Last spring we organized a trip out to Immokalee, a patch of swampland in the center of southern Florida where great numbers of tomatoes are picked by immigrant workers who toil under the most horrifying conditions of exploitation. Our tour would be guided by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (www.ciw-online.org), a community-based worker organization that has been working since 1993 to increase wages, improve working conditions, and put an end to modern-day slavery (yes, slavery, see below) in Immokalee. In 2001 the CIW launched a national boycott of Taco Bell that called on the fast food giant to take responsibility for the human rights abuses that occur as tomatoes are being picked for its “restaurants” (a generous term for Taco Bell, I know). They were eventually victorious in their “Boot the Bell” campaign when students at 25 colleges and high schools—including Duke, UC Berkeley, Notre Dame, UCLA, and the University of Michigan—successfully pressured their administrations to kick Taco Bell off campus. In 2005 Taco Bell finally capitulated and agreed to meet all of the CIW’s demands to raise wages and improve working conditions. Since then the CIW has also won a two-year battle with McDonald’s and entered into comparable agreements with Burger King, Subway, and Whole Foods.
Needless to say, I find the CIW’s example tremendously inspiring in this time of global capitalism when it seems like corporations have absolute power over both workers and consumers and we are always being told that organized labor is a thing of the past. On Saturday our group was joined by a number of students from the University of South Florida and Outward Bound, totaling about 50 in all, at the CIW community center. The CIW is planning to launch a new campaign that targets the food service corporations (Aramark, Sodexo, and Compass) which are awarded contracts to feed students on college and high school campuses across America. Toward this end they have created the Student/Farmworker Alliance (www.sfalliance.org) which seeks to educate students who can then pressure their administrations in the manner that was so successful in the “Boot the Bell” campaign. A similar movement arose in the late 1990s calling itself Students Against Sweatshops, where students exposed the brutal conditions typically involved in making the clothing and apparel that display their school’s logo. These movements have proven successful because students are such a coveted demographic of consumers, and today’s corporations and universities are especially sensitive about protecting their image and brand names.
After a short presentation the CIW organizers took us out on a tour of Immokalee. Of course everything had a Third World feel to it, but it was also a bit like stepping back into the 19th century. Immokalee isn’t a “community” so much as it is an old-fashioned labor camp. After a trip to the parking lot where masses of prospective workers come every morning before 5 AM hoping to be picked up for work in the fields, we are taken on a walking tour of the residential area where some 20,000 people live in a 9 block area of rusted mobile homes and dilapidated shacks. The great majority of workers do not own cars, so they must live close to the parking lots where the buses pick them up for work. Our guide points to one of these decrepit trailers and informs us that between 10 and 15 people are typically living in one at any particular time. Most only have 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom, so people usually just throw down a mattress wherever they can, and if you need to cook something or take a shit then you’ll probably need to get in line. They rent for about 400 dollars per month because all of the trailers are owned by two families who can take advantage of their monopoly to jack up the rents. It’s the same story at the grocery store, where price gouging is routine because people don’t have the option to shop around when they’re on foot or riding a bicycle. With this in mind the CIW has recently established a little cooperative store that sells staples like tortillas and corn oil at wholesale prices, thus forcing the grocery store to lower their prices a bit.
Relatively speaking, the people living in the trailers are probably the lucky ones in Immokalee. Over the past several years the CIW has exposed 7 cases of slavery involving about 1,000 workers. The most recent case decided in December 2008 involved a family who would lock their workers in shacks and box trucks at night and tie, chain, and beat them if they tried to leave. The members of this Navarette family were convicted and are due to be sentenced in federal court. The CIW says that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that slavery is in fact rampant. It’s not hard to see how it happens: workers can be taken miles away from civilization into the Everglades, without a phone or a car, and so if you do escape, where are you going to run? Most of the workers are immigrants from Guatemala, southern Mexico, or Haiti, they don’t know anything about what little rights they do possess, they don’t speak English and frequently can’t even communicate with each other because they speak regional dialects, and of course the fear of deportation can be used against them in almost any situation.
Walking through Immokalee was depressing, to say the least. Far removed from either coast, it had already gotten oppressively hot in March, and periodically a dry wind would sweep through and smack our faces with dust and dirt. I tried to imagine what it would be like working in the fields in this baking sun, getting paid 40 fucking cents for every 32 pound bucket of tomatoes I could gather, meaning that I would need to pick 125 buckets of tomatoes—that’s two and a half tons—just to make 50 bucks. But when we got back to the CIW community center I felt a renewed sense of energy and hope. I reminded myself that these people had taken on some of the most powerful corporations in the world and actually won a little something for themselves. The CIW had created a community radio station and a couple of little kids were running around and playing like they were on the air. The CIW told us about how they had started hosted meetings for women’s groups and how the center would be packed every Saturday night when they showed movies on their projector. In other words, this isn’t just a labor movement, it’s a culture in the making. They don’t have any illusions about what they’re up against, but the collective sense of courage and
No comments:
Post a Comment