The Nation: Farmworkers and Students Take On Burger King

Farmworkers and Students Take On Burger King
Michael Gould-Wartofsky



It's tomato season in Immokalee, Florida. Today, like every other day, the tomato pickers will emerge from their trailers in the dark before dawn, and twelve hours later, they will return in the dark of the Florida night.

In the interval, the pickers will be picked up in battered trucks and shipped off to the fields. They will stoop and sweat to fill buckets with tomatoes, thirty-two pounds of them, for forty-five cents a bucket (the same piece rate, in real dollars, as in 1980). They will have to work fast and pick two tons today if they want to take home minimum wage.

The tomatoes will make their way to the growers, then to the vendors, then on to Whoppers and Happy Meals at fast food joints across the country. The money saved by paying poverty wages--or in extreme cases, nothing at all--will find its way into the profit margins of corporations like Burger King.

On November 30, the King's corporate castle was under siege as the tomato pickers, most of them immigrant workers organized through the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), surged from the fields of Immokalee into the streets of Miami on a nine-mile march.

Their demands were simple: Pay a penny more per pound. Work with the CIW to end the abuse of workers. Zero tolerance for modern-day slavery in the fields. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071231/gould-wartofsky