The headline is hyperbolic, as headlines tend to be, but this workers group has had it's successes....
Immokalee Workers Take Down Taco Bell
Elly Leary
On March 8, 2005, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Immokalee, Florida won a significant victory. In a precedent-setting move, fast-food giant Yum! Brands Inc., the world’s largest restaurant corporation, agreed to all the farm workers’ demands (and more!) if the CIW would end the four-year-old boycott of its subsidiary Taco Bell. (Yum!, a spin off from Pepsi, includes Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, A&W, Long John Silver’s, and Pizza Hut franchises.) As United Farm Workers (UFW) president Arturo Rodriguez commented at the victory celebration, “It is the most significant victory since the successful grape boycott led by the UFW in the 1960s in the fields of California.”
El Acuerdo/The Agreement
To end the boycott of Taco Bell, Yum! Brands signed these first-time-ever agreements:
* Taco Bell will deal only with Immokalee tomato suppliers who agree to pay workers an additional penny per pound. This small amount raises wages 75 percent. For the first time in history these wage increases are coming from the fast-food industry directly! Taco Bell will provide the CIW, on a monthly basis, complete records of their purchases of Florida tomatoes and growers’ wage receipts. Growers who do not pass this wage increase on to workers will be cut from Taco Bell’s list of vendors.
* Taco Bell agreed to work jointly with the CIW to set up a process to ensure that the wage increase goes directly to pickers. The CIW is the investigative and monitoring body.
* Taco Bell will add language to its Supplier Code of Conduct to ensure that indentured servitude is strictly forbidden and there will be strict compliance with all existing laws.
* Taco Bell will aid in efforts at the state level to seek new laws that better protect all Florida tomato farm workers. It will give market incentives for agricultural suppliers willing to respect their workers’ rights, even when those rights are not guaranteed by law.
In an era where workers are losing more than winning, where unionization rates and company-paid benefits like health insurance and pensions are dropping, and poverty is rising, how did a relatively small group of overwhelmingly immigrant farm workers (roughly 2,500 of whom 50 percent are Mexican, 30 percent Guatemalan, 10 percent Haitian, and the rest mostly African-American) take down a company larger than McDonald’s?
much more at link...
http://www.monthlyreview.org/1005leary.htm