The Burger King Campaign
PC(USA) Campaign for Fair Food
Since 2005, Presbyterians have been urging Burger King to work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to address poverty wages and exploitative working conditions in the fields of its Florida tomato suppliers. Unlike McDonald’s and Yum! Brands (which owns Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Long John Silver’s and A & W Restaurants) which have forged ground-breaking agreements with the CIW, Burger King has not only refused, the company has worked to halt the gains made in these agreements.
Created in God’s image, the Divine has appointed us stewards of creation, which includes our economic life. Such stewardship involves discernment and decision-making such that our words and actions reflect our belief in God’s sovereignty and good purpose for creation.
The PC(USA) Campaign for Fair Food urges Presbyterians sign and widely circulate the CIW’s National Petition to End Modern-Day Slavery and Sweatshops in the Fields and join in peaceful public actions together with the CIW, to convince the company to advance human rights in the Florida fields. Find out what you can do.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is asking Burger King to
- pay a penny per pound increase directly to farmworkers harvesting tomatoes for Burger King’s FL-based suppliers.
- work with the CIW to develop and enforce a rigorous, human-rights based Code of Conduct to end human rights abuses and require higher standards for FL-based tomato growers in Burger King’s own supply chain.
- support efforts to establish an industry-wide Code of Conduct backed by a credible third-party monitoring body incorporating meaningful worker input from development to enforcement
These are steps that Yum! Brands, parent company of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silver’s and A&W, and McDonald’s are already taking through agreements with the CIW. The PC(USA) joins the CIW and other partners from the faith, human rights, and student communities in asking Burger King to take these two important steps together with the CIW.
Burger King is a major buyer of Florida tomatoes and has a close relationship with leading tomato industry representatives. Burger King has leveraged that relationship to undermine the agreements the CIW has made with Yum! Brands and McDonald’s through a concerted public campaign designed to “debunk the myth” of farmworker poverty and deny that modern-day slavery continues to plague the industry. The PC(USA) has been calling on Burger King to work with the CIW since early 2005, but Burger King has refused to work with the CIW to address the core principles listed above, principals which McDonald’s and Yum! Brands have already incorporated into their tomato supply chains.
Burger King has claimed that farmworkers in its supply chain are not poor, citing both a discredited study produced by McDonald’s in 2006 (from which McDonald’s itself has stepped away) and by citing unverified pay figures provided by the Florida Tomato Growers’ Exchange, the lobby for Florida growers. It has further made false public statements about CIW and its agreements with McDonald’s and Yum! Brands, implying that the agreements were not working and that CIW might be pocketing the penny payment. These claims were publicly corrected by The Carter Center, the PC(USA), and Yum! Brands. (The Carter Center and PC(USA) participated in talks that led to the agreements). Instead of correcting the adverse effect its high-volume/low cost purchasing practices are having on farmworkers’ wages and working conditions, Burger King has offered to give money to an Immokalee charity or to retrain farmworkers to work in its Burger King restaurants.
No. In April 2007 as the CIW and McDonald’s announced their agreement, the CIW said that it would give Burger King until the end of 2007 to forge an agreement with them or face an “intensification of the campaign.” On November 30, 2007, over 1500 farmworkers and their allies marched 9 miles from the Miami offices of Goldman Sachs (a major shareholder) to BK World Headquarters. In addition to this action, there has been significant national and international press coverage of Burger King’s unwillingness to work with the CIW.
At the end of February 2008, the CIW launched a national petition campaign against Modern-Day Slavery and Sweatshops in the Fields. The petition calls on the entire retail food industry (fast-food and grocery) to work with the CIW to end the poverty wages and shameful human rights abuses in the field. However, because Burger King has specifically been working to reverse the agreements that the CIW has forged with Yum! Brands and McDonald’s, the petition includes the language that signatories are prepared to stop patronizing Burger King now, and other food industry leaders in the future, should they fail to do so. To be clear, the CIW has not yet called for a boycott. Through this petition they are demonstrating the serious commitment of consumers by indicating that they are prepared to boycott if Burger King does not change course.
Yes. The CIW and its network of allies called the Alliance for Fair Food, have written to all major fast-food and grocery retail corporations calling on them to work with the CIW to rectify the poverty wages and deplorable working conditions created by their high volume-low cost purchasing practices. You can read the letter and the list of corporations to which it was sent at. Thus far Yum! Brands and McDonald’s, the two largest fast-food companies in the world, have responded positively and created ground-breaking agreements with CIW.
As a result of the joint efforts of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), which has imposed a $100,000 fine upon any of its members that would participate in the Yum or McDonald’s agreements (see below), and Burger King, which has encouraged the FTGE in its opposition to the agreements, the penny per pound payments to workers have been temporarily halted. Starting in March of 2005, workers harvesting for Taco Bell began receiving a check from Yum! Brands for the additional penny-per-pound of tomatoes harvested. For two seasons, workers received two checks at pay time, one from their employer and a second from Taco Bell for the bonus. The other Yum! companies (Pizza Hut, KFC, Long John Silvers, and A&W Restaurants), were due to initiate the penny-per-pound payment to farmworkers in the fall of 2007 as a result of a voluntary agreement by Yum Brands. The McDonald’s agreement was also due to begin with the fall 2007 picking season and is in full force.
Today, however, both agreements are being held hostage by the resistance posed by the FTGE and encouraged by Burger King. It is important to emphasize that both Yum Brands and McDonalds remain firmly committed to the agreements and continue to pay the penny per pound into escrow accounts, but it is equally important to understand that already poor workers have seen their income cut as a result of the threatened fine.
An aspect worthy of particular note in the McDonald’s agreement is that McDonald’s and CIW are working together to create a third party independent monitoring organization, capable of monitoring and enforcing codes of conduct industry-wide.
The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, the growers’ lobby, sent out two press releases in 2007 stating that their members would not participate in the penny per pound agreements because the FTGE claimed they were in violation of anti-trust law. In late November, an Associated Press article revealed that, in fact, the FTGE is threatening any of its members that participate in these agreements with a $100,000 fine.
[Read the AP article printed in the Miami Herald]
In terms of the claim of anti-trust violation, Mark Barenberg of Columbia University Law Professor said to the NY Times in December 2007 “The only possible antitrust violation is by the growers since they seem to be conspiring among themselves to refuse to deal with fast-food companies that want to buy supplies made under certain specifications.”
Despite the FTGE’s action to stop the penny from getting to the farmworkers, both the Yum! Brands and McDonald’s agreements are in force; with both companies paying the penny per pound into an escrow account. Yum! Brands and McDonald’s are working together with the growers that supply them to find away around the FTGE’s fine and to get the penny-per-pound increase to the farmworkers. The Stated Clerk of the General Assembly has made a public statement to both Burger King and the FTGE concerning their coordinated efforts to roll back this significant advance in farmworkers’ human rights.
Because giant retail food corporations (fast-food and grocery) help to create the conditions in which farmworker poverty and modern-day slavery flourish, it is critical to correct these detrimental business practices. Major corporate buyers — companies like Burger King, WalMart, McDonald's, and Yum!, whose sheer economic muscle is unprecedented — have increasingly used their buying power to drive down their costs, squeezing their suppliers for the deepest possible discounts on produce. In turn, growers have sought to maintain their margins by squeezing their suppliers, and in particular the one supplier with the least power to negotiate its price, labor.
While growers cannot demand cheaper tractors from John Deere, cheaper chemicals from Monsanto or a break on the interest rate from their bank, they can hold wages stagnant, or even cut the piece rate, and still obtain desperately poor workers to pick their crops. In its 2003 study “Like Machines in the Fields: Workers Without Rights in US Agriculture,” Oxfam America concludes: "Squeezed by the buyers of their produce, growers pass on the costs and risks imposed on them to those on the lowest rung of the supply chain: the farmworkers they employ" (page 36).
And grower/packers themselves agree with this analysis. In May 2005 an article, “Big Fast-Food Contracts Breaking Repackers” appeared in “The Packer”  a grower industry journal, which particularly named Burger King as exerting this downward pressure which negatively effects the tomato pickers.
By paying a penny-per-pound increase to farmworkers and working with the CIW to establish and enforce rigorous Codes of Conduct, Yum! Brands and McDonald’s are working to counteract the downward pressure on wages and human rights that their purchasing practices exert.
Farmworkers earn 40-50 cents per 32 pound bucket of tomatoes. The range in earning accounts for differences in grower pay rates. Farmworker wages have remained essentially stagnant since 1980, when their average wage was 40 cents. According to the 2005 National Agricultural Workers Survey (US Department of Labor) farmworkers’ average wages are $10,000 to $12,499; below the U.S. poverty Line. And this estimate is even high because for the first time the 2005 NAWS included the earnings of managers and crewleaders in its estimate for the category “farmworker.”
Burger King and the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE) have claimed that workers make $12.46 an hour (according to the growers’ unverified payroll records). Clearly there is a great discrepancy between this extraordinary hourly figure (which would equate to $24,920 per year for a typical hourly job based on a stable 40-hour work week, 50 weeks per year) and the average annual income figures of $10,000 to $12,499 reported by the US Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers’ Survey. Why is there this difference?
First, workers harvesting tomatoes aren’t paid by the hour, they are day laborers paid only for the buckets of tomatoes they harvest. Each day men and women must search for employment by going to the parking lot of a local supermarket before dawn and waiting for crewleaders, who work for the various growers, to drive up in old school buses and (hopefully) select them to work. The workers are not paid for the time spent seeking work.
If they are selected to work, they are not paid for the time it takes to transport them to the fields or the time it takes waiting in the fields (for dew to dry, for orders from the crew leader, for the rain to stop…); some days you work 12 hours, some days you work 4 hours. And some days, of course, you work 0 hours, because being a day laborer in the tomato industry means that if it rains all day, if you are sick, or if you are simply not chosen by a crewleader for work in the fields that day, you earn nothing.
Nonetheless you always have to be ready to work. Tomato pickers spend their lives waiting (and hoping) for work; and that time is never compensated. As the Miami Herald pointed out recently, the cost created by these irregular hours is borne exclusively by the farmworkers.
So as a farmworker harvesting tomatoes, one week you may work 65 hours, the next week 0 hours. In this context, hourly wage figures are meaningless. It is imperative to recognize this because alert readers will notice that growers always talk in terms of hourly wages and never annual incomes (as government reports do) when defending themselves against claims of entrenched farmworker poverty.
Again, it’s important to emphasize that farmworkers harvesting in the tomato industry are day laborers, who work highly irregular hours and are paid by the piece – in other words only for the buckets of tomatoes they harvest. Farmworkers are covered under the minimum wage portion of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), but are excluded from the FLSA’s overtime provision.
The state of Florida passed its own minimum wage (now at $6.79 an hour as of January 2008). This supersedes the federal minimum wage. According to law, therefore, an average farmworker should be able to pick enough buckets to earn $6.79 an hour. But as piece rates haven’t changed in almost 30 years, farmworkers must pick more than twice as many buckets as they did thirty years ago to earn this amount.
The US Department of Labor, through the National Agricultural Workers Survey and other reports to Congress, reports on farmworker earnings and has continually emphasized that farmworkers are a population in severe economic distress, living and working below the poverty line.
In addition to stagnant piece rates, there are also unscrupulous growers. Florida tomato growers’ operations have been the subject of lawsuits and Department of Labor actions for systematic wage violations — including the suit filed in early 2007 by more than 170 farmworkers against Ag-Mart Produce Inc., one of Florida’s largest vegetable growers. According to the workers' attorney in that case, Ag-Mart was “doing what many agricultural employers do, they were hiring the workers at piecework rates but if the piecework doesn't equal minimum wage, they're supposed to make up for it. To get around this, they were writing down fewer hours than the workers had worked.” [Read more]
No. Farmworkers are explicitly excluded from the NLRA which gives workers in other industries the right to organize and bargain collectively with their employers as well as have recourse to the National Labor Relations Board for grievances.
Yes. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has worked with the U.S. Department of Justice and the F.B.I. to expose and prosecute six cases of slavery in recent years, freeing more than 1,000 slaves. These are not instances of poverty wages, but of forced labor where men and women are forced through violence or threat of violence to work and are unable to leave. The use of the word slavery is neither hyperbolic nor metaphorical language. These cases meet the high standard and definition of slavery under US federal laws. These cases have been prosecuted by the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division either under laws forbidding peonage and indentured servitude passed just after the Civil War during Reconstruction (18 U.S.C. Sections 1581-9) or under the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which prohibits the “recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.” The VTVPA was reauthorized in 2003 and 2007.
In January of 2008, a federal grand jury indicted six people under the Thirteenth Amendment for enslaving farmworkers in Immokalee itself. Among other abuses, the workers were beaten, locked in a truck, and unable to leave. This is the seventh case of forced labor to emerge out of the Florida fields.
In November 2007, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers received the premiere international anti-slavery award from Anti-Slavery International for their “extraordinary contribution to ending slavery in the US agricultural industry.” Founded in 1839 in England, ASI is the world's oldest international human rights organization. The CIW has previously won the Robert F. Kennedy International Human Rights award (2003) as well as commendations from the F.B.I. and the U.S. Department of Justice for their ground-breaking work.
March 2005 to the present — Immediately following the CIW’s ground-breaking agreement with Yum! Brands, Presbyterians across the country sent letters to Burger King, urging the corporation to “follow Yum! Brands’ lead” and work with the CIW to improve wages and working conditions. Since 2005 Presbyterians have participated in a variety of e-actions and e-petitions including those of Sojourner’s, the United Church of Christ, Oxfam America and others sending a similar message to Burger King. See www.pcusa.org/fairfood
June 2005 —The National Council of Churches, in which the PC(USA) participates, sent a letter to Burger King urging them to work with the CIW. Burger King did not respond.
December 2005 — Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, the Rev. Dr. Clifton Kirkpatrick, wrote to then-CEO, Mr. Greg Brenneman, urging Burger King to work with the CIW. Burger King did not respond.
April 2006 — The Rev. Noelle Damico, National Coordinator of the PC(USA) Campaign for Fair Food, has telephone exchanges with Mr. Steve Grover, VP of Burger King, encouraging him and the company to work with the CIW.
June 2006 — The 217th General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution supporting “Ongoing Work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Campaign for Fair Food” which discussed the responsibility that Burger King and other retail food corporations have in creating exploitative conditions in the fields and reaffirmed the various forms of consumer engagement including letter-writing, public protest, and boycott as important tools for the church to employ. Read the resolution.
January 2007 — Dr. Kirkpatrick writes to the new CEO of Burger King , Mr. John Chidsey, imploring Burger King to become a leader in human rights and to work with the CIW. Burger King did not respond. The Rev. Noelle Damico, National Coordinator of the PC(USA) Campaign for Fair Food, again has telephone exchanges with Mr. Steve Grover, VP of Burger King, encouraging him and the company to work with the CIW.
February 2007 — Burger King announces to the press that it will not work with the CIW, that farmworkers are not poor, and that they will be giving a charitable donation to a worthy institution in Immokalee. The Rev. Damico joins other leaders from the faith, human rights, and student communities at a CIW Press Conference outside Burger King’s Miami-based headquarters to decry the company’s decision and shares excerpts from Dr Kirkpatrick’s letter to Mr. Chidsey. View excerpts of the press conference.
April 2007 — McDonald’s forges a strong agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. At the victory celebration and within a public statement, Dr. Kirkpatrick, Ms. Linda Valentine, Executive Director of the PC(USA) General Assembly Council, and Rev. Damico commend McDonald’s and encourage Burger King and other fast-food companies to work with the CIW now. Read the Stated Clerk’s public statement on the McDonald’s-CIW Agreement.
May 2007 — Yum! Brands announces it is voluntarily extending the Taco Bell-CIW agreement to cover all of its brands: KFC, Pizza Hut, Long John Silver’s and A&W.
The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange puts out a press release claiming that the McDonald’s and Yum! Brands agreements violate anti-trust laws, but are not specific as to how. Read the AP story describing this move and McDonald’s and CIW’s response.
September-October 2007 — Burger King makes the following three false claims repeatedly to the press, even after they’ve been privately corrected by the CIW and the Carter Center: (a) the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is receiving payments from Taco Bell and McDonald’s, (b) that the CIW has asked Burger King to sign a check to them, and that (c) the CIW wanted Burger King to sign a “secret deal.” Further Burger King purports that it does not know how to get the penny to the farmworkers.
Both Dr. Kirkpatrick and The Carter Center privately send letters to Burger King calling on them to immediately retract these false statements. When this does not happen, Dr. Kirkpatrick and The Carter Center release public statements denouncing the company’s behavior and refuting the claims. Yum! Brands additionally releases a statement indicating that it had indeed briefed Burger King executives in a conference call on how they had set up the penny-per-pound mechanism and how was working. Read the statements from Dr. Kirkpatrick, The Carter Center and Yum! Brands as well as CIW’s response.
Mr. John Chidsey, CEO of Burger King, trustee and alumnus of Davidson College, visited the campus to lecture at the Chidsey Leadership Institute which he has established there. Following his speech on leadership and how the values of Davidson have formed him, students asked him about why Burger King was not working with the CIW to improve wages and conditions in the tomato fields. He responded by saying that farmworkers were not poor, reiterated some of the false claims Burger King had been making. Rev. Damico wrote a guest perspective piece for the school newspaper, The Davidsonian, responding to Mr. Chidsey’s remarks which were videotaped by the Institute and available online following his lecture. Read the piece that was published in November on the Davidsonian Web site.
November 2007 — The Associated Press reveals that the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange has threatened its members with $100,000 fines if they participate in the McDonald’s or Yum! Brands agreements with the CIW. President Carter and Dr. Kirkpatrick release public statements condemning the FTGE’s behavior and Burger King’s support of and cooperation with the growers in this effort.
Read the CIW’s response and the AP article.
Read Dr. Kirkpatrick’s statement.
Read President Carter’s Letter .
On November 30, 2007, over 1500 consumers marched 9 miles with farmworkers from the Miami offices of Goldman Sachs, a private equity firm that is heavily invested in Burger King, to Burger King’s world headquarters. Florida Presbyterians as well as Presbyterians from across the country were prominent in the march. The Rev. Kennedy McGowan, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood Florida, spoke at the rally on behalf of the Tropical Florida Presbytery – the presbytery within which Burger King headquarters is located. He said that he was ashamed of the company’s behavior and called on the company to “have it God’s way, which is the way of justice.” Read more about the march and rally.
During the rally on November 30th, Presbyterians were among a delegation of religious leaders which presented a Burger King spokesperson with a letter signed by more than 100 religious leaders across the country, including the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly and the Executive Presbyters of Peace River Presbytery (where Immokalee is located) and Tropical Florida Presbytery (where Burger King’s Miami-based headquarters is located). The letter called on the company to work with the CIW to establish the same precedents within its tomato supply chain that Yum! Brands and McDonald’s have done and decrying the company’s attempts to avoid responsibility for the exploitative conditions in its tomato supply chain. Read the letter.
Farmworkers who had been enslaved in Immokalee, FL escaped from the truck where they were being held and made their way to the Collier County Police department. The police immediately turned to the CIW, and they worked together with the US Department of Justice to interview the escaped slaves.
January 2008 — A federal grand jury indicts six people under the Thirteenth Amendment for forced labor in the November case above. Senator Bernie Sanders visits Immokalee and is briefed by the CIW, local organizations, and Rev. Damico. At the press conference which concluded his visit and was moderated by Rev. Damico, Senator Sanders called for Congressional Hearings into the purchasing practices of Burger King and other fast food companies that create conditions where slavery flourishes in the 21st century.
February 2008 — CIW inaugurates its Petition Campaign Against Modern-Day Slavery and Sweatshops in the Fields. The petition, which calls on Burger King and other food industry leaders to work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers now to end exploitation in the fields, indicates that signatories are prepared to boycott Burger King now if the company fails to do so.
The Justice Committee of the General Assembly Council is updated and receives the petition. The PC(USA) Campaign for Fair Food circulates this petition and encourages Presbyterians to sign on.
March 2008 — The Rev. Dr. Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly and Ms. Linda Bryant Valentine, Executive Director of the General Assembly Council sign the CIW Petition Against Modern-Day Slavery and Sweatshops in the Fields.
Dr. Kirkpatrick releases a public statement on the signing.
See the Presbyterian News Service story.
The Rev. Noelle Damico, National Coordinator of the PC(USA) Campaign for Fair Food, participates in a Petition Signing Ceremony on Capitol Hill where members of Congress, leaders from the human rights and religious communities as well as other dignitaries publicly signed the petition.
When the CIW was first forming in the early 1990s, it received a Self Development of People grant and met for a while in a Presbyterian church. Local congregations who were providing emergency food and clothing to farmworkers began to question why farmworkers, who work six days a week, often 12 hours a day, needed such charity. As the CIW farmworkers engaged the FL growers and the FL state government, Presbyterians marched with the workers, prayed with the workers, and wrote letters. When the CIW declared a national consumer boycott of Taco Bell, one of the fast-food companies known to be purchasing tomatoes from FL, members of the Tampa Bay Presbytery brought an overture of support to the 214th PC(USA) General Assembly in 2002. The General Assembly’s support of the boycott launched wider church support and initiated a partnership between the CIW and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The PC(USA) and its members have been instrumental in helping the CIW to win groundbreaking agreements with Yum! Brands, Taco Bell’s parent company, and McDonald’s.
The 217th General Assembly passed a resolution in support of an ongoing partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Campaign for Fair Food in 2006. [Read the resolution] Prior to this, the 214th GA voted to support the Taco Bell boycott in 2002 and the General Assembly Council celebrated the CIW-Yum! Brands agreement in 2005. The PC(USA) and its predecessor bodies have supported fair wages for farmworkers, the right for farmworkers to bargain collectively, and a variety of boycotts over the last century as a nonviolent way to express our Christian values and urge social change. Key theological statements by the General Assembly which undergird the PC(USA) Campaign for Fair Food’s ongoing work are “God’s Work in Our Hands” (2005) and “Christian Faith and Economic Justice” (1984).
Contact the Rev. Noelle Damico, National Coordinator of the PC(USA) Campaign for Fair Food by email or (631) 751-7076.
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