As the world watches the stock markets, nobody, but nobody wants to hear about paying more for anything. But one group is moving ahead with a campaign to pressure corporations to pay a little more (a penny a pound, to be exact) for tomatoes. And they're winning.
Before I go on, think back about six weeks. Where were you on Labor Day, that bittersweet end-of-the-summer holiday? If you had the day off, did your thoughts turn, for a moment, to the labor movement the day is named for, to which we owe not only for a well-timed three-day weekend, but more importantly, for workers' rights as they exist today? If you ate food that day, did you think about the people who helped produce it?
I was in San Francisco that weekend, attending Slow Food Nation, where I had the good fortune to meet and interview Lucas Benitez and Melody Gonzalez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, whose Campaign for Fair Food has persuaded some of the largest corporations in the food industry to agree to a price increase of a penny a pound for tomatoes, allowing for a modest raise for the farmworkers of Immokalee, Florida (where 90% of the US supply of winter tomatoes are grown), whose wages have languished, stagnant, since the 1970's. As Benitez, a farmworker himself, points out in the video below, today's tomato pickers get paid between 40 and 45 cents per 32 pound bucket, which means that to earn $50, a worker has to pick 2 tons of tomatoes.
For Burger King, the Goldman Sachs-owned chain that signed with CIW last May at the US capitol building (but only after months of protests, a blog scandal and allegedly spying on CIW's partner group, the Student/Farmworker Alliance) the penny-a-pound increase amounts to an estimated $250,000 dollars per year. To put that in perspective, Eric Schlosser's November 07 op-ed "Penny Foolish" pointed out that "[i]n 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million - more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year."
More recently, organic grocery chain Whole Foods came to an agreement with CIW. That Whole Foods was beat to the table by such cheap, decidedly un-organic eateries as Taco Bell, McDonalds and Burger King may seem ironic to those who snidely call the chain "Whole Paycheck" and may expect that those relatively high prices might translate not only to the food being organic, but also fair. This is, in part, why we're seeing from food advocates a shift away from "organic," a label that has not only been co-opted by huge corporations, but also speaks only to a food's impact on personal health (and to a much lesser extent, ecological health, but only in its initial production and not, say, its shipping) toward the more inclusive term, "sustainable," which is also being co-opted by industry but at least, in theory, speaks to other aspects of food production, including labor.
Now, CIW is after Chipotle, the growing chain that has built a reputation for social responsibility in the organic and local food arenas, and whose "Food with Integrity" campaign stands to take a major hit in the credibility department if they don't sit down with the Coalition. But that could prove difficult for Chipotle, which released a statement last month (before things got really crazy, even) warning share holders that the weak economy, coupled with rising food costs, would likely amount to lower profits than last year's.
No one knows what the future holds, but as our economic system hovers over the proverbial "rock bottom," it seems like a good time to revisit our policies, both national and personal, when it comes to the money we spend. What is the value of a tomato, and why? What (from fertilizers and pesticides to labor to transport) went into it, and does its price reflect those inputs? Or has a market driven by speculation and subsidies installed a false cap on that price, creating a decidedly unsustainable system that benefits CEOs over citizens, puts the squeeze on smaller businesses and leaves the laborers to pick up the slack?
If you'd like to help support the Coalition in their campaign for fair food, visit their Take Action page.
Originally posted on The Green Fork.
Follow Leslie Hatfield on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lesliehatfield
Daniel Klein: Did A Slave Grow Your Tomato?
Rabbi Jill Jacobs: Rotten Tomatoes: Trader Joe's and the Jewish Ethic for Farmworker Justice
Paula Crossfield: The Fair Food Project Tells Farmworkers' Stories (VIDEO)
Not like the mushy flavorless ones that you usually get at other markets where you usually don't know where it came from and how it was raised (ah yes corporate ag just loves to keep customers in the dark on this).
I have another idea. Lets STOP IMPORTING ILLEGAL WORKERS and thus these companies will pay much much more because they must then attract legal workers.
Think about this....you are keeping these people locked into slave wages this way. Dry up the supply of illegal workers, enforce the boarder laws, and all LEGAL workers will make signficantly more. Market forces will react to decreasing labor supply with more productive ways to get the tomatoes or higher wages or both.
We don't need a socialist welfare solution....but if you lock yourself into a world where you want wide open boarders will millions of illegals flowing in...then you find yourself trying to force companies to pay more for your very cheap labor.
I say lets STOP the massive support of illegal immigration and stop playing games with wages at the margins....let them be forced to really jack up wages to attract labor or find other ways to get the tomatoes off the vine. Legal immigrants will find a US that pays them far more for picking tomatoes.
Illegal immigrants are convenient slaves/scapegoats in this picture. Your argument is a distraction from demanding agribusiness take responsibility for serious human rights violations. Even if we were able to keep undocumented farm workers out of the U.S. (which we can't), those jobs would be filled with wretchedly poor American natives as soon as they were vacant.
If consumers demand cheap, the law of supply and demand dictates that producers find a way to keep it cheap. They won't be able to find Proper Americans who would be willing to take those wages? Yes, they will. As jobs disappear in the meltdown of our economy, there will be torrent of fresh blood, Americans desperate enough to work for dirt. Remember the Dust Bowl? The Oakies are us.
Leslie's question: "What is the value of a tomato, and why?" is key to evolving the way we interact with our food sources and the people attached to them. We can’t accurately assess the FAIR market value of the food we eat until we make fair wages part of the equation. How we value those jobs must change, regardless of the citizenship of the workers who are doing them.
I assure you the day you put the national guard on the boarders and stop the movenment across the boarders....which we can easily do....farm wages will go up up up and so will the price of that food in your grocery store.
Then we can move the discussion of boarder control to more healthy areas. How many more will we allow in legally, what no ID and tracking systems will we use to see that these workers come in, do their job, pay their taxes, and eventually go back home until they are allowed to return.
The reason these people make so little money is because you insist on wide open boarders with a massive flow of cheap labor to take jobs away from legal American citizens.