Tomato Escalation

First we had cherry tomatoes. Then we had grape tomatoes. Now we have strawberry tomatoes.

What comes next?

Comments

[Itinerant Pedant]

Peach Tomatoes.

[Gwailo]

Tomato Tomatoes.

[Everyman]

Love apple tomatoes.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Real tomatoes?

[anne]

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/29/headlines#15

April 29, 2008

Burger King Refuses to Increase Pay for Farmworkers
By Amy Goodman

In labor news, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has presented 85,000 petition signatures to the headquarters of Burger King. * The coalition is urging Burger King to pay farmworkers an additional penny per pound of tomatoes picked. Burger King has so far refused the demand, despite similar agreements between the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Yum Brands and McDonald's. Meanwhile, the Fort Myers News-Press has revealed new information on Burger King's covert attack on the farmworkers. The daughter of Burger King's vice president admitted to the newspaper that her father used her email account to post online messages vilifying the farmworkers.

* http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080429/BUSINESS/804280351/1014/BUSINESS

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/us/24tomato.html

December 24, 2007

Tomato Pickers' Wages Fight Faces Obstacles
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

IMMOKALEE, Fla. — In a colorful, often clamorous pressure campaign that has relied on support from college campuses and church groups, a group of farmworkers has persuaded McDonald's and Taco Bell to have their tomato suppliers pay their pickers more.

But the workers' efforts have recently collided with two big obstacles. Burger King has rejected the demands to have its tomato suppliers pay higher wages, and the main group of Florida tomato growers — calling the farmworkers' tactics "un-American" — has threatened a $100,000 fine against growers that cooperate with McDonald's or Yum Brands, the parent of Taco Bell, to pay their pickers more.

"The only way you can describe this industry is the way it was described 40 years ago: It's a harvest of shame," said Lucas Benitez, a co-founder of the farmworkers' group, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. "The wages are so low that a lot of workers are just surviving."

Steve Grover, vice president for food safety and regulatory compliance at Burger King, said his company rejected the coalition's demands because it did not employ the pickers directly and did not know how it would pay them, withhold their taxes or determine their immigration status.

"We're being asked to do something that we have legal questions about," Mr. Grover said. "We want to find a way to make sure that workers are protected and receive a decent wage."

Immokalee (which rhymes with broccoli) is 25 miles inland from Fort Myers and seems an unlikely place for a self-proclaimed "fair food movement" to begin. Its downtown is cluttered with rundown trailers and ramshackle shacks where immigrant field hands often sleep three or four to a room.

The farmworkers' coalition has garnered financial support from a dozen foundations and public support from former President Jimmy Carter; Ethel Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy's widow; the National Council of Churches; and the Presbyterian Church.

On Nov. 30, the coalition attracted more than 1,000 participants to a nine-mile march in Miami that began at the Goldman Sachs office — Goldman is one of Burger King's largest shareholders — and ended at Burger King's corporate headquarters. Many signs said, "End sweatshops in the fields," and many marchers wore yellow T-shirts with the logo "Exploitation King."

They wanted Burger King to agree to pay pickers a penny more per pound — increasing their wage to 77 cents from 45 cents per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes, up from 40 cents in 1980. Professors at Florida International University estimated the state's farm workers average $13,000 annually.

A bigger obstacle to the coalition's efforts is the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, a cooperative representing 90 percent of the state's growers. It has threatened large "noncompliance penalties" for any growers that share information about wages or tonnage picked with third parties like McDonald's. Florida grows 85 percent of the nation's winter tomatoes.

Reggie Brown, the exchange's executive vice president, said his group's lawyers said the Coalition of Immokalee Workers violated antitrust laws in joining with Yum Brands and McDonald's to get tomato growers to pay higher wages.

"I think it is un-American when you get people outside your business to dictate terms of business to you, to tell you to do something that your lawyers tell you is illegal," Mr. Brown said.

But Mark Barenberg, a law professor at Columbia University, said, "The only possible antitrust violation is by the growers since they seem to be conspiring among themselves to refuse to deal with fast-food companies that want to buy supplies made under certain specifications."

Mr. Brown disputed assertions that the tomato pickers were ill paid, saying that they averaged $12.46 an hour, and that did not include free transportation to the fields.

Angel Aguilar, a 36-year-old picker from Mexico, said: "It's a gigantic lie to say we earn $12.46 an hour. If they were to ask all of us, who earns $12.46 an hour, nobody would raise their hands."

He said he generally earned $40 to $50 a day for five to seven hours of picking, often taking home $200 to $250 a week. The pickers' days often begin at 5 a.m. when they arrive at a downtown parking lot in the hope of being chosen for a crew. The labor contractors' buses typically leave for the field at 6, arriving shortly before 7. The workers often do not begin picking until 10 or 11 because they are required to wait for the dew to burn off. They usually arrive back at the parking lot at 5 or 6 p.m. ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/opinion/29schlosser.html

November 29, 2007

Penny Foolish
By ERIC SCHLOSSER

THE migrant farm workers who harvest tomatoes in South Florida have one of the nation's most backbreaking jobs. For 10 to 12 hours a day, they pick tomatoes by hand, earning a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. For their efforts, this holiday season many of them are about to get a 40 percent pay cut.

Florida's tomato growers have long faced pressure to reduce operating costs; one way to do that is to keep migrant wages as low as possible. Although some of the pressure has come from increased competition with Mexican growers, most of it has been forcefully applied by the largest purchaser of Florida tomatoes: American fast food chains that want millions of pounds of cheap tomatoes as a garnish for their hamburgers, tacos and salads.

In 2005, Florida tomato pickers gained their first significant pay raise since the late 1970s when Taco Bell ended a consumer boycott by agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra cent going directly to the farm workers. Last April, McDonald's agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket. But Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald's.

This month the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing 90 percent of the state's growers, announced that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers. Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the group, described the surcharge for poor migrants as "pretty much near un-American."

Migrant farm laborers have long been among America's most impoverished workers. Perhaps 80 percent of the migrants in Florida are illegal immigrants and thus especially vulnerable to abuse. During the past decade, the United States Justice Department has prosecuted half a dozen cases of slavery among farm workers in Florida. Migrants have been driven into debt, forced to work for nothing and kept in chained trailers at night. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers — a farm worker alliance based in Immokalee, Fla. — has done a heroic job improving the lives of migrants in the state, investigating slavery cases and negotiating the penny-per-pound surcharge with fast food chains.

Now the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange has threatened a fine of $100,000 for any grower who accepts an extra penny per pound for migrant wages. The organization claims that such a surcharge would violate "federal and state laws related to antitrust, labor and racketeering." It has not explained how that extra penny would break those laws; nor has it explained why other surcharges routinely imposed by the growers (for things like higher fuel costs) are perfectly legal.

The prominent role that Burger King has played in rescinding the pay raise offers a spectacle of yuletide greed worthy of Charles Dickens. Burger King has justified its behavior by claiming that it has no control over the labor practices of its suppliers. "Florida growers have a right to run their businesses how they see fit," a Burger King spokesman told The St. Petersburg Times....

[Jack Neefus]

I think the next two would have to be:

-- Cocktail tomatoes (a step smaller)
-- Campari tomatoes (a step larger)

[DB]

already here (maybe hard to pack and ship for store distribution) -- peach tomatoes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_peach_tomato

quite tasty and pleasingly fuzzy -- my local CSA grows them

[Captain Button]

The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!

[walkingtheline]

> $40 to $50 a day for five to seven hours of picking

At risk of sounding heartless, Anne, those wages work out to around $7 per hour of work. The problem involves the exorbitant amount of unpaid commuting/waiting involved. Why are people still queuing for this type of job then?

I find it hard to believe there are not jobs available in urban areas that pay more or less the same wage and have more regular hours. If people are choosing this sort of job over that, the problem sounds institutional - access to better employment being denied for reasons of citizenship.

This is not an issue for which McDonalds, or Burger King or any other private business should be responsible. And why is Burger King being help to standards for employment that growers are not? The appropriate solution is to lessen restrictions on illegal labor or strengthen the grey-areas in the labor market so that alternate jobs are available for people who fall between the cracks.

[Tomas]

Drought in califonia ;)

[pgl]

Raisin tomatoes. After all - dried tomatoes are yummy!

[pgl]

Raisin tomatoes. After all - dried tomatoes are yummy!

[christofay]

Get-in-line: I too despise these communistic illegal tomato pickers, why don't they return to their banana republics where the only thing they are free to pick are their noses? However, in the meantime I am worried how we are bailing out investment bankers, those with the deca-million bonuses, soon everyone will clamor for bail-outs. Read nakedcapitalism's round-up of the free market fest Milken Institute Conference "Hubris, Denial, and the Financial Services Culture"

[Roy]

Blueberry tomatoes. Maybe they should be called pearl tomatoes like pearl onions.

[MaryCh]

Christofay, do investment bankers eat tomatoes?

[Quaker in a Basement]

Watermelon tomatoes!! Yay!!

[Quaker in a Basement]

Nanotomatoes??

[JRossi]

Call me when they get bbq pork rind tomatoes.