wfn.org | NCC Endorses Immediate Boycotts of Taco Bell, Mt. Olive Pickle

["Carol Fouke" <cfouke@ncccusa.org>]

National Council of Churches Endorses Consumer Boycotts of Taco Bell, Mt.
Olive Pickle Products
NCC is Largest Religious Group to Endorse the Boycotts - the First It Has
Endorsed in 15+ Years

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November 6, 2003, JACKSON, Miss. - The National Council of Churches General
Assembly today (Nov. 6) endorsed consumer boycotts of Taco Bell and Mt.
Olive Pickle products, both effective immediately, to put pressure for
improvement of wages and working conditions of their suppliers farm
workers.  It is the largest and broadest U.S. religious body to join the
boycotts.

The National Council of Churches is the nations leading ecumenical
organization.  Its 36 mainline Protestant, African American, Orthodox and
Episcopal member denominations comprise 50 million U.S. Christians in
140,000 local congregations nationwide.  The actions came during the Nov.
4-6 annual meeting of the General Assembly, the NCCs highest legislative
body, made up of official delegates from the member denominations.

Given the NCCs insistence that boycotts are a measure of last resort, the
affirmative votes on the two boycotts are especially significant.  It has
been more than 15 years since the NCC endorsed a boycott (May 1988, related
to Royal Dutch/Shells connections at that time to apartheid South Africa.).

TACO BELL BOYCOTT

The General Assemblys action joins the National Council of Churches to a
national consumer boycott of Taco Bell restaurants and products, called in
March 2001 by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an Immokalee, Fla.-based
workers coalition.  The Coalition launched the boycott following Taco Bell
s refusal to address exploitation in the fields of its tomato suppliers,
particularly those of Six Ls Packing Company, one of the United States
largest tomato growers.

The NCC joins the top governing bodies of three of its member
denominations - the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (3.5 million members), the
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) (805,000 members) and the United
Church of Christ (1.4 million members) - along with the American Friends
Service Committee in endorsing the boycott.

Anytime a Christian community comes together and seeks to exercise economic
justice in this way, it is because there is a very serious injustice that
cannot be resolved in any other way, said the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick,
Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), who noted that the Taco
Bell boycott resolution came to the General Assembly at the request of the
PC(USA).

Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a Florida farm worker and member of the Steering
Committee of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, described farm workers low
wages and lack of any benefits such as health insurance or overtime pay.

According to U.S. Department of Labor data, the average piece rate paid to
tomato harvesters in 1980 was 40 cents per 32-pound bucket.  Today,
harvesters are paid the same average piece rate, earning less than one-half
of what they did 20 years ago in inflation-adjusted dollars.  At the 40 cent
piece rate, workers must pick and haul two tons of tomatoes to make $50.

And in the most extreme circumstances we find modern day slavery, said
Chavez, speaking in Spanish through an intepreter.  By modern day slavery I
mean people forced to work at gunpoint.  To confront this situation weve
had work strikes, marches, hunger strikes for up to 30 days - and what weve
realized is that the agricultural industry is not interested in us.  Weve
realized that the only way to achieve justice for thousands of farm workers
is to reach up the ladder (to those) profiting from farm workers labor and
poverty.  Thats where Taco Bell comes in, he said.

We are not saying Taco Bell is guilty of slavery, Chavez said, but when
we ask Taco Bell, can you guarantee to us those tomatoes werent picked by
slave labor, the answer is no. Thats precisely because they have never
paid attention to the workers who make their profits possible.	Thats why I
am here today.

The Rev. Noelle Damico, a United Church of Christ minister working with the
PC(USA) on the boycott, spoke to the question, Why Taco Bell?

Taco Bell is purchasing from one of the lowest paying suppliers in Florida,
Six Ls Packing Company.  Taco Bell uses a high percentage of fresh-picked,
that means hand-picked, tomatoes in its products.  They are owned by Yum!
Brands, Inc., the largest fast-food chain in the world, which is in a good
position to affect change in the wider agricultural industry.

Boycotts, she said, are a serious tool companies understand and to which
they respond.  They are a way for customers and the church to say we care
that food is not only fast but fair and respects the human rights of the
workers.

The Taco Bell boycott is to remain in effect until such time as Taco Bell:

-- convenes serious three-way talks between the Coalition of Immokalee
Workers, representatives of Taco Bell, and their tomato supplies to address
exploitation and slavery in the fields, and
-- contributes to an immediate increase in farm worker wages through an
increase in the per pound rate it pays for tomatoes, and
-- works with the CIW, tomato industry representatives and tomato suppliers
to establish a code of conduct that would ensure workers fundamental labor
rights by defining strict wage and working condition standards required of
all Taco Bell suppliers.

In recent weeks, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been recognized by:

-- The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, which has
selected Julia Gabriel, Lucas Benitez and Romeo Ramirez, three leaders of
the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, to receive the prestigious 2003 RFK
Human Rights Award for their work against slavery in the fields and for the
Taco Bell Boycott.  Through their work, they have helped liberate more than
1,000 workers held against their will by employers using violence -
beatings, pistol-whippings, shootings - and the threat of violence,
according to the center.  Ms. Gabriel herself is a former captive worker who
escaped from a 400-worker slavery ring that operated in the fields of South
Carolina and Florida.  With the assistance of the CIW, Ms. Gabriel
successfully helped prosecute and put her employer behind bars.

-- The September 2003 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, which, in a
story on modern-day slavery, put the total number of slaves in the United
States at between 100,000 to 150,000 (including farm workers, prostitutes
and sweatshop workers) and featured the plight of pickers and the work of
the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, describing conditions of abuse and
enslavement.  Reported the magazine, the CIW has exposed five cases of
agricultural slavery in Florida in the past five years.  The latest involved
700 slaves.

-- On September 25, 2003, PBS-TV aired DYING TO LEAVE, a documentary on
trafficking and slavery that featured the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
work and slavery in the tomato fields of Florida in the global context of
slavery worldwide.

For more information about the issues underlying the Taco Bell Boycott, see
www.pcusa.org/boycott and www.ciw-online.org.

MT. OLIVE PICKLE BOYCOTT

Lydia Veliko of the United Church of Christ brought forward the resolution
on the Mt. Olive Pickle Boycott on behalf of the NCC Executive Board, and
National Farm Worker Ministry Executive Director Virginia Nesmith spoke to
it.

Casting our option with the poor is our best action as people of faith,
she said.  Its heartening to me to see two farm worker situations raised
up at this particular Assembly.  The people who stoop for tomatoes and
cucumbers, climb for the apples and peaches support our huge agribusiness
and put food on our tables.  They ask us not for charity but solidarity.

In March 1999, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), a union
representing farm workers, announced a consumer boycott of the products of
Mt. Olive Pickle Company, based in Mt. Olive, N.C., the nations largest
independent pickle producer and the nations second largest processor of
pickles and pickle products.

According to FLOC, the consumer boycott was called following unsuccessful
attempts to bring the management of Mt. Olive to the table to negotiate
improved wages and working conditions for farm workers who produce the
cucumbers processed by Mt. Olive. FLOC is seeking to negotiate a contract
with the Mt. Olive Pickle Company on behalf of the workers.

The boycott has received the endorsement of more than 300 organizations,
including two NCC member communions - the United Church of Christ and the
Alliance of Baptists - along with the American Friends Service Committee and
two organizations related to the NCC: Agricultural Missions, Inc., and the
National Farm Worker Ministry.

The NCC General Assembly first took up the issues at its November 2000
annual meeting.  At that time, the Assembly voted its support of the Farm
Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC)s efforts to improve conditions authorized
the Executive Board to monitor progress and to endorse the boycott if
necessary.

A September 2000 report by Agricultural Missions, Inc., described conditions
under which migrant farm laborers work as very difficult, unhealthy and
dangerous.  Already low wages have declined over the past two decades, and
health and safety standards are not being enforced resulting to illness and
injury.  Grower provided housing is for the most part substandard and
sanitary conditions are often below legal requirements, both in the fields
and in living quarters.  Child labor laws are frequently ignored on many
farms.

Several meetings with Mt. Olive CEO William Bryan have failed to win
agreement from the Mt. Olive Pickle Company to enter negotiations with FLOC.
Boycott proponents contend that contracts providing workers with a voice in
the industry and a process to address grievances without fear of firing have
proven to be farm workers best hope for improving conditions.

Letiticia Zavala, a former farm worker and organizing director for the Farm
Labor Organizing Committee based in Plant City, Fla., said she has worked in
both with and without a union contract.  A contract has a mechanism for
workplace grievances, but in North Carolina that system is not in place.
Workers cant complain.  We have instances of indentured servitude, and of
employers who deduct for rent and transport leaving workers only $30 to
survive on at the end of the week.  Unions are the best way to go.

The Assembly endorsed the Taco Bell Boycott unanimously, with five
abstentions, and the Mt. Olive Pickle Boycott with two abstentions.

"We are a country that understands and respects capitalism and the free
market," said NCC General Secretary Bob Edgar after the votes.	"But even
good economic systems need to be improved.  We must never build an economic
system at the expense of the weak, at the expense of the poor, at the
expense of those persons in our society who provide us the very food we eat
and clothes we wear.  The NCC will not be silent.  The NCC will not rest
until there is equity for the workers."

-end-

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