Labor & Employment Law

Tomato Pickers? Struggle Coming to a Grocery Store Near You

By James Parks

The fight for justice for tomato pickers is headed to grocery store aisles across the country now that the top three food service companies and the four largest fast-food companies have signed agreements to improve wages and working conditions in the Florida tomato fields.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) announced earlier this week that Sodexo, the largest food service company in the nation, had agreed to pay an additional 1.5 cents for every pound of Florida tomatoes it purchases, with the extra money going directly to the harvesters.

At least 30,000 immigrant farm workers in Florida pick 95 percent of the nation’s tomato crop between October and June. The workers are demanding safer, more humane working conditions and a penny more per pound of tomatoes picked. Florida tomato pickers earn 45 cents for a 32-pound bucket of tomatoes, a rate that has not changed for three decades.

Sodexo joins a growing list of companies that have signed agreements with CIW, including Aramark, Compass Group North America, Bon Appetit Management Co., Subway, Taco Bell and its corporate parent, Yum! Brands, McDonald?s, Burger King, Whole Foods Market and the Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurant chain.

CIW spokesperson Lucas Benitez said:

Together with Sodexo and our other partners, we are building a system of real accountability, with tangible consequences for growers who fail to protect farm workers? basic rights. It is our belief that such accountability, with worker input, will be the foundation for lasting improvements in the industry.

The farm workers? focus now has shifted to the supermarket industry. Wal-Mart, which alone sells 25 percent of all food sold in U.S. grocery stores, along with the Publix, Ahold and Kroger supermarket chains, has tremendous market power in the produce industry. And as an Immokalee press release says:

 ?with great power comes great responsibility?both for the poverty and brutal working conditions from which they have profited for so many years, and for the work of reforming farm labor conditions in their supply chains that lies ahead.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on August 26, 2010 (boomark / email).