¡La Luta Continua!

Farmworkers Beat Burger King, But Face Resistance From Growers

– Tiffany Ten Eyck (this post is taken from the latest issue of Labor Notes)

Photo: Isaac Silver

In the David and Goliath match-up between the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the fast food industry, the little guy has tripped up the giant again. Bowing to an intense corporate campaign, Burger King signed an agreement in late May that conceded all of the farmworker organization’s demands. But a backlash from the growers that supply Burger King has at least temporarily halted the deal’s implementation.

It’s the third time in three years the CIW could claim victory against a behemoth corporation. After a four-year boycott of Taco Bell and pressure on its parent company, Yum! Brands, the CIW convinced the company in 2005 to meet all of its demands: a penny more per pound paid to Immokalee workers who pick tomatoes bought by the company, an enforceable code of conduct for growers and the industry, and an assurance that the CIW would have the ability to monitor and audit the penny pass-down.

According to the CIW, the extra penny would spike the rate paid for each 32-pound bucket picked, from an average of 45 cents to 77 cents. At the current rate, workers have to pick two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes each day to earn minimum wage.

Last April, just a year into their campaign against McDonald’s, CIW announced that it had also yielded to the farmworkers’ demands. Soon after, the rest of Yum!’s brands—A&W, Long John Silvers, KFC, and Pizza Hut—followed suit.

Burger King took just more than a year to crack. One of the toughest opponents the farmworkers have faced, BK fell after a tumultuous campaign that included a surveillance scandal and continued pressure from consumers. Burger King agreed to the same conditions as McDonald’s and Taco Bell, and more. The agreement includes an extra half-cent going directly to growers to cover the payroll and administrative costs that enacting the agreement would entail.

RESISTANCE FROM GROWERS

Even with the good news, CIW activists say there’s still much work to be done. Recent moves by the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (FTGE), which represents most Florida growers, have made it harder to transfer the corporations’ commitments—and pennies—down to the fields in Florida.

In the early years of the CIW’s history, farmworkers would target growers in the fields of south and central Florida, where wages were essentially unchanged since 1978. Growers said they simply could not afford to do anything about farmworker wages or conditions—they were being squeezed by purchasing conglomerates run by corporate buyers. The organization’s strategy of targeting the top of the supply chain, the mega-purchasers themselves, was born of these experiences.

Now, even with an ever-larger group of corporate buyers exerting pressure, the growers are still dragging their feet. After the April 2007 agreement with McDonald’s—which was to be put in place at the start of the growing season that fall—the growers took measures to prevent the money from reaching farmworkers’ pockets.

The FTGE told its members that if they passed down the corporations’ pennies, it would charge them a $100,000 fine per worker, per paycheck. FTGE Vice President Reggie Brown called the CIW’s agreements “illegal and un-American.”

Growers conceded, and the FTGE succeeded in stopping the penny pass-through that had been in place since the CIW won the Taco Bell boycott in 2005.

According to CIW staffer Julia Perkins, all three corporate entities have agreed to funnel the pennies into an escrow account until growers get back on board, an outcome the CIW says companies have committed to helping bring about.

“As the news of the agreement [with Burger King] came out, Brown said that the FTGE was not going to be implementing the fine,” said Perkins.

Brown’s reason for the change of heart? The media had been paying too much attention to his extreme fines, in the light of the CIW’s campaigns.

“We need to reach a tipping point,” said Perkins. “The more buyers that we have that are telling their growers: ‘lock in this agreement and work with us to improve the conditions for workers in your supply chain and you’ll have our business’…the more growers will want to participate.”

A SCANDAL ROYALE

The CIW is used to pushback from their corporate targets, but when they began investigating mysterious phone calls and erroneous and threatening postings online, they were surprised when all leads pointed directly to Burger King headquarters (see Labor Notes May 2008).

Burger King was implicated in the hiring of a surveillance firm which posed as students to infiltrate an ally, the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA). Then, the CIW began to trace the origin of threatening posts that appeared whenever an article or video about the coalition was posted online.

Organizers and journalists eventually found the source—Burger King Vice President Steve Grover, the executive targeted by the CIW. The company fired both Grover and media spokesperson Keva Silversmith, who was implicated in leaking an internal memo to the growers’ association.

Under mounting pressure from the media and CIW supporters as a result of the scandal, Burger King gave in to the CIW’s demands just weeks later.

“It was a question of using all of Burger King’s missteps and outrageous behavior against them,” said Marc Rodrigues, an SFA organizer.

WINNING PLAYBOOK

The now-frequent question faced by CIW and its allies is, “How do you do it?”

“Having a strong network of allies that are committed and diverse and go at your target at different angles has helped the CIW win,” explained Rodrigues. “We’ve had students protesting at restaurants, faith communities organizing churches to send letters to the company, and we’ve been targeting private equity owners.”

Rodrigues and Perkins agree that the research they do to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their targets has been important. When organizers realized that Burger King is partially owned by private equity firms like Goldman Sachs and Texas Pacific Group—which has a history of making deals with pressure groups to stem bad press—organizers began linking their targets.

CIW corresponded with board members from the owning firms, and in 2007 started a march at the Miami offices of Goldman Sachs that ended at Burger King.

CIW organizers also say that their high-profile media presence has been crucial. It was a key element in bringing support from several U.S. senators in this campaign.

Organizers say they don’t need a big PR firm to make a splash. “We’ve succeeded in focusing on the strong point this campaign has: the daily work of a farmworker and what that entails,” Rodrigues said.

What has also helped the CIW succeed is a long-term vision for industry-wide changes in agriculture. As early as 2005, CIW reached out to all the major buyers of Florida tomatoes, a rogues gallery of corporate titans that includes Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Subway, and Chipotle, informing them of the poor wages and working conditions of tomato pickers in their supply chains.

“We’re spending the summer figuring out what the next steps of the campaign are going to be,” Perkins said. “All the retail buyers of Florida tomatoes have been made aware of the situation. No one can feign ignorance.”

“I Charge the White Man” … Immigrant’s Death Exposes Tensions

That powerful video clip should indicate to ya what I’ve been feeling lately. A good friend of mine recently made an entry in his blog about the criminalization of immigrants in this “land of the free, home of the brave.” Sparking his thoughts was a recent story in the New York Times of Juana Villegas, an undocumented Mexicana in Nashville, who was 9-months pregnant and who had been arrested in Nashville and subsequently forced to give birth chained to her hospital bed. The story is outrageous, but what interests me most is not so much the specifics of the case (in my view, the injustice of Villegas’ situation is self-evident), but instead a comment posted to his entry. Here is a portion of this knuckle-head’s response:

“It’s no wonder Americans are beginning to associate the word “Latino” with illegal invader! It’s people like you that are turning American citizens against all Latinos and causing the so called hatred of Latinos, no matter whether they are legal, ilegal…. Your defence of this criminal illegal alien is doing nothing but adding to the anger of more Americans against all Latinos.”

So-called hatred? Criminal illegal alien?

Okay, aside from his ignorance of the actual law (i.e. that violation of immigration law is not equivalent to a felony crime warranting restraint), it is frightening just how mainstream racist, anti-immigrant sentiment has become. The sanctity of our nation’s laws is only a pretext, a cover, in which people can now spout their racist venom in this so-called post-civil rights era (I’m sure some of his/her best friends are non-white, right?)

But laws are only man-made creations. They do not drop from the heavens, nor are they like the laws of science. Laws are inherently social, and in this country, they have historically reinforced white supremacy…sometimes dealing with race explicitly (the Greaser Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Plessy v. Ferguson, etc.) and at other times implicitly (like, say, Bill Clinton’s recent “end-welfare-as-we-know-it” disaster called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act). The real question, therefore, is not merely the matter of a violation of laws, but instead what values underlie our society and are expressed in our law? After all, when one thinks about it, if it was only about respecting the sanctity of laws, the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South would have been much different.

So its not about law; its about race, about power. Its about how this country is changing. They often use the highly-charged term “invasion” to describe these dynamics. They even believe that mainstream, reform-oriented organizations like the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) are somehow separatist organizations seeking to reclaim Aztlan (the US Southwest). In response, many Latina/o politicians and pundits make an effort to dispel such notions. And, indeed, NCLR is nothing of the sort. But, ya know what, we are taking over, and I welcome it. These changes, no matter how much they attempt to stop it, are going to continue. Their lily-white ideas about who or what this country is are dead. And it goes well-beyond salsa outselling ketchup.

So it isn’t about the facts (any junior high student, with access to the web, could have told you the NCLR wasn’t radical or separatist), or…as I mentioned above, about the law. It is straight-up about white supremacy and real hatred of Brown folk. [well, hatred for them/us as human beings, that is, not as the nameless, "things" that are there to pick their fruit, serve as nannies for their children, etc.]

Is it a democracy when a woman is chained for what amounts to a civil offense? Is it a democracy when, as reported recently in the Fresno Bee, a Mexican truck-driver can be arbitrarily pulled over, and when his English just doesn’t seem good enough to the Alabama police officer (well-known as they are for their racial progressiveness), he can be fined upwards of $500? As Chicano historian Rudy Acuna wrote a number of years ago in relation to Los Angeles: it increasingly seems like its better to be “anything but Mexican.”

And now this following story from Pennsylvania:

Immigrant’s death exposes tensions

Mexican Worker Beaten By Teen

Michael Rubinkam, ASSOCIATED PRESS

SHENANDOAH, Pa. | Luis Ramirez came to the United States from Mexico six years ago to look for work, landing in this town in Pennsylvania’s coal region. Here, he found steady employment, fathered two children and, his fiancee said, occasionally endured harassment by white residents.

Now he is headed back to Mexico in a coffin.

The 25-year-old illegal immigrant was beaten over the weekend after an argument with a group of youths, including at least some players on the town’s beloved high school football team, police said. And despite witness reports that the attackers yelled ethnic slurs, authorities say the beating wasn’t racially motivated.

Hate crime or not, the killing has exposed long-simmering tensions in Shenandoah, a blue-collar town of 5,000 about 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia that has a growing number of Hispanic residents drawn by jobs in factories and farm fields.

An investigation continues, and no charges have yet been filed, but police say as many as six teens were involved in the fight, which ended with Mr. Ramirez in convulsions and foaming at the mouth. He died early Monday of head injuries.

Crystal Dillman, the victim’s 24-year-old fiancee, who is white and grew up here, said Mr. Ramirez was often called derogatory names, including “dirty Mexican,” and told to return to his homeland.

“People in this town are very racist toward Hispanic people. They think right away if you’re Mexican, you’re illegal, and you’re no good,” said Ms. Dillman, who has two young children by Mr. Ramirez and a 3-year-old who thought of him as her father.

On Ms. Dillman’s fireplace mantel hangs a medallion of Jesus that Mr. Ramirez was wearing the night he was beaten. Mr. Ramirez had an imprint of the medallion on his chest, marking where an assailant stomped on him, she said.

Police Chief Matthew Nestor acknowledged there have been problems as the community – the birthplace of big band musicians Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and home of Mrs. T’s Pierogies – has tried to adjust to an influx of Hispanics, who now comprise as much as 10 percent of the population.

Teenagers have sprayed racially tinged graffiti and yelled racial slurs at the newcomers, he said.

“Things are definitely not the way they used to be even 10 years ago. Things have changed here radically,” Chief Nestor said. “Some people could adapt to the changes and some just have a difficult time doing it. … Yeah, there is tension at times. You can’t deny that.”

Police are interviewing suspects and witnesses. Preliminarily, though, they have determined that Mr. Ramirez, who worked in a factory and picked strawberries and cherries, got into an argument with a group of youths that escalated into a fight in which he was badly outnumbered.

“From what we understand right now, it wasn’t racially motivated,” Chief Nestor said. “This looks like a street fight that went wrong.”

Retired Philadelphia Police Officer Eileen Burke, who lives on the street where the fight occurred, told the Associated Press she heard a youth scream at one of Mr. Ramirez’s friends after the beating to tell his Mexican friends to get out of Shenandoah, “or you’re going to be laying next to him.”

Shenandoah Valley High School Principal Phillip Andras said he knew little about the purported involvement of any football players. A call by the AP to the athletic director was referred back to the principal.

But the players’ possible involvement has added to interest in the case. Football, along with the town’s many block parties and festivals, is a major attraction. Home games typically draw thousands of fans.

Arielle Garcia and her husband, who were with Mr. Ramirez when he was beaten late Saturday, said they had dropped their friend off at a park but returned when he called to say he had gotten into a fight.

She saw someone kick Mr. Ramirez in the head, she said, and “that’s when he started shaking and foaming out of the mouth.”

Despite the witness statements, Borough Manager Joseph Palubinsky said he doesn’t believe Mr. Ramirez’s ethnicity was what prompted the fight: “I have reason to know the kids who were involved, the families who were involved, and I’ve never known them to harbor this type of feeling.”

So let me get this straight: the guy is actually saying that there is no way these boys could have been involved in such an atrocity because, hey, after all, I know them and they come from “good” families?!! [for an interview describing more] As a historian of sixties social movements, I can’t help but cringe at the parallel to the many arguments that authorities in the segregationist South gave to dismiss crimes against African Americans. Many of those involved in those horrific lynchings were, indeed, church-going folk that supported the local high school football team.

So what do we do? For starters, its well past time to be upset, its time to be outraged and organized. And, coming full circle, in light of all these recent developments, I believe its time we took another serious listen to this man:

…and to the powerful ideas he articulates below: part of the lesson being that we not allow the struggle of immigrants and Latinos/as in this country to be defined narrowly within a domestic framework, or as only a matter of civil/legal rights, but as Malcolm indicates here, the burning issue of race in “America” is much larger and deeper, it is global and a fundamental matter of human rights. And lastly, oppressed groups need to develop a real  and meaningful and lasting solidarity.

c/s