As the largest buyer of tomatoes of Yum! Brands' five restaurant chains, he said, Taco Bell should set an industry example by paying a penny more per pound of tomatoes, guaranteeing that the extra payment would go directly to workers, and by demanding that growers adhere to humane labor standards.
But Taco Bell spokeswoman Laurie Schalow said that the coalition may be asking the company for too much. "We have said we absolutely understand the workers' plight," Schalow said. "We really do." But, she added, "this is a problem that goes deep." For that reason, she said, the company offered to help develop a team that would lobby legislators -- "all the way to [Republican Florida Gov.] Jeb Bush" -- to change labor laws.
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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Contradicting an industry newspaper, the Packer, which describes Yum! Brands as a major player in the Florida tomato industry, Schalow said the company's role is not that big. "We actually are not a very large purchaser; we're really not," she said, adding that she does not know what percentage of the crop Yum! Brands buys. "Taco Bell uses tomatoes, but KFC really doesn't use tomatoes, Pizza Hut uses more tomato sauce products."
After two years of the boycott, Schalow said, Taco Bell last year sent the coalition a $110,000 check, representing an extra penny per pound for the tomatoes it bought in 2003. The coalition, she said, returned the check.
"That was just a tactic," the coalition's Benitez said of the check, "not a systemic change. How were we supposed to distribute the money? And how can the company claim that that was an honest response when they won't disclose how many pounds of tomatoes Yum! Brands buys from the suppliers?"
He said Yum! Brands President David C. Novak proposed helping the workers only if they agreed to end the boycott and only as part of an industry-wide solution. The proposal prompted former president Jimmy Carter to scold Novak, in a statement released by the Carter Center, for missing an opportunity "to take the lead in eliminating human rights abuses that he knows exist within his supply chain."
Benitez and other coalition members who have been spending 18-hour days planning the Truth Tour, said they realize that Taco Bell, or Yum! Brands, does not hold the entire solution to the workers' situation. The farm owners, the slumlords who rent dilapidated trailers to workers for $350 a week, and the labor contractors who mistreat and cheat the workers, as well as politicians who ignore the problems, all need an awakening, Benitez said.
But, just as major apparel retailers were forced to confront the conditions of the Southeast Asia sweatshops where their products are made after student-led anti-sweatshop campaigns, the coalition says, Taco Bell and Yum! Brands must confront the exploitation of farm workers.
No one disputes that Immokalee farm workers have been subjected to the most extreme injustice. The coalition has uncovered several slavery rings in Immokalee-area farms. In one case, based on two years of undercover work and investigation by the coalition in 2002, three Florida-based farm bosses were convicted in federal court of slavery, extortion and weapons charges and sentenced to nearly 35 years in prison. They were also ordered to forfeit more than $3 million in assets. The bosses had threatened more than 700 farm workers with death if they tried to leave and assaulted passenger van service drivers who gave rides to farm workers.
In a 2000 case, a farm contractor was convicted of holding more than 30 tomato pickers under armed watch in two trailers in an isolated swamp near Immokalee. When three workers escaped, the employer tracked them down, running one of them down with his car.
The coalition's work uncovering slavery garnered Benitez, of Guerrero, Mexico, and two other workers the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2003. The coalition is working with a federal task force that continues to investigate slavery rings.
Benitez said he hoped publicity for the Taco Bell boycott would help inform more people about the slavery, along with the general conditions of farm workers.
"What the laborers go through," he said, "is the shame of this country."
