Down With the King: protests around the US

Students, unions, churches oppose human slavery in tomato fields, demand justice

(Champaign) Burger King stores around the US will see protests this weekend as thousands of students, union members and community supporters turn out to say NO to slavery and other abuses in Florida tomato fields and demand that the Burger King corporation pay just one cent more per pound of tomatoes it buys.

Actions are planned this weekend for cities from Miami to Los Angeles, Washington to Chicago and Detroit, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Austin, Texas, Carbondale and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

Last month McDonald’s corporation agreed to pay the penny per pound and to work with farmworkers to improve conditions and eliminate slavery, just as Taco Bell had in 2005. Burger King has refused, instead offering to recruit some farmworkers to work in BK restaurants – which would be a raise for most tomato pickers, who have to pick 2-1/2 tons of tomatoes a day (10-12 hours) just to earn $50. This has been the basic piece rate for 30 years.

But the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Florida-based association of Mexican, Guatemalan, Haitian and other farmworkers, say no way. Somebody still has to pick the tomatoes, they say. And members of the grassroots group say their goal is not to simply gain better lives for themselves, but to improve conditions for all farmworkers.

Abuses in the fields include beatings, pistol-whipping and other physical and mental mistreatment. At times workers have been held in the fields at gunpoint, locked into squalid labor camps overnight, even run over in trucks when they tried to escape.

There have been six federal convictions of grower involved in human trafficking in the last ten years, largely due to the CIW's anti-slavery campaign. The most recent conviction was a family who ran potato and other fields from the Carolinas to southern Florida, worked by African American citizens of the US recruited from homeless shelters and fed crack cocaine.

Farmworkers are being bought and sold in Florida today for $1000-4000. Big buyers like Burger King have the power to put a stop to all these abuses including the subpoverty wages at a negligible cost to the corporation, if they want to.

Taco Bell estimated the cost of their agreement with CIW as about $150,000 a year. For a multibillion dollar company this is almost nothing. But the impact on farmworkers' lives in the Taco Bell supply chain is impressive: raises of up to 70 percent and an end to the fear and intimidation and physical abuse.

Together we CAN make a difference.

Local protest:

SATURDAY MAY 12
12 noon - 1 pm

Burger King on N. Prospect
(near Meijer, Applebees, Target)

Please see also www.ciw-online.org for more info.