Immokalee workers to take slavery tales to Crist

By AMY BENNETT WILLIAMS
awilliams@...

http://news-press.com/article/20090312/NEWS0119/903120349/1075

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced Wednesday he will talk with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers - a meeting the group has sought for two years. On the table: slavery and the labor conditions of Southwest Florida's tomato harvesters.

Crist spokesman Sterling Ivey said the meeting will likely be the last week of March.

The coalition has tried to meet with Crist for two years with no success. On Monday, members traveled to Tallahassee to deliver thousands of petitions and re-enact Immokalee's most recent slavery prosecution.  (Click here for a photo report of the theater and press conference that took place on Monday.)   

In December, members of the Navarrete family went to federal prison for enslaving 12 migrant workers. The bosses took their captive crews to work on farms owned by some of the state's major tomato producers: Immokalee-based Six L's and Pacific Tomato Growers in Palmetto. Both belong to the Socially Accountable Farm Employers program, designed to prevent labor abuses.

Neither company returned calls from The News-Press Wednesday afternoon.

The Navarrete case is the seventh such slave labor operation the coalition has helped prosecute in federal court in the past 11 years. More than 1,000 people have been freed.

Slavery, coalition members say, is the extreme end of a broken labor system that begins with subpoverty wages. The group has pledges from the world's largest fast-food companies - McDonald's, Burger King, Subway and others - to pay harvesters a penny more per pound for the tomatoes they pick.

The extra money would make a huge difference in workers' lives, 31-year-old picker Rafael Gomez told The News-Press last week. He hadn't found work for eight days.

"If I'd made a few more dollars, I'd have been able to have some defense against hunger," Gomez said.

Although the fast-food companies have agreed to the increase, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, to which 90 percent of the state's tomato producers belong, refuses to pass it along, citing legal concerns. Instead, the companies pay the extra wages into an escrow account, where it accumulates without reaching workers.

That's another thing coalition members want to take up with Crist.

"What's most important is what happens after the meeting," worker Leonel Perez said. "We hope the governor can set the record straight that not a single case of slavery is acceptable in the 21st century - period - and that he can help us move the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange out of the way of our agreements with food industry leaders."

Josh Viertel, president of New York-based Slow Food USA and part of a group of food advocates who visited Immokaee earlier this month, agrees.

"We should be eating food with a story behind it that doesn't make us lose our appetite," Viertel said.

 

 

 

 

Seth Doyle, MA

Migrant Health Coordinator

Northwest Regional Primary Care Association

sdoyle@..., (206) 783-3004 ext 16