Today’s Good News: Coalition of Immokalee Workers Keeps Winning For Farmworkers

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In the past couple of months, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has signed up McDonald’s and the remaining Yum! brand restaurants to its “Fair Food” campaign. The companies will pay farmworkers a penny more per pound of tomatoes picked. This may not sound like much, but the increase effectively doubles farmworkers’ wages.

CIW, a small group of farmworkers from southwest Florida, over the past few years has brought together labor leaders like AFL-CIO’s John Sweeney, faith leaders, human rights groups, and artists including Martin Sheen and Zack de la Rocha and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine to support their cause. The farmworkers and their allies are known as the Alliance for Fair Food. They won an agreement first with Taco Bell, with McDonald’s in April, and now with the other Yum! brands: KFC, Long John Silver’s, Pizza Hut, and A&W. The agreements cover not only the extra payments, but also involve workers in monitoring companies for human rights abuses.

Here’s a few words from Kerry Kennedy, RFK’s daughter and the head of the Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, as she made a recent speech congratulating CIW.

“More than 40 years [after the California grape boycott led by the UFW], labor laws, pay and working conditions remain grim for farmworkers. The struggle continues for farmworkers and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has picked up Cesar Chavez’s torch…

“My father once said ‘there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the bomb or the shot in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay.’ The farmworkers of Immokalee, Florida toil in fields ripe with institutional indifference…

“The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has helped prosecute six slavery cases of involuntary servitude involving over 1,000 farmworkers in Florida since 1997.”

Burger King is next in CIW’s sights. If you’d like to help or learn more, check them out at http://www.ciw-online.org/news.html

 

 

Filed by Karen on June 1st, 2007 under Economic Issues, Labor, Media, Music, Poverty


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