Trumps Tomatoes
COMMENTARY March 16, 2016, 2:22 pm
The story behind the billionaires fast food of choice
By Andrew Cockburn
According to the Washington Post, guests on Donald Trumps luxurious personal 757 jetgold-plated seat-belt buckles!who get peckish and order a burger are served Wendys. It would have to be Wendys. No other food chain strives so hard to avoid buying tomatoes from Florida, where they are almost guaranteed to have been picked by immigrants, a policy surely appealing to Trump. Admittedly, the tomatoes in question are quite possibly picked by a worker confined in conditions of near slavery, paid minimal amounts and forced to scavenge for food, but at least he or she is not an immigrant working in this country.
To understand the background to the Wendys guarantee, we have to go back to the beginning of the century, when a workers rights group in Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, pioneered an innovative and effective strategy. Agricultural workers are a traditionally exploited group, excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, the New Deal law enshrining basic workers rights such as collective bargaining. Conditions have been especially dire for the men and women, almost entirely immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who picked the Florida fruit and vegetable crops. In 2001, tomato pickers were still being paid the forty cents per thirty-two-pound bucket of tomatoes that they were two decades earlier. (Some received nothing at all. When I visited Immokalee in 2001, the C.I.W. had just uncovered a slave camp nestled between a Ramada Inn and a retirement community in the little town of Lake Placid, the fifth such operation busted by the Coalition in the past six years. Inmates who tried to escape risked beatings or worse.)
Naturally, the workers had fought for better conditions using traditional means, but a number of strikes had yielded only defeat. In 2001, however, the C.I.W. conceived and adopted a new strategy, targeting not the agribusinesses that employed and exploited them, but the farmers corporate customers, using the leverage of consumers social conscience. In the first such campaign, the group fomented a nationwide boycott of Taco Bell. The demand was simple: Commit to paying an extra penny a pound directly to the pickers. This Boycott the Bell movement, augmented with widely publicized hunger strikes by C.I.W. organizers, caught on across the country, especially on college campuses. Eventually Yum! Brands Inc., the parent company of Taco Bell, caved and accepted the terms.
Over successive years other giant enterprises have fallen into line. Burger King, McDonalds, Chipotle, and Walmart all eventually signed on to the Fair Food Program, a C.I.W. initiative in which participating retailers agree to purchase Florida tomatoes exclusively from suppliers who observe a specified code of conduct that includes zero-tolerance for slavery and sexual violence, as well as the direct penny-a-pound payments.
More:
https://harpers.org/blog/2016/03/trumps-tomatoes/
Rhiannon12866
(205,288 posts)And if any of us still doubted that Trump is a cruel and irredeemable bigot...
Donkees
(31,392 posts)Published on Mar 5, 2016
Working families of Immokalee, Florida, have been fighting exploitation by the agricultural industry. "I will always fight. As long as I can see my children happy and well, I will continue fighting to provide them with the best. My children are the motor that drives my life, Udelia says.
In 2008, Bernie traveled to Immokalee and met with migrant workers who were being ruthlessly exploited. He told the story to Congress in the hopes of improving their condition, and succeeded. But how many more Immokalees are there? How many fields or factories are there? We have to ask ourselves who benefits from this exploitation?' And to understand that it is not only the Immokalee workers who suffer but every worker in America because that pushes us in a race to the bottom.
We appreciate the use of footage from the award winning documentary Food Chains, directed by Sanjay Rawal.
Rhiannon12866
(205,288 posts)We know that he always advocates for the oppressed...