A penny for tomato pickers

By Julia Perkins - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Op-ed - News: "We started our boycott of Taco Bell in April 2001, at a time when people were hearing a lot about sweatshop labor abroad. This was an issue of sweatshop labor right here in America, but the sweatshops were in our fields, not overseas in garment factories.

Most of the fresh tomato harvest in this country comes out of Florida, where workers were earning the same wages they earned in 1978. Pickers are paid by the piece -- 40 to 45 cents for every 32 pound bucket picked. In order to make $50 in a day, they'd have to pick 125 buckets of tomatoes -- that's two tons of produce in a day.

We couldn't get satisfaction from the farmers who hired the pickers because they were under extreme pressure from their fast-food clients -- like Taco Bell -- to keep costs down. Their only recourse was to squeeze the pickers.

We asked that Taco Bell pay its farmers one penny more per pound of tomatoes and that this increase be passed along to the workers. In addition, the Coalition wanted Taco Bell to establish a code of conduct in its supply chain, assuring the public that the company would not support the exploitation of pickers.

The initial response from Taco Bell was: We don't employ these workers, therefore their pay is not our responsibility. That was interesting to us, since when pressured by animal rights groups, Taco Bell had indeed gotten involved with setting limits for their supply chain. All we were asking was that they pay as much attention to the needs of human beings as they did to the treatment of animals.

Student organizations were the key to our boycott, groups like the Student-Farmworkers Alliance and MEChA, an organization of Hispanic students. Students were the target market for Taco Bell, and in many cases its franchises were actually located on college campuses. Through the boycott we were able to close down Taco Bells at UCLA and the University of Chicago, and students were key in our protests at other franchises.

Finally on March 8, 2005, we reached a resolution with Taco Bell. They met our demands, and pickers who were formerly paid 1.2 cents per pound are now earning 2.2 cents per pound.

We hope that this resolution with Taco Bell has shown the rest of the fast-food industry that something can be done for low-wage pickers. We hope they'll join the cause without forcing us to call another boycott.

What boycotts like ours do is shed light on a problem that Americans don't really think about -- like who really pays for those cheap tacos they're eating. Once they're informed that it's slave labor and sweatshops, they're willing to support change.

Julia Perkins is staff worker for The Coalition for Immokalee Workers, which successfully boycotted the Taco Bell."