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"We must ensure that all life is treated with the dignity it deserves," President Bush declared during his final State of the Union address. He then segued into a call to ban human cloning. He didn't talk about dignity in terms of ravaged pensions, working longer hours for lower wages, and the loss of healthcare and other benefits. He didn't talk about dignity in terms of the rise in poverty - 37 million Americans, one in eight citizens now living below the poverty line in the wealthiest nation in the world. And he certainly didn't talk about dignity when it comes to migrant workers in Immokalee, Florida where - as Senator Bernie Sanders told me just days before Bush's SOTU - "the norm is a disaster, and the extreme is slavery."
These farm workers pick the tomatoes many Americans eat at McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King and other fast food chains. They are paid 45 cents for a 32-pound bucket of tomatoes. It's grueling work, as Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser noted recently in a New York Times op-ed : "During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes." For that two tons the worker can expect about $50, and annual wages of $10,000-$14,000. Wages have been stagnant for more than two decades. Two weeks ago, six people were indicted on slavery charges for beating workers, chaining and locking them inside U-haul trucks, and threatening physical harm if the workers left their jobs. This is far from a rare occurrence, as the Miami Herald wrote, "… farm crew slavery stories and the brutal exploitation of undocumented workers have long since lost their shock value in Florida."
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) - a community-based worker organization - has "exposed a half-dozen slavery cases" that helped trigger the freeing of more than 1,000 workers, and also advocated for better wages, living conditions, respect from the industry, and an end to indentured servitude. CIW recently scored critical victories in negotiating a penny-per-pound surcharge - so workers would now receive about 77 cents per 32-pound bucket - with McDonald's and Yum! Brands (owner of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC).
The corporations - not the tomato growers - would pay the 40 percent salary increase. Astonishingly, Burger King has refused to go along with the deal (tell Burger King to pony up) - it would cost them less than $300,000 annually and the corporation took in $2.23 billion in revenues in 2007. Not to mention three private equity firms control most of Burger King's stock, including Goldman Sachs.
In 2006 Goldman Sachs' top 12 execs took home bonuses exceeding $200 million - "more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year," according to Schlosser.) Even more outrageous is the response of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing 90 percent of the state's growers. The group has said it will fine any member $100,000 for accepting the extra penny per pound for worker wages.
It's no surprise that Bush has failed to use the bully pulpit to call out slavery and excessive greed in our nation. It's also no surprise that Sen. Sanders is once again taking a leading role in serving as the conscience of the Senate. Two weeks before the State of the Union address, Sanders, along with Schlosser, went to Immokalee to meet with CIW and witness the working and living conditions firsthand. In letters co-signed by Senators Edward Kennedy, Richard Durbin, and Sherrod Brown, he urged both Burger King and the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange to support the penny-per-pound deal. He's also working with Kennedy to hold hearings on this issue in the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee chaired by Kennedy. I spoke with the Senator about his experiences down in Immokalee, and why this is such an important issue for our country. If President Bush truly wants to use his final year in office to ensure that all life is treated with dignity, he should head on over to Sen. Sanders office and get involved.
Here, then, is what Senator Sanders shared with me:
"It was really stunning - the likes of which I have never seen in my life. I've long been interested in workers issues. But when we talk about the race to the bottom here in the United States I would say that Immokalee, Florida is the bottom. I think those are workers who are more ruthlessly exploited and treated with more contempt than any group of workers that I've ever seen and I suspect exist in the US.
What I observed is… I was out at 5:30 in the morning, where tomato pickers from all over the community assemble at several locations, primarily in a large parking lot. School buses come by to pick them up and take them to different growers' tomato fields. Some are selected and some are not. So, for a start, when you line up at 5:30 in the morning, you don't know if you're going to make a nickel during that day. You're standing there, and someone is pointing, 'you, you, you… but not you….' and you can see people dejected, because by 8:30 the buses are out and if you're not selected you're not gonna work. So these are desperate people then who have just discovered that that day they're not gonna earn a penny.
Then you get on the bus and depending on which farm you're going to it will be longer or shorter, but perhaps you're going a half hour away…. You're getting to the field at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning, and you don't go to work right away. You're getting paid piecemeal.
The pay is very, very low to begin with, but you're getting paid piecemeal. You can't pick until the sun comes out and dries the tomatoes. So we got photographs of workers just hanging around the bus waiting for the tomatoes to dry and that might be an hour, hour and a half. Now it's not only that this is your time, it is in a sense the contempt that you are so disposable, that we can get you out here
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