Tomatoes, fair pay and a campaign for dignity in the field
Through years-long push, farmworkers persuade big food companies to sign on to human-rights movement
IMMOKALEE — Sweat drenched his long-sleeve shirt and soaked his thick black hair. Lucas Benitez, 17, quick on his feet and newly arrived from Mexico, finished staking a row of tomatoes on a scorched southwest Florida farm and stopped to wait for his co-workers to catch up.
Benitez recalled how his supervisor drove a pickup closer to confront him. He wanted Benitez to help unload a truck instead of taking a time-wasting break. But even more, the boss wanted to show who was in control, and it was not the teen.
Benitez, 120 pounds and skinny, insisted on staying put. Why should he be punished for his speed, when he was accomplishing the same tasks as the rest of the crew? The 200-pound boss threw a punch, but the teen blocked it with one hand, a tomato stake in the other, ready for a fight. He looked the boss in the eye and saw wide-eyed shock.
“It was the first time anyone had said anything to him,” recalled Benitez, now 40.
A farmworker-led movement, with Benitez among its leaders, was about to ignite.
Benitez’s small act of defiance planted a symbolic seed among tomato farmworkers in Immokalee, an impoverished farm town filled with empty lots, trailer homes, crowing roosters and scrubby palmetto trees. The migrants who sought work each day staking and picking tomatoes were about to take on the farm owners and crew leaders and the corporations that purchased the tomatoes they picked.
Those tomatoes arrive almost daily in kitchens and restaurants across the country. Though most Americans don’t realize it, almost every Florida tomato they eat comes from a field near Immokalee, just two hours from Fort Lauderdale.
The workers who pick tomatoes have spent more than 20 years on a campaign for dignity and fair pay, a campaign that has gained momentum in recent years as more food retailers, such as Fresh Market, sign on. Farmworker advocates are now broadening the campaign to other items in grocery produce departments, including strawberries and peppers.
The workers have succeeded, against incredible odds, in getting some of the biggest corporations in the country to recognize their plight.
Blood-stained shirt, a symbol
A bloodied shirt became a symbol that helped awaken the movement.
The shirt came to represent the story of Edgar, a 16-year-old tomato worker from Guatemala, who asked his boss for a water break and was refused. When Edgar went to get water anyway, he suffered a savage beating and broken nose.
Benitez spread news of the assault, waving the bloodied shirt to rally sleepy Immokalee into a galvanizing protest in 1996. “When you beat one of us, you beat us all,” he told the crowd.
Farmworkers began brainstorming ways to support one another. “Everyone was in their own world, Mexican, Guatemalan, Haitian,” Benitez said. “We were not a community.”
A sense of commonality among the neighbors, segregated by an assortment of languages and countries of origin, began to build.
Benitez and seven other workers, mostly young men like himself, began meeting at the Catholic church where many attended Mass, Our Lady Of Guadalupe, a cream-colored set of buildings inside Immokalee’s nine-block downtown.
They walked door-todoor to poll their neigh- bors: What changes would you like to see in Immokalee? Are you interested in working toward a solution?
They invited neighbors to their Wednesday night meetings at the church. They created a low-power radio station, Radio Conciencia, or “Radio of Awareness.” They opened a co-op to offer food and other basics at reasonable prices.
They called themselves the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and they would come to be known as one of the most successful farmworker organizing groups in the country.
Life of a farmworker
In the 1990s, tomato workers were paid about 30 cents for picking a 32-pound bucket of tomatoes, the same wage they earned in 1975, preventing most from earning more than $10,000 a year for back-breaking, dangerous work.
Most of the workers are immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Some are undocumented, although the Coalition of Immokalee Workers says the number is unknown. Their uncertain legal status forced many to fear going to the authorities to complain about mistreatment.
Some contractors took advantage of this fear. The case of brothers Ramiro and Juan Ramos, convicted of involuntary servitude in 2002, showed the threats workers could face.
The Ramos brothers made millions on real estate, grocery and clothing stores, and three harvesting businesses. They also supplied workers to farmers, transporting Mexican immigrants from Arizona to Florida for a $1,000 fee.
But according to the FBI, they also “threatened [the immigrants] at gunpoint, promising torture and death if they tried to escape. And they made them live in filthy, substandard, and overcrowded apartments.”
Pesticide exposure is another danger workers faced.
Francisca Herrera, was 19 and pregnant when she worked in tomato fields operated by Ag-Mart Produce, famous for its Ugly Ripe and Santa Sweets tomatoes. Her son Carlos Candelario was born in December 2004 with no arms and no legs.
Herrera testified in a deposition that workers got little protection from pesticides, sprayed from tractors onto the plants they touched each day. Rules required workers to stay off the field and to wear protective garments, but the rules were rarely enforced, she said.
“Every time they would spray, we would be there picking tomatoes, and we’d feel badly. And then we’d get headaches, earaches. Our eyes would burn,” Herrera said in the deposition. “I would get sore throats. I always felt like it burned me and my stomach as well, and I would get a rash on my skin.”
In 2008, the family reached a settlement with Ag-Mart Produce, which admitted no wrongdoing but paid to take care of Carlos’ medical needs for life
Evidence was piling up. Grievances were escalating. But change still seemed impossible. How could uneducated tomato workers get anyone to care about their plight?
Taking on Taco Bell
While some farmers offered small pay increases after workers approached them, most said the highly publicized cases of slavery and pesticide dangers were isolated instances, certainly not connected to their farms.
The workers had an epiphany: Why not skip over the farmers and approach the food giants directly? Why negotiate with landowners when it’s really the large corporations that have the power as they buy enormous quantities of tomatoes for their grocery shelves, Whoppers and chalupas?
At an after-work meeting of the coalition, Benitez said a worker mentioned a newspaper article about Taco Bell’s massive purchases of tomatoes at bargain-basement prices. “Somebody is paying the price for those cheap tomatoes,” the worker said. “And that’s us.”
Taco Bell was an especially irksome symbol of corporate indifference for the workers: The company’s television advertisements featured a sombrerowearing Chihuahua with a Mexican accent.
The workers wrote Taco Bell and invited its brass to Immokalee to show them their dreadful living and working conditions. Benitez said they received no response.
The coalition reported this silence at a meeting and asked if anyone had an alternative idea. “Why don’t we organize a boycott?” a worker asked.
“It sounded crazy,” Benitez recalled. “We didn’t have any economic resources to do a boycott.”
Who could help them? Many young idealists began streaming into Immokalee when they heard about the workers’ struggles.
Laura Germino and her husband Greg Asbed, graduates of Brown University in Rhode Island, moved to South Florida in the mid-1990s after she volunteered for the Peace Corps in Africa, and he worked for a community development organization in Haiti.
College students such as Brian Merle Payne, a graduate student in Latin American studies at the University of Florida, joined a 230-mile trek the coalition organized from Fort Myers to Orlando, home base of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association.
Payne met students from throughout Florida on the march, and together they organized the Student/ Farmworker Alliance to support the campaign. He moved to Immokalee and spent 4 1⁄2 years there.
“There was an energy in the air that things could change,” said Payne, now 41. “There was a feeling there of the depths of poverty and depression and alcohol and drugs. But the workers were a ray of sunshine, that they could come in and be leaders and change the world around them.”
Coalition members began working with the student participants to organize a series of Taco Bell protests in 2004. The students got 22 high schools and colleges to “Boot the Bell” and cut contracts with the fast-food giant. Religious leaders also joined the alliance, impressed with its democratic meeting methods, lack of bureaucracy and peaceful approaches. “They act responsibly and civilly,” said the Rev. Russell Meyer, executive director of the Florida Council of Churches, based in Tampa. “They sit down with the entity and build a working rela-