With These Hands I Demand the Future

[Omaha Steve]

Run time: 04:59 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlcIAfkXklk   Posted on YouTube: February 01, 2007 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: December 02, 2007 By DU Member: Omaha Steve Views on DU: 314

 
by James Parks, Nov 30, 2007

Hundreds of union members, religious activists and concerned consumers from across the country joined with members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to draw attention to Burger King’s refusal to pay its tomato workers a decent wage. They marched 9 miles across Miami today for a rally in front of Burger King headquarters.

The march began at the Miami offices of Goldman Sachs, one of three multibillion-dollar private equity firms that own a substantial share of Burger King stock.

The workers are demanding that Burger King follow in the steps of Yum! Brands and McDonald´s by paying a penny more per pound for its tomatoes to improve workers’ subpoverty wages.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker took part in the rally and march, and told workers their struggle was personal:

This is personal for me. Like so many of you, I know what it is like to struggle just for survival. I grew up in the poverty of west Texas. My mother was a domestic worker; my father was a day laborer who did not have the benefit of belonging to a union.

I had a dream to make people’s lives better, and I was fortunate to get a job with my union and become an organizer. Now my new job is to help others organize and bring justice to our communities. That’s what the AFL-CIO is about, and that’s what the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is about.

Farm workers who pick tomatoes for the fast-food industry are among this country’s most exploited workers. They earn subpoverty wages, have no health care coverage, no freedom to form unions and have not had a significant raise in nearly 30 years.

In the most extreme cases, farm workers are held in modern-day slavery conditions and forced to work against their will. Since 1997, federal civil rights officials have prosecuted five such operations run by Florida growers, involving more than 1,000 workers.

In April, CIW won a groundbreaking agreement with McDonald’s, the world’s largest restaurant chain. The fast-food giant agreed to pay a penny more per pound to workers harvesting tomatoes, which means the workers will get 72 cents to 77 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick, up from 40 cents to 45 cents.

But Burger King, the world’s second-largest burger chain, has rejected working with the CIW to improve farm workers’ wages and conditions. Not only does Burger King refuse to agree to the principles signed onto by Yum! and McDonald’s, the company has joined forces with the most conservative elements of the Florida tomato industry to launch an aggressive assault on the CIW’s agreements with the other two chains.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, wrote in The New York Times yesterday that Burger King’s action on wages

offers a spectacle of yuletide greed worthy of Charles Dickens.

He points out that Burger King seems to care more for livestock than for its workers. In March, Burger King announced strict new rules on how its meatpacking suppliers should treat chickens and hogs. But the company suggested that if the poor farm workers need more money, they could apply for jobs at Burger King restaurants.

CIW co-founder Lucas Benitez says:

In the wake of our agreements with Yum! Brands and McDonald’s, we have arrived on the threshold of a more modern, more humane agricultural industry in Florida. Yet rather than join us on that path toward further progress, Burger King has allied itself with tomato industry representatives to push us back, back toward the same abuse and exploitation we have experienced for decades.

But we will not be turned back. We will not give up the gains we have already won, and we will continue forward until all of Florida’s farmworkers can enjoy a fair wage and humane conditions in this state’s fields.

Holt Baker also made it clear that the union movement stays firmly behind the tomato workers.

The AFL-CIO is honored to support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. We helped you bring Taco Bell and McDonalds and Yum! Brands to justice, and now we are ready to help bring Burger King to justice. We are united in demanding they agree to lift up Immokalee workers and their families by paying a penny a pound more and agreeing to a code of conduct in the fields.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

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