You might think that “slavery” refers to labor conditions in some backwater of the developing world, but actually it’s the term federal prosecutors use to describe tomato pickers in Florida. According to Douglas Molly, a U.S. attorney, the tomato picking region of Immokalee, Florida, is “ground zero for modern slavery.”
The quote comes from a story by Barry Estabrook in Gourmet magazine, who points out that you’ve eaten the product of slave labor if you’ve had tomatoes in the winter. Most come from Florida, where workers earn about 45 cents for a 32-pound basket of tomatoes — unchanged since the late 1970s. But with jacked up fees for ramshackle housing, cold showers, and subsistence rations they never get out of debt. Workers have been locked and shackled while not in the fields. A handful of these slave bosses have been prosecuted.
Fast food companies under pressure from labor activists have raised the price they pay for tomatoes by 1 cent a pound. But local tomato growers have refused to pass on that money to workers. Now, the extra money, meant to raise workers’ $50 daily pay by another $20, sits in escrow.
Whole Foods also agreed last year to work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to improve wages and working conditions in the fields – the only supermarket company to do so. This week, Bon Appetit Management Co., a Palo Alto, CA-based food service company — part of Britain’s $16 billion Compass Group — said it would stop buying tomatoes if the growers did not reform their labor practices, according to the Washington Post. BAMCO runs about 400 dining halls for companies including Yahoo, Cisco, Dreamworks SKG and many college and universities, including MIT.
The growers “can do the right thing, and our five million pounds of business can go to them,” said Fedele Bauccio, Bon Appetit’s chief executive. “Or they can let the tomatoes rot in the fields.”
Bauccio is looking for widespread reform and is willing to steer his business to those growers who agree to a higher labor standard. What this might do is split the growers’ coalition, slowly fomenting change.
As Whole Foods President Walter Robb says in the Post story: “In the long term how can something be sustainable if it doesn’t include the welfare of those who produce it?”
May 6th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Excellent post! Thank you for drawing attention to Immokalee. There’s a group from the University of Notre Dame that goes down there every year and has for some time as part of a larger effort to protest Taco Bell’s use of slave tomatoes in their food.