"

In response, the workers, most of whom had been working since long before daybreak, made their voices heard. ""Presente!" they yelled. We are here.

Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Kris Hundley can be reached at hundley@sptimes.com or 727 892-2996.

[Last modified March 3, 2006, 21:08:03]