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.
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