Tomato Pickers Win Big At Taco Bell

Many U.S. farm laborers are immigrants, often undocumented, and routinely face working and living conditions that are unthinkable to most Americans. Conditions may include long hot work days, little or no access to drinking water or toilets, and beatings or other harassment. Some workers have even been held at gunpoint in the fields. 

For this life, farmworkers in the U.S. generally earn about 40 cents for picking 32 pounds of tomatoes, the same rate in real terms as they earned 30 years ago. A picker has to gather fully one ton of tomatoes to earn $25. 

In the late 1970s wages in the fields began a precipitous decline and continued dropping throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Then in 1993 a group of farm laborers in Immokalee, the largest agricultural center in Florida, began meeting in a local church to talk about how to bring about change.  

O ver the next few years the group organized a number of work stoppages, combined with public pressure, including three general strikes, a month-long hunger strike, and a 230-mile march from Ft. Myers to Orlando in 2000. By the end of the 1990s the Coalition of Immokalee Workers had won wage increases of 13-25 percent across the industry, not just for themselves. This series of victories ended the 20-year plummet of farmworker pay and raised wage rates back to the mid-1970’s level, earning farmworker communities several million dollars a year. 

Lucas Benitez, of the CIW, believes the extra penny per pound paid by Taco Bell should substantially improve the wages of about 1,000 tomato pickers employed by Taco Bell suppliers. He says that under the new agreement these workers could earn up to 72 cents for a 32-pound bucket, an increase of 80 percent. “It would mean almost reaching the poverty level,” Benitez told one reporter. 

Outside The Bun 

T aco Bell and its corporate owner had resisted CIW’s demands for years, saying that the fast food giant was only one buyer of Florida tomatoes and that it would agree only if the rest of the industry would also pay more. In fact, as most union organizers understand, resistance to unions is rarely about the money alone. 

As if to prove this, Taco Bell at one point offered to make a direct payment to CIW of $100,000, the same amount as the company’s estimate of the total cost of the penny per pound “pass through.” The company said they intended the payment to help CIW lobby the state legislature for protective regulations on the industry as a whole—and of course to stop the protests. CIW rejected the offer. 

Taco Bell had also argued from the beginning that it was not the direct employer of the tomato pickers. This is true, but the additional point and the implication, that the chain had no control over its tomato suppliers, is not true. As a huge buyer of tomatoes, CIW argued, Taco Bell applied constant pressure on its suppliers to keep costs low, which in turn exerted downward pressure on the pickers’ wages. Echoing the company’s own ad campaign, CIW urged Taco Bell to “think outside the bun.” 

It is a slogan the Immokalee Workers take to heart. Their strategies show remarkable creativity and savvy, adapting their organizing to labor markets that combine 19th century conditions with the latest innovations in capitalist globalization. Their internal egalitarianism, too, is almost unique among modern-day unions. Even Benitez, who often speaks for the group, avoids using an official title. “We are all leaders,” he and others in CIW will say, when asked. 

The Immokalee Workers see themselves as part of a movement, fighting for the rights of an entire community, not just their dues-paying members. Their lack of legal rights forces them to rely upon a wide variety of persuasive techniques, but what it does not force is the overcautious narrowness of purpose as in the standard union model. Theirs is a community unionism—one that wins. 

The CIW strategy also seems to involve widening that community to encompass concerned individuals and groups other than farmworkers. The Taco Bell campaign reached out to churches, labor unions and student-labor networks established in the anti-sweatshop movement. They often made this last connection explicit, calling for an end to “the sweatshops in the fields.” 

The student campaign hit the company where it hurt. Taco Bell’s main marketing target is 18-to- 24-year-olds, collectively known in the restaurant’s market strategies as “The new hedonism generation.” In the end, students at more than 20 high schools and colleges—including UCLA, University of Notre Dame, and the University of Chicago—organized “Boot the Bell” mini-campaigns to block or kick out on-campus Taco Bell restaurants. 

CIW also works with the U.S. Department of Justice, so far forcing at least five federal prosecutions on human slavery charges, most recently involving 3 Florida citrus growers who had been holding over 700 workers in slavery. Overall, the group’s website proclaims, “We have liberated over 1,000 workers.” 

Together with some of its allies, CIW co-founded the national Freedom Network Institute on Human Trafficking and now serves as Regional coordinator for the south- eastern U.S. for the Institute. In this capacity, the group conducts trainings for law enforcement and social service personnel in identifying and assisting victims of slavery, in addition to their advocacy for full prosecution of all traffickers, both corporations and subcontractors. 

This anti-slavery work continues, as does the overall fight against poverty in the fields. Both depend heavily on CIW’s grassroots organizing. Given that there is no government enforcement agency to oversee an agreement, such as the new Taco Bell accord, for example, constant vigilance will be the price of victory. There are other buyers, too—as CIW noted before the ink was dry. 

“Systemic change to ensure human rights for farmworkers is long-overdue. Taco Bell has now taken an important leadership role by securing the penny per pound pass-through from its tomato suppliers and by the other efforts it has committed to undertake to help win equal rights for farmworkers,” Benitez told reporters. “But our work together is not done. Now we must convince other companies that they have the power to change the way they do business and the way workers are treated.” 

Benitez said the Immokalee Workers are open to future protests and boycotts to pressure other produce buyers into helping the farmworkers. “Anything is possible in this struggle,” he said.