Tomatoes of Wrath

By Chris Hedges

It is 6 a.m. in the parking lot outside the La Fiesta supermarket in
Immokalee, Fla. Rodrigo Ortiz, a 26-year-old farmworker, waits forlornly in the
half light for work in the tomato fields. White-painted school buses with logos
such as “P. Cardenas Harvesting” are slowly filling with fieldworkers. Knots of
men and a few women, speaking softly in Spanish and Creole, are clustered on the
asphalt or seated at a few picnic tables waiting for crew leaders to herd them
onto the buses, some of which will travel two hours to fields. Roosters are
crowing as the first light of dawn rises over the cacophony. Men shovel ice into
10-gallon plastic containers from an ice maker next to the supermarket, which
opens at 3:30 a.m. to sell tacos and other food to the workers. The
containers—which they lug to pickup trucks—provide water for the pickers in the
sweltering, humid fields where temperatures soar to 90 degrees and above.

Ortiz, a short man in a tattered baseball cap and soiled black pants that are
too long and spill over the tops of his worn canvas sneakers, is not fortunate
this day. By 7 a.m. the last buses leave without him. He heads back to the
overcrowded trailer he shares with several other men. There are always workers
left behind at these predawn pickup sites where hundreds congregate in the hopes
of getting work. Nearly 90 percent of the workers are young, single immigrant
men, and at least half lack proper documents or authorization to work in the
United States.

Harvesting tomatoes is an endeavor that comes with erratic and unpredictable
hours, weeks with overtime and weeks with little to do and no guarantees about
wages. Once it starts to rain, workers are packed back onto the buses and sent
home, their workday abruptly at an end. Ortiz and the other laborers congregate
at the pickup points every morning never sure if there will be work. And when
they do find daywork they are paid only for what they pick.

“I only had three days of work this week,” Ortiz says mournfully. “I don’t
know how I will pay my rent.”

Ortiz, who along with many others among these migrant workers sends about
$100 home to Mexico every month to support elderly parents, works under
conditions in these fields that replicate medieval serfdom and at times descend
into outright slavery. He lives far below the poverty line. He has no job
security, no workers’ compensation, no disability insurance, no paid time off,
no access to medical care, Social Security, Medicaid or food stamps and no
protection from the abusive conditions in the fields. The agricultural industry
has a death rate nearly six times higher than most other industries, and the
Environmental Protection Agency estimates that of the 2 million farmworkers in
the United States 300,000 suffer pesticide poisoning every year.

But this may change as one of the most important battles in the history of
migrant labor is launched by the Coalition
of Immokalee Workers (CIW). If this battle succeeds it will nearly double
the wages of the farmworkers who labor in the $600 million tomato-growing
industry. A victory over the supermarket chains also would hold out the
possibility of significantly alleviating the draconian conditions that permit
forced labor, crippling poverty and egregious human rights abuses, including
documented cases of slavery, in the nation’s tomato fields. If the CIW
campaign—which is designed to pressure supermarket chains including Publix, Trader
Joe’s, Wal-Mart, Kroger, and Ahold brands Giant and Stop & Shop to sign
the CIW Fair Food Agreement—fails, however, it threatens to roll back the modest
gains made by farmworkers. It depends on us.

“We are standing on the threshold of achieving significant change in the
agricultural industry,” Marc Rodrigues, with the Student/Farmworker Alliance,
tells me later in the day at the CIW office in Immokalee. “But if the
supermarkets do not participate and support it then it will not go any further.
Their lack of participation threatens to undermine what the workers and their
allies have accomplished. They represent a tremendous amount of tomato
purchasing. They wield a lot of influence over conditions in the field. For
those growers not enamored of the concept of workers attaining rights and being
treated with dignity, they will know that there is always a market for their
tomatoes with no questions asked, where nothing is governed by a code of conduct
or transparency. If we succeed, this will help lift farmworkers, who do one of
the most important, dangerous and undervalued jobs in our society, out of
grinding poverty into one where they can have a slightly more decent and normal
life and provide for their families.”

The next major mobilization in
the campaign will take place at noon Oct. 21 outside Trader Joe’s corporate
headquarters in Monrovia, Calif. This will follow a week of local actions to
target supermarkets across the country. To thwart the campaign, the public
relations departments of Trader Joe’s, Publix and other supermarkets are
churning out lies and half truths, as well as engaging in unsettling acts of
intimidation and surveillance. Publix sent out an employee posing
as a documentary filmmaker to record the activities of the organizers.

“Publix has a cabal of labor relations, human relations and public relations
employees who very frequently descend from corporate headquarters in Lakeland,
Fla.—or one of their regional offices—and show up at our demonstrations,” says
Rodrigues. “They watch us with or without cameras. They constantly attempt to
deflect us: If we attempt to speak to consumers or store managers these people
will intercept us and try to guide us away. These people in suits and ties come
up to us and refer to us by our first names—as if they know us—in a sort of
bizarre, naked attempt at intimidation.”

If you live in a community that has a Whole Foods, which is the only major
supermarket chain to sign the agreement, shop there and send a letter to
competing supermarkets telling them that you will not return as a customer until
they too sign the CIW Fair Food Agreement. Details about planned protests around
the country can be found on the CIW
website.

Workers in the fields earn about 50 cents for picking a bucket containing 32
pounds of tomatoes. These workers make only $10,000 to $12,000 a year, much of
which they send home. The $10,000-$12,000 range, because it includes the higher
pay of supervisors, means the real wages of the pickers are usually less than
$10,000 a year. Wages have remained stagnant since 1980. A worker must pick 2.25
tons of tomatoes to make minimum wage during one of the grueling 10-hour
workdays. This is twice what they had to pick 30 years ago for the same amount
of money. Most workers pick about 150 buckets a day. And these workers have been
rendered powerless by law. In Florida, collective bargaining is illegal, one of
the legacies of Jim Crow practices designed to keep blacks poor and
disempowered. Today the ban on collective bargaining serves the same purpose in
thwarting the organizing efforts of the some 30,000 Hispanic, Mayan and Haitian
agricultural laborers who plant and harvest 30,000 acres of tomatoes.

The CIW, which organized a nationwide boycott in 2001 against Taco Bell,
forced several major fast food chains including Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Burger
King, Subway, Whole Foods Market, Compass Group, Bon Appétit Management Co.,
Aramark and Sodexo to sign the agreement, which demands more humane labor
standards from their Florida tomato suppliers and an increase of a penny per
bucket. But if the major supermarkets too do not sign this agreement, growers
who verbally, sexually and physically abuse workers will be able to continue
selling tomatoes to the supermarkets. This could leave at least half of all the
fields without protection, making uniform enforcement of the agreement
throughout the fields difficult if not impossible.

“Supply chains are very opaque and secretive,” says Gerardo Reyes, a
farmworker and CIW staff member. “This is one of the reasons a lot of these
abuses continue. The corporations can always feign that they did not know the
abuses were happening or that they had any responsibility for them as long as
there is no transparency or accountability.”

One of the most celebrated modern cases of fieldworker slavery was uncovered
in November 2007 after three workers escaped from a box truck in which they had
been locked. They and 12 others had been held as slaves for two and a half
years. They had to relieve themselves in a corner of the truck at night and pay
five dollars if they wanted to bathe with a garden hose. They were routinely
beaten. Some were chained to poles at times. During the days they worked on some
of the largest farms in Florida. It was the seventh such documented case of
slavery in a decade.

“As long as the supermarket industry refuses to sign this agreement it gives
the growers an escape,” says Reyes. “We need to bring the pressure of more
buyers who will sign the agreement to protect the workers. We have gotten all of
the major corporations within the fast food industry and food providers to sign
this agreement. Two of the three most important buyers within the industry are
on board. But if these supermarkets continue to hold out they can put all the
mechanisms we have set in place for control at risk. If Wal-Mart, Trader Joe’s
and other supermarkets say the only criteria is buying from those growers who
offer the lowest possible price then we will not be able to curb abuses. If the
agreement is in place and there is another case of slavery then the growers will
be put in a penalty box. If we do not have the ability to impose penalties then
there will always be a way for abusive growers to sell. The agreement calls on
these corporations to stop buying from growers, for example, that use slave
labor. Without the agreement there is no check on these practices.”

“Supermarkets, such as Trader Joe’s, insist they are responsible and fair,”
Reyes goes on. “They use their public relations to present themselves as a good
corporation. They sell this idea of fairness, this disguise. They use this more
sophisticated public relations campaign, one that presents them as a friend of
workers, while at the same time locking workers out of the discussion and
kicking us out of the room. They want business as usual. They do not want people
to question how their profits are created. We have to fight not only them but
this sophisticated public relations tactic. We are on the verge of a systemic
change, but corporations like Trader Joe’s are using all their power to push us
back.”