08309
April 22, 2008
U.S. senators expose tomato pickers’ poverty wages; call for federal probe
CIW co-founder testifies about slavery in Florida’s tomato fields
U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders (left) and Edward Kennedy at a Senate committee hearing April 15 examining the treatment and wages of tomato pickers in the growing fields of Florida. Photo by Fritz Meyer LOUISVILLE — U.S. lawmakers called for a federal probe into the wages of Florida tomato pickers and greater oversight of worker conditions during a Senate committee hearing last week that included testimony from the co-founder of a Presbyterian-backed farmworkers group.
The April 15 hearing in Washington, DC, focused on the living and working conditions facing thousands of migrant tomato pickers, their rate of pay, and the tomato industry’s blockage of the penny-per-pound increase major restaurant chains were paying to farmworkers harvesting tomatoes for their Florida suppliers.
Lucas Benitez, co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), which receives support from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and other faith groups, told the panel that tomato pickers are regularly abused, harassed, intimidated and in some instances, are held against their will in conditions of forced labor.
The Mexican-born Benitez, a former tomato picker himself, said female pickers are additionally subjected to sexual harassment and abuse.
“I assure you that the seven cases of modern-day slavery that have been uncovered in the fields of Florida are just the tip of the iceberg,” he said, referring to federal cases in the past decade.
The CIW, based in Immokalee, FL, works to improve the lives of its mostly immigrant members, many of whom do low-wage labor in Florida’s fields. The Coalition is also considered one of the most respected anti-slavery groups, helping the U.S. Department of Justice to successfully investigate and prosecute six federal slavery cases and educating NGOs worldwide about the farmworkers’ human-rights-based approach for countering slavery.
Lucas Benitez, co-founder of the PC(USA)-backed Coalition of Immokalee Workers, told lawmakers that tomato pickers are regularly abused, harassed, intimidated and in some instances, are held against their will in forced labor conditions. Photo by Fritz Meyer Benitez, speaking in Spanish with his words translated into English, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee that more cases of farmworker abuse are currently being investigated.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-VT; Edward Kennedy, D-MA; Dick Durbin, D-IL; and Sherrod Brown, D-OH, expressed concern for the farmworkers, calling the conditions they face in Florida’s farm fields tragic, appalling and deplorable. They said consumers would be shocked at the labor conditions of people who harvest Florida tomatoes.
Kennedy, the committee’s chairman, invoked Edward R. Murrow’s landmark 1960 documentary “Harvest of Shame,” which detailed the grim plight of migrant workers in Immokalee and elsewhere.
“Too little has changed over the years,” Kennedy said. The fact that there’s a need for hearings today shows “how far we have to go to provide genuine fairness and justice for this vulnerable workforce,” he said.
Sanders also decried conditions in the farm fields of south Florida pointing out that when he visited Immokalee in January, a 17-count indictment was handed down for enslavement of tomato workers.
“In America today we are seeing a race to the bottom, the middle class in many ways is collapsing, poverty is increasing,” said Sanders, who called for the hearings after returning from Immokalee. “What I saw in Immokalee is the bottom in the race to the bottom. And if we do not lift that bottom up, every worker in this country is in danger. So it is terribly important that we understand how in the year 2008 slavery — slavery can exist in Immokalee and how workers can be treated as badly as they are.”
Sanders said he will request an investigation into wages and working conditions in the tomato fields by the Government Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress. He said the committee was likely to push for greater protection of farmworkers, including changes to federal trafficking statutes that would hold growers and others higher in the food system responsible for these human rights abuses.
“This is the beginning, this is not the end,” Sanders said during the two-hour hearing.
Journalist Eric Schlosser, author of the bestseller, Fast Food Nation, and a long-time observer of farm labor conditions from California to Florida, began his testimony by saying, “What is happening right now in the tomato fields of Florida is so bad that it almost defies description, let alone belief.”
Committee members questioned the tomato industry’s claim that tomato pickers earn an average of $12.50 per hour.
“Please join with me in doing the basic math,” Durbin said in his opening statement.
Workers would have to fill and empty a 32-pound bucket of tomatoes, each worth about 45 cents, about every two minutes all day long to earn the $12.50, he said.
“Is that physically possible? I don’t think it is,” Durbin said.
Benitez said he would be happy if the growers would guarantee $12.50 an hour. He said even if some workers can earn that much or more picking tomatoes, they are paid less or not at all during the hours they wait for the dew to dry or get their tallies checked.
Benitez said because farm work has long been the exclusive domain of such a small and marginalized portion of the overall U.S. population, the vast majority of Americans “have no context in which to understand the reality of work that we do.”
The hearing on Capitol Hill came as tomato growers, represented by the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, have obstructed a penny-per-pound increase paid by Taco Bell parent Yum! Brands Inc. and McDonald’s to farmworkers harvesting for their Florida tomato suppliers.
Yum! Brands had been paying the increase to farmworkers since 2005 and McDonald’s was set to begin paying the penny-per-pound increase in the fall of 2007 as a part of historic agreements with the CIW. Both companies are currently paying this money into an escrow account, but the money isn’t reaching farmworkers because the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is prohibiting its grower-members from participating in the agreements.
Reginald Brown, executive vice president of the growers exchange, contends the workers are fairly paid and that attorneys have warned the exchange against participating in the penny-per-pound proposal because it could “open them up to lawsuits”' regarding anti-trust and labor laws. The exchange has threatened $100,000 fines against its members for participating.
But Sanders produced a letter signed by 26 labor law professors who called the fear of litigation “entirely ill-founded.”
And Sanders noted that McDonalds and Taco Bell’s owner, Yum! Brands Inc., had been willing to pay the extra penny following agreements with the CIW.
“You might want to reconsider the attorneys that you are currently consulting,” he told Brown.
Though Brown called charges of slavery on the farms “false and defamatory,” Collier County (FL) Sheriff’s Detective Charlie Frost told the committee “human trafficking has surreptitiously found its way into our society.” Frost said victims have been beaten and threatened, and his investigations have been hindered by threats against victims’ families.
“Today’s form of slavery does not bear the overt nature of pre-Civil War society, but it is nonetheless heinous and reprehensible,” Frost said.
To put an end to the debate surrounding farmworker wages, Benitez suggested growers offer a surcharge on their tomatoes — as they have done to offset spikes in oil prices or ease the cost of phasing out the pesticide methyl bromide — but with the money going to farmworkers.
“But in this case, the money won’t be going to Exxon or to Monsanto, but directly to the families of thousands of the poorest workers in the country,” Benitez said.
The Yum! Brands agreement Sanders referred to came about in March 2005 following a nearly four-year CIW-led boycott of Taco Bell.
The PC(USA)’s 214th General Assembly in 2002 endorsed the Taco Bell boycott and called for discussions involving Taco Bell, its tomato suppliers and CIW representatives.
In 2006, the PC(USA)’s 217th Assembly approved a resolution calling for ongoing work with the CIW in the campaign to get fast-food and grocery corporations to ensure the human rights of farmworkers harvesting their tomatoes by partnering with the CIW and advancing the precedents established in the Yum! Brands-CIW agreement.
Despite currently being engaged by farmworkers and consumers, most recently through the CIW’s petition to End Modern-Day Slavery and Sweatshops in the Fields, hamburger giant Burger King has remained adamant about not signing onto the penny-a-pound deal, saying that it buys tomatoes from repackers, not from growers, and has no way to get money to the workers.
“We’ve always been interested in finding a way to assure decent wages and modern working conditions for the tomato harvesters in Immokalee,” Burger King spokesman Keva Silversmith said in a published report.
But there was not much sympathy at the hearing for those benefiting from the sweat of farmworkers.
Sen. Durbin said: “If Florida tomato growers can’t live with workers being paid a decent wage, then I can live without tomatoes from Florida on my hamburgers.”
For information about the PC(USA)’s Campaign for Fair Food, click here. |
