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Pulling Injustice Up from the Roots

by Kari Lydersen
02.10.04

IT IS 4:30 A.M. IN IMMOKALEE, FLA., and suddenly the streets are coming alive.

Under a nearly full moon and a sky full of twinkling stars, figures are stepping out of the palm trees and tall weeds from all directions and heading toward a parking lot illuminated by lights from the La Mexicana #5 grocery store. They walk in twos and threes, carrying plastic bags with their lunches. Some of them ride bikes.

Soon, as the first faint light begins to illuminate the sky, old school buses painted red, blue and green begin to pull into the lot. By 5:30 a.m., the place is bustling. There are long lines for coffee and bread inside La Mexicana #5, and ranchera music blares out of a passing car. Over a hundred men and a small number of women gather in groups and walk from bus to bus, speaking Spanish and Creole. They come from Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and other countries in Latin America; a few of them are African-Americans born in the U.S.

By 6:30 a.m., the lot is again quiet, save for a few Mayan Indian boys from Guatemala who bicycle by, or a pair of Haitian women in bright skirts and head wraps who amble down the street. By this time, most of the workers are on their way to the fields, where they will spend the day picking tomatoes, cucumbers, oranges, watermelons and other fruits and vegetables. The workers earn $40 to $50 on a good day. In 2001, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that migrant farm workers earn an average of $7,500 per year, well below the poverty line.

SUBHEAD

Up until the 1960's farm workers were not even covered by minimum wage laws. The exemption for farm workers in the Fair Labor Standards Act was overturned in 1969, giving them the legal right to earn the minimum wage, but in practice, the minimum wage law is regularly violated through a combination of fraudulent record keeping and virtually non-existent enforcement of labor laws, according to workers’ advocates.

Most farm workers have no health insurance and effectively no access to workers compensation, and labor law specifically excludes them from the right to organize without fear of retaliation. They also work in close contact with dangerous pesticides on a daily basis, often developing chronic respiratory or skin problems as a result.

The growers who own the farms pay contractors to hire farm workers, creating a structure with little accountability that’s ripe for labor abuses. Contractors have long been known to fire guns into the air to intimidate workers, beat them for working too slowly or stopping for water, and refuse to pay them their wages. Thousands of workers have been toiled in conditions of virtual slavery, forced to work and live under armed guard 24 hours a day.

Many of these workers were literally sold to contractors by the smugglers who helped them cross the border or the ocean into the U.S. The workers were housed in crowded, shabby trailers or barracks and forced to work fast and hard from sunup to sundown. They might be paid $40 a week or less, and from that amount the contractor would subtract money for room and board, leaving workers in a constant cycle of debt slavery. If they tried to escape, they were often hunted down and beaten.

Enter the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The coalition was formed in 1995 by a group of about 40 workers to combat the gross human rights and labor violations visited upon the migrant farm workers who come to town every fall and spring harvest season.

“Immokalee” is a Seminole word for “my home,” as a cheerful sign welcoming visitors along the highway points out. The town, an hour’s drive south of Fort Myers and just north of the Big Cypress National Preserve, on the southerntip of Florida, has a permanent population of about 14,000 that swells to around 30,000 during the harvest seasons.

One of the coalition’s first large actions was to rally hundreds of workers to march on the home of a contractor who had beaten a worker severely for trying to get a drink of water. As the workers marched, they waved the man’s bloody shirt above their heads and chanted a slogan that echoed the mantra of the Industrial Workers of the World’s immigrant worker struggles nearly a century ago: “When you beat one of us, you beat us all” (“Golpear a uno es golpear a todos!”).

Since that day, there has not been a single report of a contractor beating a worker in the Immokalee area.

Emerging Strength

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has become an integral part of the local community, orchestrating countless marches and protests to demand fair treatment and decent pay. The coalition intervenes in specific cases in which a worker is being abused or denied pay, and maintains a constant public presence pressing for better wages and workers’ rights. In 2000, the coalition marched 230 miles from Fort Myers to Orlando to protest in front of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. And within the past six years, it has played a critical role in exposing and shutting down five human slavery rings involving a total of over 1,000 workers.

For these achievements, on Nov. 20, 2003 three members of the coalition received the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, the first time in its 19-year history that the prize was given to members of a U.S. organization.

Romeo Ramirez, one of the award recipients, came to Immokalee six years ago at age 17. He had left his home in Guatemala at age 12 and spent five years on his own working as a farmer and laborer in Chiapas, Mexico.

“I was in Guatemala trying to figure out how to manage,” he said in Spanish. “I could see who were the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’ Even though I was very young, this was all clear in my mind.”

A mural on the outside of the coalition office shows the Statue of Liberty holding a bushel of tomatoes. | by Kari Lydersen

Almost immediately after Ramirez arrived in Immokalee, he heard about the coalition. He went to one of the group’s meetings and was hooked. Here, finally, were others who shared his analysis of the world and were trying to do something about it.

Ramirez played a key role in the November 2002 conviction of three men -- immigrants themselves) -- from Lake Placid, Fla., on federal charges of slavery and extortion, which got them a total of 34 years behind bars and forced the forfeiture of $3 million in assets. Ramirez went undercover and spent several weeks working as part of the slavery operation the men had been running.

“It was hard work, but it had to be done, whether we were afraid or not,” he later said of the sting. “I saw the workers being held under armed guard. I saw them prevented from leaving and being threatened. It was injustice.”

The coalition has also been involved in four other slavery investigations and prosecutions going back to 1997. Lucas Benitez, a 28-year-old immigrant from Guerrero, Mexico, and another award recipient, said there are still numerous cases of slavery in the U.S.

But Benitez and other coalition members emphasize that besides these literal cases of slavery, all farm workers are toiling under such harsh conditions that they often feel like slaves.

Farm worker and coalition organizer Lucas Benitez stands in front of the coalition's banner, which is written in Creole, Spanish and English. | by Kari Lydersen

“Even if there are no armed guards, people are still enslaved by low wages and unhealthy working conditions,” according to Benitez. “The root of these problems is the same as the root of slavery—the desperation of immigrants to make a living and the way that allows people to exploit them.”

To counter this exploitation, the coalition addresses the problem on a genuinely grassroots level, involving the farm workers directly with a popular education approach and focusing not only on the conditions of agricultural laborers in the U.S., but also on the global economic system that forces so many workers to leave their home countries in the first place.

“People say, if this is so bad, why don’t you find other jobs,” said Gerardo
Reyes, 26. “But not everyone can run away from the situation. There will always be others who will work, because people are forced into desperate situations. The only way you will change this situation is systematic change. In Mexico people used to grow their crops for subsistence and then sell some of them to make money. Now, with all the cheap corn and other grains imported from the U.S., they can’t sell any more. So what do they do? That’s why I can’t follow in the tradition of my father and grandparents.”

Reyes’ grandparents and his father in Zacatecas, Mexico, made their living off the land, growing grains and vegetables in a small farming community. But Reyes realized that this would not be an option for him.

“I asked myself the question where do I want to go in life,” he said in fluent English, which he has learned in just five years in the U.S. “I realized there was not an answer in Zacatecas. If I kept working in the fields in that small town I’d never get out of the cycle of poverty, I might work my whole life and never really be able to provide anything for my family. I wanted to create something, to have something to offer.”

So he made his way to the U.S., and began working in Immokalee. He found out about the coalition from a co-worker who became his friend and roommate. Soon he was attending coalition meetings and starting to think about things more deeply.

“I started to analyze why things are the way they are,” he recalled. “It was an amazing experience for me, to see that there were people here who were fighting against the same things I was against. I learned how an organization works, and how people work together to obtain their rights.”

Today, Reyes, Benitez, Ramirez and several other workers are staff members of the coalition. Employers no longer feel they can get away with robbing, beating and terrorizing workers. Coalition members say violence and blatant human rights violations have virtually ceased in the area due to their efforts, and if an employer is mistreating or refusing to pay a worker, a visit from the coalition will usually turn the situation around.

“Now, things like that don’t really happen, because they know if our rights are violated, we will march,” asserted Francisca Cortez, a young woman from Oaxaca, Mexico, who came here five years ago to work in the fields and is now a coalition staff member.

Workers who come to at least two of the coalition’s weekly meetings, which center on popular education techniques including skits and drawings, get a laminated CIW I.D. card. Cortez noted that employers—not only in Florida, but up and down the East Coast—have learned to respect the card.

“In North Carolina a boss told his workers they couldn’t have a lunch break," she recounted. “They showed their CIW cards and he let them. They called us and said, ‘The cards even work up here!’”

During a bustling November day at the coalition’s office, a Guatemalan woman named Lucrecia came in to report that she and her husband, along with six other workers, had been chased out of the organic squash fields where they were working by a drunken supervisor who threatened and harassed them. The supervisor claimed they had left voluntarily, and so the workers had not been paid their wages. After a quick call from the coalition, the farm owners paid the wages due and promised to look into the conduct of the supervisor.

Even with the gains the coalition has won, however, members are quick to point out that farm workers still live with exploitation and abuse. Workers’ wages today are hardly any higher than they were 20 years ago. In most areas farm workers pay inordinately high rent for substandard, overcrowded housing close to work pick-up sites. In Immokalee, the majority of migrant workers live in a nine-block area adjacent to the parking lot by the coalition’s office. They pay $35-$50 a week to share a rundown trailer with nine other men or to squeeze onto a bunk bed or mattress in one of the shabby, low-slung apartment complexes with metal doors and crumbling stucco walls.

“There will be six men in these tiny rooms, so all there is room for is the beds,” said Cortez, giving a tour of the jumble of trailers and small apartment complexes where workers live. In front of many of the apartment buildings are crude hand-painted signs identifying them as “Campo Gomez” or “Camp Barnhart.” At one peach-colored complex right across from the pickup site, “Tenant Only” is stenciled on the doors and metal grates cover the dingy windows.

“They might look okay on the outside, but inside they are falling apart,” explains Cortez, who wears three sparkly earrings in each ear and a T-shirt from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. “There are rats and cockroaches and no air conditioning. And there is only one stove and one bathroom, so you have to get up at 3 a.m. to wait in line to cook and bathe.”

Given the figures provided by Cortez and other workers, the owners of the trailers and apartments are getting around $1,500 to $2,000 per month for their units, obviously far more than normal market value in the area.

The few local stores in the area are also known to engage in price gouging to take advantage of the workers, according to Cortez. So the coalition started a co-operative store of its own, where workers can buy tortillas, phone cards, soap, spices and other necessities at just over cost. The co-op is bustling every evening, with workers filing in to pick up some Jumex juice, chiles, cooking oil or whatever else they might want. As they wait in line, they gaze at the myriad colorful workers’ rights and global justice posters that line the walls. Above the door is a painted slab of wood that reads, “No soy tractor” (“I am not a tractor”). On the opposite wall is a large mural showing workers from different countries and the words “Coalition of Immokalee Workers” in English, Spanish and Creole (“Kowalisyon Travaye nan Immokalee,” in Creole). Next to the racks of black pepper, pumpkin seeds and other products are drawings created in the coalition’s popular education workshops, including one of a haughty Chihuaha dog holding a Mexican man on a leash with the words “What’s wrong with this picture”—a reference to the coalition’s campaign against Taco Bell.

Yo No Quiero Taco Bell

Indeed, the huge restaurant chain is the subject of many of the posters and protest signs that make up the pleasant clutter in the coalition’s office. There are crossed-out Chihuahuas with the slogan “Yo no quiero Taco Bell” (“I don't want Taco Bell”), and beautifully painted baskets of tomatoes bearing the slogan “Stop Sweatshops in the Fields.” The coalition is demanding that Taco Bell, the largest buyer of Immokalee tomatoes, pay growers one cent more per pound, which would enable growers to approximately double the pickers’ wages. Now, on average, a worker must pick two full tons of tomatoes per day to earn $50. The coalition is also asking Taco Bell to facilitate negotiations between growers, contractors and the coalition, and to implement a code of conduct mandating fair treatment and wages for pickers.

Targeting major corporations has been the primary focus of the coalition’s general strategy for the past few years. Members note that fast food chains like Taco Bell play a major role in keeping farm workers’ wages low, since they pay so little for their produce. Benitez addressed the fast food industry’s responsibility for the plight of farm workers in his acceptance speech at the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Awards ceremony in Washington, D.C.

“Behind the shiny, happy images promoted by the fast-food industry, with its never-ending commercials on TV fueled by over $3 billion in marketing annually, and behind the supermarket advertising that celebrates the abundance of our harvest each Thanksgiving, there is another reality,” Benitez told the crowd. “Behind those images, the reality is that there are farm workers who contribute their sweat and blood so that enormous corporations can profit, all the while living in sub-poverty misery, without benefits, without the right to overtime or protection when we organize.”

“If you target these growers, no one knows who they are,” added Reyes. “But everyone knows who Taco Bell is. We won’t stop targeting the contractors and the growers, but we also want to target the corporations that buy the produce and the consumers who buy the products produced by the corporations.”

As of November 2003, Taco Bell was still refusing to negotiate with farm workers, even after Immokalee workers and their allies held a 10-day hunger strike outside the company's Irvine, Calif. headquarters the previous February, which garnered the official endorsement of the National Council of Churches. In February 2002, Immokalee workers did a cross-country “Truth Tour,” speaking at countless colleges and community centers and standing on tables at Taco Bells throughout the nation to tell customers the true story behind the tomatoes they were eating.

The Taco Bell campaign was also a major focus of the Root Cause March in November 2003, a 34-mile trek from Ft. Lauderdale to Miami organized by several South Florida grassroots groups to raise awareness of the effects of free trade on poor communities and people of color. About 50 workers from Immokalee went on the three-day march, which culminated in the Miami protests against the Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA, or ALCA in Spanish).

Thanks to the coalition’s efforts, there is probably already more general public awareness about the FTAA in Immokalee than in most major U.S. cities. The walls of money-transfer outfits, taquerias and apartment buildings were plastered with fliers about the march and the FTAA, and for a week before the event the coalition handed out free coffee and bread along with anti-FTAA leaflets to workers heading out for their early morning shifts.

“Senores, the time has arrived for the free coffee,” Ramirez called out over a megaphone into the chilly darkness the morning before the march began, quickly drawing crowds of workers over from the parking lot where the buses were waiting to take them to the fields. “This is the last day to sign up for the march to Miami,” Ramirez said as the workers got coffee, bread and steaming cups of oatmeal. “If you can’t come on the march, please learn this information about ALCA. It will make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

The next evening at the pre-march meeting, it was obvious that his early morning message and the rest of the campaign had had an effect. The room was filled with men and a handful of women ready to join the march, some of them long-time coalition members and some who were in the office for the first time. While some reclined wearily on couches, others leaned forward with excitement on folding chairs.

“I’m not afraid, this will be a good march,” said a middle-aged man from Vera Cruz, Mexico, still covered in mud from his day in the fields.

“We get paid so little, it’s a crime,” exclaimed Amilcar Cruz, 26, a Guatemalan who had come to the office for the first time. “That’s why I’m marching, for our rights. We are humans too!”

For the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, raising awareness about the FTAA and the role of corporations like Taco Bell in the oppression of workers is just as much a part of the struggle for human rights as their work exposing slavery.

“When they’ve been negotiating something in secret for over six years, with the investors and the people who own companies, when they’re trying to change the constitutional laws of countries to favor the people with money and power, you know there’s nothing good about it,” said Reyes, of the effort to implement the FTAA. “They’re not asking the poor, they’re not asking the needy and the hungry, instead they’re making their money off the poor. A lot of people in Mexico, in poor countries around the world, don’t know [about the FTAA/ALCA]. But we know we are poor, and we just need to ask ourselves why. The answer is ALCA, free trade and corruption. That’s why we’re taking to the streets and making our voices heard.”

One of the Immokalee workers marching to Miami, Mathieu Beaucicot, came to the U.S. from Haiti in 1992 looking for a better life. He left a wife and five daughters behind.

“I work so hard for almost no money,” said Beaucicot, 48, in Spanish he has learned from his fellow workers, with a soft Caribbean lilt. “After I pay for rent and food I have no money left to send back to my family. In Haiti there was no money and the work was hard, but you could have a beer, relax, spend time with your family. Here all you do is work. I work when I’m tired, I work when I’m sick, and I get no Medicaid, no Social Security, no health insurance.”

As with most of the workers who come through the coalition’s office, it is clear that the hours of hard work have not dimmed Beaucicot’s spirit. He is always quick to smile and laugh—and play a mean game of dominoes, his friends note—carrying on the fight with an air of gentleness and joy.

“We will just keep fighting more and more,” he vowed. “We're used to working hard."

Postscript:
On Dec. 7, 2003, The Palm Beach Post made public an ongoing U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the enslavement of immigrant tomato-pickers in the town of Wimauma, Fla., several hours drive from Immokalee. A 28-year-old Mexican immigrant who received temporary legal status for cooperating with the FBI described the situation to the Post: "The contractors, afraid the workers would try to escape, began to guard them at all times and, on some occasions when no guard was available, locked them in a trailer that was secured with a thick chain, a padlock and windows that were nailed so that no one could get out."

For more information:

• The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, www.ciw-online.org.
• National Center for Farmworker Health, www.ncfh.org.

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