Human Rights With Your Food: Farm Workers March in Florida for Living Wages

Chanting "No more slaves! Pay a living wage!", hundreds of farmworkers, students and others marched 22 miles through central Florida for three days, calling on the Publix supermarket chain to pay an extra penny to the impoverished workers who pick their tomatoes.

The three-day long march was organised by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a collective of Mexican, Guatemalan and Haitian migrants based in the small south Florida town of Immokalee. The procession passed through the cities of Tampa and Plant City, and then culminated with a rally in Lakeland, where Publix corporate headquarters is located.

The farmworkers are calling on Publix to pay them a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they pick, which would almost double their meager wages. They also want Publix to sign onto a code of conduct, co-written by the workers themselves, which would prevent the supermarket chain from buying tomatoes from any growers that did not meet certain basic working conditions.

"We get paid 45 cents for picking a bucket of tomatoes," says farmworker Wilson Perez.

The workers have to pick about 4,000 lbs of tomatoes per day (1,818 kg) to earn more than 50 dollars a day, a pay rate that has remained virtually unchanged since 1980, accounting for inflation.

Farmworkers in the U.S. are also exempt from many employee protections - they have no right to overtime pay and cannot organise unions.

"We are asking for real social responsibility from Publix Corporation," said CIW co-founder Lucas Benitez, at the kick-off of the march. "Publix says they support families. So why don't they support our families?"

Since 2001, the CIW has waged successful campaigns against fast food chains, food service providers, and now supermarkets - always calling for the same penny per pound raise and binding code of conduct agreement.

Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell and several other chains, was the first to agree to the CIW's demands in 2005; they were followed by McDonalds, Burger King, and Subway. More recently, pressure from college students allied with the CIW led to agreements with food service providers Aramark, Bon Appetit and Compass. Health-oriented supermarket company Whole Foods also signed on in 2008.

Farmworker and CIW organiser Gerardo Reyes Chavez says the goal of the "Campaign for Fair Food" is to make U.S. citizens more aware of where their food comes from. "This movement, it's aiming not just to change the mentality of Publix, but it's aiming to change first and foremost the mentality of the consumers so that we can achieve greater changes."

The "Farmworker Freedom March" featured a box-truck turned into a traveling exhibit about farmworkers being beaten, and even kept captive as slaves in the modern agricultural industry, an extreme example of the lack of rights afforded to the mostly immigrant workforce in Florida who provide about half of the tomatoes for the entire United States.

"The workers are being exploited and it's not just," said Natalia Margolis, a college student who came from Washington DC for the march.

Margolis learned about the CIW from a group at her school called the Georgetown Solidarity Committee. Support from college students has been key to the CIW's campaigns throughout the past decade. Most significantly, students kicked more than 20 Taco Bell outlets off college campus as part of a four-year boycott which began in 2001.

"Since a lot of these corporations are targeting students as their audience, or who they are advertising to, I think students have a lot of power," said Margolis.

The CIW has also written letters to several other supermarket chains with the same demands. Publix would be the first mainstream supermarket to sign on with the CIW, which Chavez says would be an opportunity for Publix to "set an example for other corporations in the world of the supermarket industry".