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A prayer vigil and news conference involving national religious and human-rights leaders will also take place outside the Yum! offices. Meanwhile, congregations across the United States will schedule their own times of fasting and prayer.
“We are fasting because we do not want to eat food tainted with the exploitation of our sisters and brothers,” said the Rev. Thomas Hoyt Jr., President of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC), a bishop in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.
The religious communions are calling on their members to join students and farmworkers in fasting and prayer to draw attention to conditions in the fields of growers that supply Yum! Brands with tomatoes, and to express support for the shareholder resolution.
The fast will end with a 6 p.m. community meal at a local retreat center and the screening of a new documentary film chronicling the struggles of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a community-based group of Florida farmworkers that launched the consumer boycott in 2001.
The boycott has drawn the support of national religious groups including the PC(USA), the NCC, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the American Friends Service Committee and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
The 213th General Assembly of the PC(USA), in 2002, endorsed the boycott and called for good-faith dialogue between Taco Bell’s supplier and representatives of the workers’ coalition.
The Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, the PC(USA)’s stated clerk, voiced the concerns of many in the religious community.
“We are particularly concerned with the role Yum! Brands has played, or more accurately, has not played, in this situation,” he said. “Yum! benefits by being able to purchase these tomatoes cheaply on account of the poverty wages earned by farmworkers. As such, we believe that Yum! Brands has a clear moral responsibility to take leadership to assure just working conditions and compensation for the very persons who provide the products which are at the heart of its operation.”
Institutional shareholders including the Center for Reflection, Education, and Action, Inc., and Trillium Asset Management Corporation filed the sustainability resolution. An identical resolution introduced during last year’s meeting received 43 percent of shareholders’ votes.
Boycott organizers are working to get Yum! to use its power as a major purchaser to see that the food it serves is not only fast, but fair. In addition to Taco Bell, Yum! Brands owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, Long John Silver’s, A&W Restaurants and Pizza Hut.
Farmworkers must pick two tons of tomatoes to earn $50. The U.S. Department of Labor has said that their piece-rate pay has been essentially unchanged for more than 25 years.
The CIW wants Taco Bell to:
- Participate in three-way talks involving the company, their tomato suppliers and CIW representatives;
- Contribute to an increase in farmworker wages through an increase in the per-pound rate Taco Bell/Yum! Brands pays for tomatoes, with an agreement from suppliers to pass the increase along to the workers; and,
- Work with Taco Bell’s suppliers and the CIW to establish a code of conduct that would ensure workers’ fundamental rights.
For more information about the boycott, visit the Web sites of the workers’ coalition and the NCC and the boycott page of the PC(USA) site. |
