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VT Towns vs. Biotech
Brian Tokar
South End Press: 25 Years …
Site Administrator
Special Report
Justin Podur
Interview
Domenico Pacitti
Caserolazos
Site Administrator
Fog Watch
Edward Herman
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Ralph Nader
Gay and Lesbian Community Notes
Michael Bronski
Interview
David Barsamian
Commentary
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Features
Israel-Palestine Crisis
Stephen R. Shalom
Picking Tomatoes, Picking Fights
Scott Sink
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James Seckington
Zaps
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Picking Tomatoes, Picking Fights
Scott Sink
In Immokalee, Florida, when the bus came to a stop, several workers had already crowded around the door. Their eyes revealed a tense urgency, anxiously scanning the seven-foot rows of tomato plants in the dark, misty pre-dawn. As soon as the door opened, they stampeded towards a pile of plastic crates, the first ones there being able to grab three or four. Just as suddenly, the workers ran out to the field, disappearing in the maze of grape tomato plants strung together. The incessant “thud” of grape tomatoes landing in the bins began.
Tomato pickers work at such a frenzied pace because they don't know when they'll be working next. Paid by how many buckets they pick, contractors often leave them on the bus for hours before the workday begins. After carefully filling up the 20 pound bin, making sure not to pick the green ones, the workers carry it to the truck to be loaded where the contractors give them a ticket for every 20 pound crate. These tickets are turned in at the end of the day, worth $2.50 each.
Before long, the truck filled up and went off to the packing plant. Meanwhile, workers with filled crates waited for another truck before they could start picking again. It could be hours, hours they're not paid for. In this way workers who beat others to the crates, taking more than one, are at an advantage.
Contractors, calculating the yield of the crop and the work- force, benefit from this set-up. An excess of pickers tends to work more frantically when they have to compete against each other as well as race against the clock. Also, workers are compelled to go back over picked plants and pick tomatoes off the ground.
In Orange County, California, an ominous skyscraper bears the Taco Bell logo. Taco Bell's world headquarters—located in Irvine, CA—is the staging ground for a recent protest for farm- workers' rights, organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). Taco Bell, owned by Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc. is a major buyer of Florida tomatoes.
One of Taco Bell's principal tomato buyers, Six L's, pays tomato pickers 40 cents for every 32- pound bucket of tomatoes, the same rate paid in 1978. The CIW who represent approximately 3,000 farm workers in Immokalee, Florida, has organized several protests, as well as a national boycott of Taco Bell. The CIW is proposing that Taco Bell pay one cent more per pound of tomatoes, passing the extra penny on to the pickers, which would nearly double their pay. But the company has refused to meet with them, saying it's not their “position” to become “involved” in the affairs of other companies.
Finally, last March the CIW organized a two-week long national Taco Bell Truth Tour—a caravan of Immokalee migrant farm workers. After stops in several major cities across the U.S., the caravan arrived at Taco Bell Headquarters in Irvine, California for a March 11 protest and demanded to meet with the company. Facing pressure, the company finally agreed to meet with the farm workers and the CIW.
Immokalee (pronounced im- MAH-kuh-lee) is an unincorporated Florida town of 70,000, about half of whom are migrant laborers. About 50 percent are from Mexico, approximately 30 percent are from Guatemala and Central American countries, and about 20 percent are from Haiti.
Every morning, the parking lot in front of the Mexicana #5 Market in the center of town fills up with contractors' buses. To the sound of roosters crowing, workers head down the dark streets and fill up the buses. Although the availability of work can change on a daily basis, most workers tend to stay with one contractor in one industry, often determined by ethnicity. For example, grape tomatoes are picked primarily by Guatemalans and southern Mexicans, whereas Haitians and Mexicans prefer to pick oranges.
Unfortunately, it is harder for indigenous people from Mexico and Guatemala to find work in the U.S. than for mestizos (also called criollos, meaning of mixed race), because of language barriers and anti-indigenous racism. So the indigenous wind up being the most vulnerable and marginalized sector of workers. What's more, the immigration status (either documented or undocumented) of most farm workers serves as a hindrance to fair labor practices.
Unfair labor practices addressed by the CIW have included beatings by contractors, refusal to pay workers, pay cuts and exposure to Monsanto's Roundup, a highly toxic pesticide, as well as other controversial pesticides.
Many migrant workers in Florida's fields are from Oaxaca, such as Sabino, a 29-year-old tomato picker from a Mixtec Community. He explains that he can earn “$50 to $60, or maybe $20 to $30” a day, “depending on how many hours” the contractors allow him to work. Often “they only let us work two hours and then they send us home.”
Antonio, a 41-year-old orange-picker from Central Mexico, tells of picking oranges “in the dark at 6:30 AM. You go out there and you don't even earn enough to do the laundry. It's not right.”
Antonio has worked in Immokalee for 15 years, sending money to his family in Mexico. He remembers the time a contractor savagely beat a farm worker, which the CIW responded to with a general strike and a march from the Mexicana #5 parking lot to the contractor's house. “The bosses don't act like they used to.”
He shows me his green card, which is actually pink nowadays. Antonio explains that the contractors “prefer the undocumented worker, because they have him in their hands. They don't give him a check stub.”
Nicolas, a 51-year-old orange picker from Mexico City is supportive of the CIW strikes, but concerned that many workers won't be able to afford missing work. For example, many “Guatemalans earn $10 to $15 a day picking tomatoes.”
Both Antonio and Nicolas say they aren't able to pick as many oranges as when they were young. Before, Nicolas says he could pick 15 to 20 bags of oranges a day, each bag weighing about 63 kilograms (approximately his body weight). But lately he can only pick about 10 bags a day. “It really concerns me that I'm not going to be able to retire.”
The average farm worker is 21 years old and retirement in this industry is unheard of. Nicolas remarks that he makes about $8,000 a year before taxes. “The government is on my back, and the big-bellied contractors won't give me anything.” Having worked in Immokalee since 1990, after applying for papers in 1988, Nicolas estimates that “not even half of us have papers.”
Another orange picker said that he paid $300 in 1994 to be taken to Westminster, Orange County, just miles away from Taco Bell's headquarters, where he worked for several years.
Due in part to increased militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border, he paid $1,400 recently to be taken to Georgia. He commented, “20 years paying the same rate.... Just look at how much rent has gone up.” Pointing to a Taco Bell Truth Tour flyer taped to the wall outside the store, the undocumented worker smiled: “I hope it brings some results.” Z
Scott Sink, an activist from the Orange County, CA Boycott Taco Bell campaign, along with activists Lee Siu Hin from ActionLA and Elizabeth Gotez of LA IMC, worked with migrant farm workers in Immokalee, FL in support of the workers' demands.