Senate to Hold Hearings on Plight of Tomato Pickers

The Florida tomato pickers, among the most benighted workforce in the country, have been lobbying for nearly a decade to get a penny more per pound of the tomatoes they pick during the winter for the East Coast market and fast-food chains. Since the 1970s, these workers have been paid about 40 cents for each 32-pound bucket of green tomatoes they pick. Using clever organizing tactics with allied students and clergy, a grass-roots organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers over the past two years convinced Yum Foods (Taco Bell, KFC, etc) and McDonalds to pay workers directly the extra penny/pound for tomatoes destined for their products. But the workers’ campaign hit a wall last November when Burger King refused to accede to the additional penny. It joined forces with the Florida Tomato Exchange, which represents growers and threatened to levy $100,000 fines on farmers who signed deals with the multinational buyers for the wage increase–although it doesn’t cost the growers themselves anything extra.

At an outdoor news conference Thursday on Capitol Hill, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said that Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) had promised hearings in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee next month to look into the plight of the workers. Rep. John Conyers, the powerful Michigan Democrat, said he had called the CEO of Burger King to try to get him to change his mind. Migrant tomato workers from Haiti, Mexico and Guatemala (they’re mostly illegal, but strangely the immigration service hasn’t shown much interest) earn subsistence wages for backbreaking work. Many live crammed into shabby, overpriced trailers. Federal prosecutors recently charged six men for beating and enslaving tomato pickers–the seventh investigation of slavery in the tomato fields in the past decade. “The plight of these workers is a national disgrace,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said at the rally. “It’s hard to believe that in 2008, exactly 200 years after we banned the introduction of slaves to the United Staets, slavery is still going on.”