Farmworkers walk a long road

WHEN SEVERAL hundred Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) members and supporters set out from Tampa, Fla., on April 16 on a 22-mile trek to the Lakeland headquarters of grocery goliath Publix Corp., it was just one more leg of a 17-year journey of historic importance to the cause of social and labor justice.

Seventeen and counting.

The CIW's mission is to end the dire plight of Florida tomato pickers, whose below-minimum wage has stagnated for three decades. Working conditions are so debased that there have been seven successfully prosecuted federal cases of modern-day slavery affecting more than 1,000 workers there since 1997. An eighth case, involving human trafficking as well as the enslavement, sexual abuse and forced labor of a 15-year-old Guatemalan girl, is now pending.

The Publix supermarket chain, Florida's largest private employer, is the latest target of CIW's Campaign for Fair Food. The campaign has won agreements with the four largest fast-food chains, including McDonalds and Burger King, and the two largest food-service corporations in the U.S. The largest of those is Compass Group, which signed an agreement with CIW just over six months ago. The congressional dining room is among its hundreds of clients.

Three weeks ago, Aramark agreed to pay workers a penny per pound more for tomatoes, and to commit to a code of conduct developed by CIW for the ethical treatment of the workers. The CIW also demands zero tolerance for slavery--a stipulation that is shocking for having to be made explicit.

The weekend march to Lakewood was the biggest event to date targeting Publix, far outdistancing two other protests over the past four months. By Sunday, the few hundred faithful had ballooned to well over 1,000 participants, as supporters caravanned or flew in from points near and far.

The penny per pound increase, where it has been implemented, raises the piecework rate from about 1.4 to 2.4 cents per pound of tomatoes. Instead of 45 cents for each 32-pound bucket of tomatoes, which has been the standard since the late 1970s, tomato pickers will receive 77 cents.

Even with the increase, workers will earn less than $100 per day for picking as much as two tons of tomatoes, or the equivalent of over 40 years of tomato consumption by the average U.S. citizen, according to a USDA source. No worker has benefits and--owing to a race-based, repressive provision in the New Deal-era National Labor Relations Act--farmworkers have no collective right to organize a union.

But even the penny-per-pound proposal seems too much for Publix. Management's public relations spinners erected a wall of denial.

While none responded to multiple requests for comments made on the first day of the march and on the following Tuesday, a pattern of disengagement and admitting no wrongdoing already had been established. As Publix Director of Media and Community Relations Maria Brous told the Produce Business journal in May 2009:

We have stayed out of Fair Trade. We believe that those are issues that need to be handled outside of our arena. We are not involved. We encourage the parties to come to the table and have those discussions and our job, at the end of the day, is to be a responsible supplier to our customers, be an outlet. We do not engage in this regard. We are very respectful. We don't like anybody coming into our house telling us how to do business.

Regional Media and Community Relations Manager Shannon Patten told reporters last week, "As a community partner for nearly 80 years, it would be unconscionable to believe that our company would support a violation of human rights. Publix is unaware of a single instance of slavery existing in its supply chain."

But company representatives didn't address the fact that Publix continued to purchase from two companies implicated in slavery for 15 months.

EVEN WITH much cause for sadness, farmworkers' attitudes are more often joyful. Against powerful corporate opposition, including attempts at infiltration and provocation, the CIW members' determination is unwavering.

"We're going to continue forward with the campaign until they sign," Meghan Cohorst said. She is a national coordinator with the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA), a multi-campus-based group that has been working with CIW for 10 years to carry its message to colleges across Florida and beyond. "It's time for Publix to follow the lead of the eight companies that have already signed agreements."

The SFA, which helped organize the march and rally, was one of dozens of groups from across the country that supports the farmworkers' cause.

"It's very important to recognize that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have vision, they see who has the power," Maria Cisneros, who was part of a consortium of groups that traveled from Minneapolis, said through a translator. "It's these corporations that often hide behind the different landowners and intermediaries, but they're the ones that have the power."

Cisneros' group, Mujeres en Liderazgo (Women in Leadership), empowers women to be activist leaders for immigrants' rights issues in Minnesota. She and her contingent embodied the fervor for social justice, workers' rights and fair food that the CIW campaign has inspired across the country.

Sue and Tom West drove from Venice, Fla., for Saturday's march from Plant City to Publix headquarters in Lakeland. A couple in their 70s, they walked the entire second half of the day's 11 miles. They said many others from their church, Epiphany Cathedral, also supported the tomato pickers after a fact-finding group from the church recently visited the heart of the tomato-growing region.

"When I went to Immokalee last month, we saw how little these people are paid, how much they have to pay for rent," Sue said. "They have one room with four men in it for a thousand dollars. It's inhumane."

She also expressed disgust that Publix, whose stores the Wests have patronized for decades, only two weeks ago announced that it had ended its purchasing agreement with two Immokalee growers, Six L's and Pacific, which were both implicated in the most recent federal slavery cases. The Publix announcement came more than 15 months after the convictions in December 2008.

"Publix is not really saying much as far as righting the wrongs. One cent per pound will make an enormous difference in the lives of these people," Sue said.

Jeremy Amouak of Lawrence Fair Food in Kansas spoke for his group of a half-dozen activists who had come to Tampa. "Lawrence Fair Food stands for food being produced locally and also for justice in the food system nationally," he said.

Established along with other Fair Food groups across the U.S. for the specific purpose of supporting the CIW, these activists will be even more instrumental once CIW shifts its primary campaign away from Publix. One group in the CIW's sights is Ahold, a Dutch-owned corporate whale with numerous grocery chains including Stop & Shop and Giant. An even bigger fish in the dedicated grocery business is Kroger.

The largest owner of chain grocery stores in the country, Kroger runs two in the Lawrence area, Dillons and QuikStop. While an initial overture to Dillons already has been made, a more concerted focus on the parent corporation is still in the offing. First impressions, however, were unexpectedly good.

"Dillons was very open to talking with us, and they brought someone from Kroger corporate to our march. Gerardo [Reyes, a CIW staff member] actually spoke with them about three weeks ago," said Amouak. But he wouldn't predict how the relationship would progress once Kroger is confronted with the CIW's demands. "I hope it will lead to meaningful change," Amouak said.

Agricultural Missions is a national ecumenical group. One of its veteran staffers from Louisville, Ky., Stephen Bartlett, cited CIW gatherings as historically providing "strong tools for building the social movements at the base....diverse and active and rich social movements to change basic structures of oppression."

"I think there is more and more momentum all the time," he said of CIW. "I feel like part of the family after being in some of their struggles for the past nine years."

Bartlett initially got behind CIW during its first "penny per pound" campaign beginning in 2001. Aimed at Taco Bell, and thrust onto college campuses with the slogan "Boot the Bell," a hard-won victory finally came in March 2005 in the form of CIW's first signed fair food agreement. Bartlett said that he's been involved in every campaign since.

A student at the University of South Florida in Sarasota, Garret Ean came with friends from Students Working for Equal Rights, a group based at New College in Sarasota.

"I think it's important for individuals to be conscious of their buying habits," he said. "And that's something that consumers can control, that they usually don't take advantage of because they think these things are being taken care of by government regulation and other sorts of social controls. I believe the responsibility is on the individual."

A dancer with Cetiliztli Nauhcampa, which performed over the weekend, is now residing in New York City. She had previously fought for immigrant rights with Gente Unida, a San Diego coalition which, along with the International Socialist Organization and other groups, had confronted anti-immigrant Minutemen actions in Southern California several years ago.

"What brought me here?" she mused, "What brings me out to every protest is just where I came from. My grandfather came here and struggled, and didn't have papers, and didn't speak English. I feel as Chicanos and Chicanas living in the U.S., it's good when we can give back and help out other families that are developing in the U.S."

ON SUNDAY, before the weekend's final push--a protest in front of a Publix store on downtown Lakeland's main drag, capped off by a two-mile march to the weekend's closing rally in Munn Park--the various contingents broke off into large groups of students and social justice organizations for some give-and-take.

Farmworkers mixed with day laborers and factory workers to share stories with painfully similar outlines, but nonetheless inspiring trajectories.

When Maria Santos came to Immokalee, nobody gave her an instruction manual. At the end of her first day of work in the fields, some nine years ago, she remembers she picked 70 buckets of tomatoes. Her boss said, "Oh, I'll pay you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow came and went. He didn't pay," she said through a translator. "And a week came and went, and he didn't pay. I had a friend, and she told me about the coalition, and I went, and they made that boss pay me. But I know there are other workers in Immokalee who still don't know what their rights are, and [bosses] treat their workers badly because they think they can get away with it."

Silvia Martinez, representing the 70-member Proyecto Defensa Laboral from Austin, Texas, spoke of violations of day laborers' rights in her city. Her group educates workers on how to protect themselves from predatory employers. "A lot of contractors go and take the people to work and they don't pay. This happens to everyone, people from Haiti, Mexicans, Guatamaltecans, it's a big problem."

Claudia de la Cruz's grandmother had told her about the grinding poverty and exploitation from her days working in the rice fields of the Dominican Republic. De la Cruz, the pastor at Iglesia San Romero de las Americas in New York City, speaks with gratitude about being able to escape such a difficult life, but also of maintaining her grandmother's values in the context of a devout anti-imperialist theology of liberation.

"I was able to learn those values very young, based in community, based in sharing, based in collectiveness and consensus building," she said. "The hierarchical model did not work at home." She has also applied that model to her work with a host of women's and health causes in her Washington Heights neighborhood. "That came from the work in the fields, I believe."

Her proudly working-class view also evokes the structure of CIW, whose leaders have no titles other than "staff," and whose motto states, "We are all leaders."

FOR THE CIW, 4,000 members strong and growing, with eight major victories in its rearview mirror, the road immediately ahead is mapped out.

Sodexo, the next largest food-service provider, is one nearby destination where a foothold already is being established. Likewise for Kroger and Ahold--and at a more distant point as yet unmapped, even Wal-Mart's coordinates may well be marked down some day.

But Publix is the current stop, and it remains to be seen how long it will be necessary for CIW to hunker down before its hulking intransigence. "Sooner or later, they need to come to the table," veteran staffer Lucas Benitez insists. "There are two roads...on one road is more and more conflict; on the other road is reconciliation...and a better face for Publix."

He continued, "We know Publix does a lot of good things in the communities...And they say, 'We support families.' We asked for the same thing. We ask to support our families. So I don't know why they don't respond."

Benitez was happy for the wide range of support on display at the event. In addition to the dozens of community-based groups from across the country, he was thankful for a contingent of supporters from organized labor who attended. Of these, UNITE HERE was the most visible.

"The challenges that these workers are facing are very similar to ours," noted Eric Clinton, who heads the 5,500-member UNITE HERE Local 362. His local covers virtually all the 5,000 workers at Disneyworld and another 500 at both major airports in Orlando and Tampa.

While Benitez, whose CIW commitments cover a full plate, would not predict any future effort to push for the farmworkers' right to organize, Clinton insists they should have that right. "Absolutely! That's a fundamental cornerstone in our country," he said.

"It's Wal-Mart on steroids when it comes to oppressing workers," Clinton added, speaking of the CIW workers' situation. "And for a company like Publix, which makes as much money as they do, to say 'We're not going to be involved'...C'mon, do the right thing!"

"We expect Publix to take responsibility the same way other corporations have done already," echoed Gerardo Reyes, another longtime CIW staff member. "There's no reason for them to continue to ignore this because there's already a system that is working and in place. It's time for them to do the right thing."

Carrying the successful CIW paradigm forward, as Reyes sees it, "We have to expand the agreements to the rest of the industry."

For others on the left, for socialists in the U.S., we also have to wonder how this movement may potentially resonate more broadly in the context of class conflict and the proletarian struggle. We, need it be said, are not Bolivia, where a largely campesino orchestrated struggle has significantly, if not universally, taken control of much of the country.

But the democratic nature and the strategic wisdom of the CIW's struggle, as evidenced in its successes, clearly carry a power and appeal that is more than symbolic. It is a cause to which socialists cannot help but feel an alliance and extend a hand. It is the potential stuff of real societal transformation.

"I think that this movement absolutely has ripple affects on the rest of the left in the U.S. This is one of the biggest, most successful corporate accountability campaigns that anybody my age has seen," noted Candace Vallejo, a Fair Food organizer and student from the University of Texas in Austin. "This has made the biggest splash."