04233
May 17, 2004

What the moderator knew

After Immokalee, tomatoes will never taste the same

by John Filiatreau

IMMOKALEE, FL — When the Rev. Susan Andrews arrived in the Sunshine State, she was taken aback to find herself in a place so dark and cold that it gave her a chill.

     The moderator had used some of her Texas-to-Florida flight time to bone up on the Taco Bell boycott, and had plenty of facts — “talking points” — in her head: A farmworker has to pick 4,000 pounds of tomatoes to earn $50. For every 32-pound bucket he dumps into a grower’s bin, he gets a chit worth 40 cents — the same “piece rate” his father worked for in 1978. Taco Bell has 30,000 restaurants worldwide with annual sales of $5 billion.

     Up to then, Andrews was like a lot of other Presbyterians — aware of the boycott, mildly in favor, not too clear on the details.

     She’d heard some Presbyterians grumble that a consumer boycott is not the kind of thing the church should be doing with its money while other missions go begging.

     So the issue was on her radar, but was little more than a blip on a screen.

     It’s not as if she’s a Taco Bell habitue.

The Rev. Susan Andrews spoke to farm-workers during a meeting in the ICW office, with CIW staffer Julia Perkins translating.
Photos by David P. Young

     She didn't know, until she was told by Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Douglas Malloy in Fort Myers, that trafficking in humans is "the second-most lucrative organized crime in the United States.” (“Drugs are consumed,” Malloy said. “People you can use over and over.”)

     She wouldn’t have guessed that slavery in the farm fields of the United States is a major focus of federal law enforcement. ("You don't normally expect to hear the words ‘slavery’ and ‘United States’ in the same sentence,” said Malloy, a colorful prosecutor who said his job description is “locking up people that don’t belong walking around.”)

     Nor did Andrews know that the most notorious modern slaver Malloy ever “popped” is walking around today after just three years in prison.

The roots of the Taco Bell boycott extend to 1995, when the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) organized a weeklong work stoppage to protest low pay and intolerable living conditions.

     “All we were asking for was dialogue with the growers,” Lucas Benitez, a charismatic CIW leader, told Andrews, pausing now and then to let a translator relay the words. “We saw that that road was blocked. We then tried to get legislation passed to help the workers, but we found that that path was blocked also, because in Tallahassee (the capital), the growers have all the power. So then we organized a march from Fort Myers to Orlando, to get the attention of the growers … but the march wasn’t noticed much outside of Florida. Nobody had ever heard of Immokalee. All these things have led us to where we are today.

     “We saw that we would have to … focus attention on those who had more power — consumers, and the big corporations who control what goes on in Washington and Tallahassee. We wrote two or three letters to Taco Bell, and there was no response. That’s when we decided to launch the boycott.”

     That was not quite three years ago.

     Since then, lots of people have heard about Immokalee (rhymes with broccoli).

     Benitez and two other CIW members, Romeo Ramirez and Julia Gabriel, took a turn on the national stage last year when they were chosen to receive the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for helping to free more than 1,000 field workers from slavery rings in Florida and South Carolina. They went to Washington and received the award from Kennedy’s widow, Ethel. The citation said they’d helped uncover “the ugly truth that modern-day slavery exists in the United States.”

     They also received $30,000, which is roughly equal to what four farmworkers earn in a year. It went into CIW’s operating budget.

Andrews had read about the “coyotes” who smuggle workers in from Mexico and truck them to Florida from Texas and Arizona, charging them $700 to $1,000 a head, but she didn’t know that many workers were then forced to live in company housing and buy groceries in company stores and sink ever

    She didn’t know about a “firewall” in Florida law that makes growers immune from prosecution for hiring illegal workers, accepting false documents or permitting

A slavery investigation led federal officials to this trailer near Immokalee, which housed 14 farmworkers, who were virtually imprisoned.

labor contractors to hold workers in indentured servitude. (“If they didn’t have that protection,” Malloy said, “the growers’d be like, ‘I ain’t going to prison.’”)

     Until she walked these streets in her own sensible shoes, she could not have been touched by the sorrow that shimmers in the air here like a desert mirage.

What the Immokalee workers want, short-term, is an increase in the “bucket price” to 75 cents. To make that raise possible, big buyers like Taco Bell would have to pay 1 cent more per pound for tomatoes than they pay today. According to the CIW, the effect on the retail price of a Taco Bell chalupa would be about one-quarter of 1 cent.

     Taco Bell invokes the firewall/Pontius Pilate argument: We can’t tell the growers how to treat their field hands. We’re not a party to this dispute; it’s between the growers and the pickers.

     Some buyers say the market is so tough these days — because of foreign competition, especially, ironically, from Mexico — that they can’t afford the penny-a-pound premium.

     Yet in 2002, when federal law required growers to phase out methyl bromide, a popular pesticide, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange quickly and without complaint approved an “environmental surcharge” of 25 cents per carton (1 cent per pound, as it happens) as “an accepted cost of doing business.”

     What the ICW wants is for Taco Bell to persuade the growers to sit down with representatives of the farmworkers and hammer out a labor agreement that is less unfair.

     Benitez said Taco Bell should grab this opportunity to polish its corporate image.

     “We’re trying to make a hero out of them,” he said. “We think it’s a win-win situation.”

Before her Immokalee visit, one stop on her recent tour of domestic missions, Andrews had never seen the ramshackle buses that carry the workers to and from the fields, sometimes two hours or more each way — hours for which they are not paid.

     She didn’t know that when the morning dew is on the fruit, the workers have to sit around waiting, sometimes for hours, until the sun climbs higher into the sky and dries the tomatoes. They aren’t paid for that time, either.

     She would never have imagined, had she not been told by the Rev. Gary Cook, the coordinator of the Presbyterian Hunger Program, that migrants with authentic green cards can’t get work unless they buy forged green cards — because labor contractors want to be able to use the threat of deportation to keep the workers in line.

     She didn’t know about an obscure part of the financial-services industry that preys on illegal immigrants — who can’t open bank accounts or obtain Social Security numbers but are desperate to send money to their families back home, and thus have no choice but to let the moneychangers take a 7-percent cut.

     She didn’t know that a tomato picker’s branch bank is his sock, which sometimes might contain $500 or more, making him an attractive target for someone more desperate than himself. Robbers in Immokalee ply their trade with impunity because no one ever goes to the police.

     She’d never had reason to think about second and third passes through already-harvested fields, when the pickers who have the hardest time getting work in the first place — women, youngsters under 14 and men over 40 — labor where fruit is so sparse that even a young, strong man with lungs undamaged by pesticides could barely make $25 in a 14-hour day.

Lucas Benitez, flanked by his ICW colleagues Romeo Ramirez and Julia Gabriel, displayed a work shirt stained with a farmworker’s blood.

Benitez said the migrant fruit and vegetable pickers are the “most disenfranchised and vulnerable” laborers in America. “First there were the black slaves,” he said, “then the sharecroppers ...”

     Andrews, interrupting: “... And now we have you.”

The moderator might have guessed that farmworkers get no medical insurance, no pension, no overtime, no sick pay, no paid holidays, and, in many cases, less than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. But she hadn’t been told that the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Relations Act and the federal unemployment compensation system specifically exclude farmworkers; or that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has no power to act against growers who misuse pesticides or endanger workers; or that the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which prohibits employers from knowingly hiring undocumented workers, is never enforced (“There’s a lot of willful blindness,” said Malloy); or that farmworkers pay state and federal income taxes but never get a refund no matter how little they earn.

     She didn’t know that the one-fifth of farmworkers who are women are almost certain to be sexually abused by “coyotes” and others who gain power over them.

     She had never felt the curious stiffness of a workshirt stained with the blood of a worker beaten senseless for pausing for a drink of water.

     She wouldn’t have dreamed that a box of Rice Krispies would cost one-third more in Immokalee than in her prosperous suburban hometown of Bethesda, MD.

The moderator’s recent tour of domestic missions took her to Immokalee on the day when CIW organizers learned that a committee of the United Methodist Church had voted to recommend endorsing the boycott. A few days later, delegates to the General Conference of the 8-million-member church would vote 846-6 to stop going “south of the border” — becoming the biggest denominational supporter of the campaign.

     The PC(USA) has been on board almost from the beginning. A cross displayed prominently on a wall of the CIW office is a gift from the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, the stated clerk, a Texas-sized minister widely known in Immokalee as gringo grande.

     CIW leaders also had learned earlier that day that the University of Notre Dame, responding to a protest fast by 100 students, had “postponed” a renewal of its contract with Taco Bell and asked for more information about its labor standards. Notre Dame is the 19th U.S. university to evict a Taco Bell restaurant from campus or block the opening of a new one.

The moderator will never eat a tomato again without thinking of the immigrant farmworkers living in squalor in Immokalee.

     A CIW baseball-style cap and CIW T-shirt were presented to Andrews, who has amassed a collection of such garments during her travels. This one was at least two sizes too small; when she held it in front of her torso, she looked like a child playing with a Barbie shirt. Later, she traded it in for one that fits, and said she’ll wear it with pride.

Until her visit to Immokalee, Andrews didn’t know the true cost of winter tomatoes.

     These are the squarish fruits you’ve read so much about, the ones that are bred, like moderators, for thick skins and bruise resistance. They are picked when they’re still as green as snap peas, and zapped later with a gas to make them redden on schedule. Although they often taste like styrofoam, they’re known in the industry as “fresh” tomatoes (as opposed to those grown for processing into the likes of tomato paste and ketchup).

     Fresh tomatoes are the basis of a $500 million industry in Florida alone.

Before leaving town, Andrews toured the modest offices of the workers’ new, low-power radio station, WCIW, which broadcasts only during daylight hours but hopes one day soon to go 24/7. Its makeshift antenna, jerry-rigged to the side of a building, extends maybe 25 feet into the air. You can’t tune it in if you’re more than a mile away. But for Andrews, on this day, Immokalee’s “Rrrrrrradio Consciencia” was coming in loud and clear.

     Because of all she learned that day, Andrews will never eat a tomato again without thinking of this desperate town where the American dream goes to die.

     She thanked the CIW members and organizers for being “a model and a witness to the rest of us,” and said she believes they’ll prevail in their battle, because they have a moving story to tell — and it’s a matter of faith with her that “people change when they hear stories.”

     One in particular.

     “If this isn’t the gospel,” she said on her way out of town, “then I don’t know what is.”