May 27, 2008--Have It Their Way

Almost overlooked while Americans struggled this weekend to pay for a fill-up and worried about whether their jobs would be outsourced was the plight of tomato pickers in Florida. Especially those working on Burger King farms.

The Coalition for Immokalee Workers that represents the pickers has for a year been trying to get Burger King, which was founded in Florida, to match wage increases already won from McDonalds and Taco Bell. The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange resisted and was even accused by the union of old-fashioned scare- and union-busting tactics—spying on individual workers and investigating organizations to which they belonged. As evidence that there has been progress in the tomato fields since the 1930s, they did not go so far as to hire scabs or Pinkerton Guards to defend the crops from sabotage or beat up on striking workers.

As a recent snowbird resident of south Florida, with an apartment not too far from the Immokalee tomato patch—in fact buying vine-ripened tomatoes every Saturday at the Delray Beach Farmers Market that came from those fields—in my own obliviousness I did not connect all the dots until I slowly began to learn what was behind the struggle in which these field hands were engaged.

Now I know a little better and understand some of what was at issue until the recent settlement. And to tell the truth, I’m not feeling all that good about the tomatoes I coveted and savored. Actually, they were wonderful but how they got from field to market to me is an upsetting story.

Burger King may be having some bottom-line difficulties with its Whoppers these days but they still have 11,300 outlets worldwide (nearly 7,000 are in the U.S.), employ 37,000, have annual sales that top $11.0 billion, and a net profit of $2.2 billion. But to accede to the demands of their tomato pickers, which all agree have not had a, to quote the New York Times, “substantial wage increase in decades,” considering what the settlement will cost them makes one wonder what is wrong with some segments of corporate America. (Article linked below.)

The workers were demanding a 1-cent increase in wages for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. Yes, 1-cent. This is what Burger King resisted for more than a year.

At the old wages, workers who live by the fields in “decrepit shacks and trailers” earned between $10,000 and $12,000 a year. And, the total cost to Burger King of the 1-cent-a-bucket settlement is, are you seated, about $300,000 per year.