IMMOKALEE, Fla. -- The best part of the farm workers' day may be 4 a.m., still pitch black out, when they gather in a concrete building on the corner of Third and Main for hot coffee and bread.
Minutes later, hundreds of them, almost all men, head to a parking lot behind the building to wait for farm crew chiefs who will pick the workers who will pick the tomatoes for the day.
Lucas Benitez, who helped launch the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, displays the bloodied shirt of a worker who was beaten in 1996, a shirt he saved.
(Nuri Vallbona -- Miami Herald)
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If they're lucky, the workers get to spend 12 hours on their hands and knees, filling buckets of tomatoes for 40 to 50 cents a bucket. To make at least $50, they scurry to fill 125 32-pound buckets -- two tons of tomatoes. But if it rains, as it did Friday, work stops. The workers are returned to the parking lot in rickety school buses 12 hours after they left, having earned just a few dollars, maybe none at all.
In short, things have not changed much in the 45 years since Edward R. Murrow's television documentary "Harvest of Shame" highlighted the plight of Immokalee's migrant workers. Today the Immokalee area, about 40 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico in southwest Florida, produces the largest supply of fresh tomatoes for the nation's supermarkets, as well as for some of the biggest fast-food chains in the world. But the farm workers are still dirt poor. They still work long days with no overtime, no benefits and no job security, seven days a week. They still live squished into hovels or packed 12 to a trailer, in trailers fit to be scrap.
But the Immokalee farm workers, or tomato pickers, as they call themselves, are making the improvement of their condition a national cause.
In 2001, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an advocacy group housed in the squat building where the workers get their pre-dawn coffee, launched a boycott of Taco Bell, an important buyer of Immokalee tomatoes. Taco Bell's corporate parent, Yum! Brands Inc., is the world's largest restaurant company with five restaurant chains. (KFC, Pizza Hut, A&W and Long John Silver's are the other four.)
The coalition, made up largely of the farm workers, says Yum! Brands helps perpetuate the workers' poverty by pressuring growers to sell tomatoes at volume discount prices, keeping wages low. But while talks between the coalition and the corporation have yielded little -- executives from Taco Bell and Yum! Brands say the workers are unfairly singling out the restaurant chain when it alone cannot change their plight -- the boycott has gathered steam and clout in the past couple of years.
Campus groups and dozens of faith groups, including the National Council of Churches, representing 50 million Christians, have endorsed the boycott, with students taking a strong role. "Boot the Bell" campaigns by students, part of the company's target market of 18- to 24-year-olds, have blocked or forced Taco Bell from 21 campuses, and boycott campaigns are underway at about 300 universities and 50 high schools.
On Monday, the coalition is launching its annual "Taco Bell Truth Tour," loading buses from Immokalee with 100 farm workers, most of them immigrants from southern Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti, on a 15-city publicity campaign. The buses will stop in Atlanta, Nashville, Cincinnati, Cleveland and other cities before ending with a rally on March 12 at Yum! Brands headquarters in Louisville. The rally will feature celebrity headliners, including actor Martin Sheen and Kerry Kennedy, daughter of the late senator Robert F. Kennedy.
"Yum! Brands has the power to change the way it does business and the way the workers are treated," said Lucas Benitez, 29, a picker who helped found the coalition in 1993.
