"True wealth is not measured in money or status or power. It is measured in the legacy we leave behind for those we love and those we inspire." Those were the words of Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers and a man who was a migrant farmer his whole life. Chavez, who never earned more than $6,000 a year in his lifetime, never owned a house, never was elected to public office. Yet when he died in 1993, nearly 40,000 people marched behind his casket and his legacy surely does live on.
Chavez' legacy lives on in the work of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), the two farm workers unions. Both work with one of the most exploited groups of workers in this nation. The Board of Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ recently went to North Carolina and met with farm workers who is one of the nation's largest pickle companies. The company says that it does not directly employ workers who pick the cucumbers it uses for its pickles and therefore cannot be held accountable for the workers' pay and conditions. This is technically true, but Mt. Olivedoes have contracts with growers which determine the prices growers receive for cucumbers, effectively controlling the wages and benefits growers can provide. In addition, some of its growers are highly-placed employees of the company itself.
The workers who pick cucumbers for Mt. Olive growers work 10 to 12 hour days, with little or no enforcement of minimum wage standards. On our visit, we saw no toilet facilities near the fields and many have no water for the workers to drink while they are working in hot, dusty fields. We visited some of the living quarters and saw broken down and unsanitary conditions.
Workers told us stories of taking thier little children in the fields with them because there are no child care facilities, so many children begin to work in the fields as a game. They told of being afraid to complain for fear of harassment, firing and deportation for those who are not citizens. Many are brought to the U.S. to work in the fields and if they are fired, they are immediately returned to thir homeland and not allowed to look for other work.
FLOC, which has organized similar contracts in the Midwest, four years ago was asked by the workers to negotiate with Mt. Olive. Over 3,000 workers have signed cards authorizing FLOC as their collective bargaining agent, but the company refuses to negotiate. After two years of trying to talk, FLOC called a boycott of all of Mt. Olive pickle products and over 200 religious, labor and community organizations across the country have endorsed the boycott. Kroger food stores in northwest Ohio have agreed to take Mt. Olive pickles off their shelves, but the NC Krogers have so far refused and would not even accept a package of 540 letters from religious groups in North Carolina asking them to do so.
Similarly, a coalition of farm workers and friends in Florida has launched a new initiative to address major corporte buyers of Immokalee tomatoes. On Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday this year, these farm workers marched to the Florida state capitol to publicize their plight. The Immokalee tomato pickers are paid between 40 and 45 cents per 35-pound bucket of tomatoes. Their wageshave not increased in a decade and they face many of the same living conditions as other farm workers. One of the largest buyers of Immokalee tomatoes is Taco Bell and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), after repeatly being turned away by Taco Bell, has called for a boycott of Taco Bell. "If Taco Bell were to voluntarily pay just one cent more per pound, and the growers would agree to pass that penny along to workers, that one penny could almost double the picking piece rate overnight," says CIW.
Experience tells us that farm workers only win their struggle for fair wages and decent living standards when they are joined by consumers who care. As the rest of the economy has prospered, farm workers have been left out. They earn no more than they did twenty years ago, when inflation is taken into account. Many live in appalling conditions so that we might have plentiful and cheap fruits and vegetables. If Cesar Chavez's legacy is to live on, then we must rededicate ourselves to justice for the farm workers. For without them, our nation would not eat.
(Note: If you wish to contact Kroger's concerning the Mt. Olive pickle boycott, you can call their national customer service hotline at 800-853-3033. If you wish to contact Taco Bell president Emil Brolick, write: 17901 Von Karman, Irvine, CA 92614.)