Romney’s Firm Refuses to Protect Farm Workers from Sweatshop Conditions

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/02/01/romneys-firm-refuses-to-protect-farm-workers-from-sweatshop-conditions/

by Tula Connell, Feb 1, 2008

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) founded Bain Capital in 1984. In December 2002, Bain Capital joined with two other buyout firms to purchase Burger King for $1.5 billion. To date, Bain Capital and its partners have nearly tripled their original out-of-pocket investment. Bain Capital and its partner firms own roughly 43 percent of Burger King and control six seats on the company’s board. During his tenure at Bain Capital, he stayed on the sidelines as the firm slashed jobs at the office supply manufacturer “in marked contrast to his recent pledges to beleaguered autoworkers in Michigan and textile workers in South Carolina to ” ‘fight to save every job.’ “

During the same time, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a community organization in Immokalee, Fla., organized the Campaign for Fair Food, calling on major buyers of Florida tomatoes to take responsibility for the chronic poverty and horrific labor abuses faced by tomato workers. Earlier this month, federal officials arrested Antonia Zuniga Vargas with virtually enslaving immigrant workers in south Florida, charging her with conspiring to make money off workers from Mexico and Guatemala, forging documents and committing identity theft. (Click here to view photos of farm workers in the fields for 10 to 12 hours a day and the broken-down trailers they return home to each night.)

The CIW campaign achieved several unprecedented successes, bringing companies like McDonald’s and Yum! Brands behind two key principles: economic relief for farm workers through a penny-per-pound surcharge passed on directly to workers in the form of a raise in the piece rate and a code of conduct with strict consequences for violating workers’ rights.

Burger King has chosen to join with the most extreme elements of Florida’s tomato industry to undermine these agreements and enable a “harvest of shame.” Will Mitt Romney and Bain Capital continue to support a system that keeps workers in subpoverty conditions? Will they stand silently as these workers’ modest gains are rolled back?

In the past decade, there have been six federal criminal prosecutions in Florida for forced labor and slavery of farm workers, resulting in prison terms and the freeing of more than 1,000 workers. Farm workers have few protections, with most workers earning subpoverty wages and excluded from the right to overtime pay and to organize and bargain collectively.

In the latest Florida slavery investigation, prosecutors filed charges against four farm labor employers in Immokalee accused of locking and chaining workers inside U-Haul trucks, holding workers in debt and beating workers who tried to leave.

[robinlynne]

1. shit. I work for getty, and it looks as if Bain Capital is about to buy it.

I do not want these people to own me, or my contract....

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. Romney probably favors sweatshop conditions for farm workers.

More money for him. That's the Republican way.

[MadMaddie]

3. That's why it's ironic that he is anti-immigration and yet

works workers in these conditions.


And believe me the billions he supposedly made making good business decisions..was on the backs of acquisitioned companies, laid off American workers and illegal workers.