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Note #8236 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

04233
May 17, 2004

What the moderator knew

After searing Immokalee visit, tomatoes will never taste the same

by John Filiatreau

IMMOKALEE, FL - When the Rev. Susan Andrews arrived in the Sunshine State,
she was taken aback to find herself in a place so dark and cold that it gave
her a chill.

	The moderator had used some of her Texas-to-Florida flight time to
bone up on the Taco Bell boycott, and had plenty of facts - "talking points"
- in her head: A farmworker has to pick 4,000 pounds of tomatoes to earn $50.
For every 32-pound bucket he dumps into a grower's bin, he gets a chit worth
40 cents - the same "piece rate" his father worked for in 1978. Taco Bell has
30,000 restaurants worldwide with annual sales of $5 billion.

	Up to then, Andrews was like a lot of other Presbyterians - aware of
the boycott, mildly in favor, not too clear on the details.

	She'd heard some Presbyterians grumble that a consumer boycott is not
the kind of thing the church should be doing with its money while other
missions go begging.

	So the issue was on her radar, but was little more than a blip on a
screen.

	It's not as if she's a Taco Bell habitue.

	She didn't know, for example, until she was told by Chief Assistant
U.S. Attorney Thomas Kirwin in Fort Myers, that trafficking in humans is "the
second-most lucrative organized crime in the United States." ("Drugs are
consumed," Kirwin said. "People you can use over and over."

	Andrews wouldn't have guessed that slavery in the farm fields of the
United States is a major focus of federal law enforcement. ( "You don't
normally expect to hear the words 'slavery' and 'United States' in the same
sentence," said Kirwin, a feisty prosecutor who said his job description is
"locking up people that don't belong walking around.")

	Nor did she know that the most notorious modern slaver Kirwin ever
"popped" is walking around today after just three years in prison.

	The roots of the Taco Bell boycott extend to 1995, when the Coalition
of Immokalee Workers (CIW) organized a weeklong work stoppage to protest low
pay and intolerable living conditions.

	"All we were asking for was dialogue with the growers," Lucas
Benitez, a charismatic CIW leader, told Andrews. "We saw that that road was
blocked. We then tried to get legislation passed to help the workers, but we
found that that path was blocked also, because in Tallahassee (the capital),
the growers have all the power. So then we organized a march from Fort Myers
to Orlando, to get the attention of the growers ... but the march wasn't
noticed much outside of Florida. Nobody had ever heard of Immokalee. All
these things have led us to where we are today.

"We saw that we would have to ... focus attention on those who had more power
- consumers, and the big corporations who control what goes on in Washington
and Tallahassee. We wrote two or three letters to Taco Bell, and there was no
response. That's when we decided to launch the boycott."

	That was not quite three years ago.

	Since then, lots of people have heard about Immokalee (rhymes with
broccoli).

	Benitez and two other CIW members, Romeo Ramirez and Julia Gabriel,
took a turn on the national stage when they were chosen to receive the 2003
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for helping to free more than 1,000
field workers from slavery rings in Florida and South Carolina. They went to
Washington and received the award from Kennedy's widow, Ethel. The citation
said they'd helped uncover "the ugly truth that modern-day slavery exists in
the United States."

	They also received $30,000, which is roughly equal to what four
farmworkers earn in a year. It went into CIW's operating budget.

Andrews had read about the "coyotes" who smuggle workers in from Mexico and
truck them to Florida from Texas and Arizona, charging them $700 to $1,000 a
head, but she didn't know that many workers were then forced to live in
company housing and buy groceries in company stores and sink ever deeper into
"debt bondage." She didn't know that many contractors keep workers enslaved
by paying them in alcohol and crack cocaine.

	She didn't know about a "firewall" in Florida law that makes growers
immune from prosecution for hiring illegal workers, accepting false documents
or permitting labor contractors to hold workers in indentured servitude. ("If
they didn't have that protection," Kirwin said, "the growers'd be like, 'I
ain't going to prison.'")

	The moderator had never actually picked up one of those 32-pound
buckets. She'd never stood in a dusty, trash-strewn parking lot where
hundreds of workers gather every morning, hours before dawn, hoping to get
work. She'd never laid eyes on a rusty old trailer occupied by 14 men sharing
one toilet and one shower and paying $35 a week in rent. Apiece. She'd never
peered into the $7-a-night flophouse that is the shelter of last resort for
Immokalee men with alcohol and drug problems - or imagined that the
proprietor of such a place could think himself a humanitarian.

Until she walked these streets in her own sensible shoes, she could not have
been touched by the sorrow that shimmers in the air here like a desert
mirage.

	What the Immokalee workers want, short-term, is an increase in the
"bucket price" to 75 cents. If they got that raise, big buyers like Taco Bell
would have to pay 1 cent more per pound than they pay today. According to the
CIW, the effect on the retail price of a Taco Bell chalupa would be about
one-quarter of 1 percent.

	Taco Bell invokes the firewall/Pontius Pilate argument: We can't tell
the growers how to treat their field hands. We're not a party to this
dispute; it's between the growers and the pickers.

	Some buyers say the market is so tough these days - because of
foreign competition, especially from Mexico - that they can't afford the
penny-a-pound premium.

	Yet in 2002, when federal law required growers to phase out methyl
bromide, a popular pesticide, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange quickly
approved an "environmental surcharge" of 25 cents per carton (1 cent per
pound) as "an accepted cost of doing business."

What the ICW wants is for Taco Bell to persuade the growers to sit down with
representatives of the farmworkers and hammer out a labor agreement that is
less unfair.

	Benitez said Taco Bell should grab this opportunity to polish its
corporate image.

	"We're trying to make a hero out of them," he said. "We think it's a
win-win situation."

	Before her Immokalee visit, one stop on her recent tour of domestic
missions, Andrews had never seen the ramshackle buses that carry the workers
to and from the fields, sometimes two hours or more each way - hours for
which they are not paid.

	She didn't know that when the morning dew is on the fruit, the
workers have to sit around waiting, sometimes for hours, until the sun climbs
higher into the sky and dries the tomatoes. They aren't paid for that time,
either.

	She would never have imagined, had she not been told by the Rev. Gary
Cook, the coordinator of the Presbyterian Hunger Program, that migrants with
authentic green cards can't get work unless they buy forged green cards -
because labor contractors want to be able to use the threat of deportation to
keep the workers in line.

	She didn't know about an obscure part of the financial-services
industry that preys on illegal immigrants - who can't open bank accounts or
obtain Social Security numbers but are desperate to send money to their
families back home, and thus have no choice but to let the moneychangers take
a 7 percent cut.

She didn't know that a tomato picker's branch bank is his sock, which
sometimes might contain $500 or more, making him an attractive target for
someone more desperate than himself. Robbers in Immokalee ply their trade
with impunity because no one ever goes to the police.

	She'd never had reason to think about second and third passes through
already-harvested fields, when the pickers who have the hardest time getting
work in the first place - women, youngsters under 14 and men over 40 - labor
where fruit is so sparse that even a young, strong man with lungs undamaged
by pesticides could barely make $25 in a 14-hour day.

	Benitez said the migrant fruit and vegetable pickers are the "most
disenfranchised and vulnerable" laborers in America. "First there were the
black slaves," he said, "then the sharecroppers ..."

	Andrews, interrupting: "... And now we have you."

	The moderator might have guessed that farmworkers get no medical
insurance, no pension, no overtime, no sick pay, no paid holidays, and, in
many cases, less than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. But she
hadn't been told that the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor
Relations Act and the federal unemployment compensation system specifically
exclude farmworkers; or that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has no
power to act against growers who misuse pesticides or endanger workers; or
that the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which prohibits
employers from knowingly hiring undocumented workers, is never enforced
("There's a lot of willful blindness," said Kirwin); or that farmworkers pay
state and federal income taxes but never get a refund no matter how little
they earn.

	She didn't know that the one-fifth of farmworkers who are women are
almost certain to be sexually abused by "coyotes" and others who gain power
over them.

	She had never felt the curious stiffness of a workshirt stained with
the blood of a worker beaten senseless for pausing for a drink of water.

	She wouldn't have dreamed that a box of Rice Krispies would cost
one-third more in Immokalee than in her prosperous suburban hometown of
Bethesda, MD.

	The moderator's recent tour of domestic missions took her to
Immokalee on the day when CIW organizers learned that a committee of the
United Methodist Church had voted to recommend endorsing the boycott. A few
days later, delegates to the General Conference of the 8-million-member
church would vote 846-6 to stop going "south of the border" - becoming the
biggest denominational supporter of the campaign.

	The PC(USA) has been on board almost from the beginning. A cross
displayed prominently on a wall of the CIW office is a gift from the Rev.
Clifton Kirkpatrick, the stated clerk, a Texas-sized minister widely known in
Immokalee as gringo grande.

	CIW leaders also had learned earlier that day that the University of
Notre Dame, responding to a protest fast by 100 students, had "postponed" a
renewal of its contract with Taco Bell and asking for more information about
its labor standards. Notre Dame is the 19th U.S. university to evict a Taco
Bell restaurant from campus or block the opening of a new one.

	Those developments sparked a little celebration, during which CIW
members expressed gratitude to the PC(USA) for its early endorsement of the
boycott and for its role in promoting the campaign to the United Methodists.

	A CIW baseball-style cap and T-shirt were presented to Andrews, who
has amassed a collection of such garments during her travels. This one was at
least two sizes too small; when she held it in front of her torso, she looked
like a child playing with a Barbie shirt. Later, she traded it in for one
that fits, and said she'll wear it with pride.

	Until her visit to Immokalee, Andrews didn't know the true cost of
winter tomatoes.

	These are the squarish fruits you've read so much about, the ones
that are bred, like moderators, for thick skins and bruise resistance. They
are picked when they're still as green as snap peas, and zapped later with a
gas to make them redden on schedule. Although they often taste like
styrofoam, they're known in the industry as "fresh" tomatoes (as opposed to
those grown for processing into the likes of tomato paste and ketchup).

	Fresh tomatoes are the basis of a $500 million industry in Florida
alone.

	Before leaving town, Andrews toured the modest offices of the
workers' new, low-power radio station, WCIW, which broadcasts only during
daylight hours but hopes one day soon to go 24/7. Its makeshift antenna,
jerry-rigged to the side of a building, extends maybe 25 feet into the air.
You can't tune it in if you're more than a mile away. But for Andrews, on
this day, Immokalee's "Rrrrrrradio Consciencia" was coming in loud and clear.

	Because of all she learned that day, Andrews will never eat a tomato
again without thinking of this desperate town where the American dream goes
to die.

	She thanked the CIW members and organizers for being "a model and a
witness to the rest of us," and said she believes they'll prevail in their
battle, because they have a moving story to tell > and it's a matter of faith
with her that "people change when they hear stories."

	One in particular.

	"If this isn't the gospel," she said on her way out of town, "then I
don't know what is."

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