Trader Joe’s agrees to improve wages for tomato pickers

By Michelle Rostampour

Pennies are not a particularly popular coin. Tossed aside and disregarded, we often fail to understand the value of a cent. Yet, when Trader Joe’s finally agreed to sign the Fair Food Agreement with the Coalition for Immokalee Workers (CIW), the penny became a symbol of progress in the struggle of farmworkers to earn a living wage. In accordance with the agreement, Trader Joe’s will pay one cent more per pound of tomatoes it purchases to go directly to those who pick the tomatoes. These Florida-based farmworkers, paid by the piece, must pick 64 pounds of tomatoes to earn $1. The one-cent increase means a significant pay increase for workers, the majority of whom are living in poverty despite working 10-hour work days. According to the CIW, today’s workers have to pick over 2.25 tons of tomatoes in a work day (of ten hours) to earn minimum wage, double what workers had to pick 30 years ago to earn minimum wage.

Since 1980, despite the increase in living costs, the wages of farmworkers have changed insignificantly, with the average farmworker makes less than $12,000 per year. Adding to unfair wage conditions, farmworkers are excluded from the right to earn overtime pay and do not have the right to organize and collectively bargain with employers. Thus, the CIW acts as a community-based organization and does not bargain with employers but with purchasers. The justification behind efforts on the demand side rather than supply side is that large corporations purchase food at artificially low costs due to the exploitation of the workers who pick the produce, contributing to the oppression of workers by using their market influence to demand that costs stay low and thus promoting poverty conditions for workers at best and slavery conditions at worst.

The agreement with Trader Joe’s, which includes the establishment of Code of Conduct expectations in the supply chain of the company and third-party monitoring of working conditions, has been preceded by agreements with nine other food-purchasing giants. The first target of the Campaign for Fair Food was Taco Bell in 2001--they signed in 2005. McDonald’s followed in 2007, Burger King, Subway, and Whole Foods in 2008, Bon Appétit Management Co. and Compass Group in 2009, and Aramark and Sodexo in 2010 (thanks to the “Dine with Dignity” Campaign of the Student/Farmworker Alliance). Despite these hard-earned victories, farmworkers continue to struggle for fair working conditions, adequate pay, and basic human rights. Thus the efforts of the CIW forge ahead.

After canceling recent protests against Trader Joe’s, CIW efforts are now refocused on the Florida-based Southern supermarket chain Publix, which currently operates 1,086 stores, refuses to sign the Fair Food agreement, stating in press releases that the company does not feel the working conditions of fieldworkers to be their concern or responsibility. A fast of 50 CIW members and supporters is scheduled to take place in front of Publix headquarters in Lakeland, Florida from March 5-10 in efforts to put additional pressure on the chain, which has so far resisted the pressure of demonstrations and refused to enter into dialog with the Coalition. The event, the Fast For Fair Food, continues a non-violent tradition of holding hunger strikes to generate attention for issues of social injustice. On the final day of the strike, fasters will be joined by Fair Food supporters in celebration of the hunger strike.

It is important to point out that in addition to the Campaign for Fair Food, the CIW also promotes an Anti-Slavery Campaign, which fights the grossest injustices of the agricultural industry through the reporting and investigating of modern day slavery. The CIW has worked with the Federal government to prosecute offenders, while promoting the prevention of slavery through the empowerment of laborers. The belief of the CIW is that fair prices for produce will reduce labor abuses, which unites their two campaigns (Campaign for Fair Food and the Anti-Slavery Campaign) into one overall goal: dignity and fair treatment for those who work so hard to bring food to our stores and to our plates.

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