Tomato Rabbi!

When you look at this tomato, what do you see? What questions come to mind?

·        Red, round, shiny, beautiful

·        I wonder if it’s juicy inside and if it has good flavor

·        I think about eating it with a slice of mozzarella and some basil

·        I might wonder whether it is organic or locally grown – whether I need to wash some pesticides off of it before I eat it.

But for me, and probably for many of us, there is a question that I hadn’t really thought to ask about tomatoes before this week.

Who are the people who picked this tomato? And what are their lives like?

This week I met some of those folks. On Monday through Wednesday of this week, I and a group of a dozen rabbis – Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox – went down to Florida with T’ruah – a national rabbinic human rights organization that I have been involved with for many years.

We met migrant farmworkers who spend a good part of the year – from October through February or March – picking tomatoes in central Florida, in the fields surrounding a town called “Immokalee.” These laborers pick nearly all of the tomatoes that Americans consume and purchase out of season at places like Stop and Shop, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, McDonalds, Wendy’s, Subway and Taco Bell.

The first thing to know is that the people who pick the tomatoes have created a powerful organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or CIW. Even though they come from different places and speak many different languages – Spanish, Creole, and a variety of indigenous languages spoken in various regions of Mexico and Guatemala – they came together, starting in the early 90’s, to share their experiences with each other and to change the conditions in which they are working. Use popular education – drawings, skits, radio. Now the CIW has many allies, including my rabbinic organization, T’ruah.

Up until 2010, when the CIW’s organizing efforts began to transform the industry, workers had no rights or protections and were at the mercy of the particular grower they worked for that day. On Tuesday morning at 5am, our group of rabbis went to one of the many parking lots in Immokalee and watched the workers streaming there to board white and blue school buses that would take them out to the fields.

We also saw the deplorable, ramshackle trailers in which the workers live. They pack 10-12 people into a trailer to be able to afford the rent, which is comparable to what you would pay in NYC for the same amount of space.

We learned from Emilio Faustino, one of the CIW members, that the people who pick our food are mostly day laborers. Some might have a verbal agreement with a particular grower to work for a certain number of days in a week or month. But for the most part, the workers arrive at the parking lot and don’t know for sure if they will find work that day.

What I’m about to describe used to happen everywhere, without any recourse on the part of the laborer. Today, now that the CIW’s Fair Food Agreement is taking hold among growers, these conditions don’t exist everywhere all the time anymore, and when they do arise among growers who have sign the agreement, there is recourse. But there are still many growers who have not signed the agreement, and even those who have are not implementing it consistently yet.

Conditions historically, and still in many places today:

·        They would board the bus, arrive at the field by 6am, and sometimes have to sit on the bus for 2-3 hours to wait for the dew to dry on the tomatoes – they wouldn’t get paid for those hours.

·        Once the picking begins, the workers were, and still are not paid by the hour – they are paid according to the number of 32-lb buckets of tomatoes they pick. Try lifting a 32-lb bucket on your shoulder and running with it some time.

·        To make minimum wage, a worker would have to pick 153 of these buckets in one day, in the hot, humid sun, for 10-14 hours per day, with no shade. $7500 /yr., sub-poverty

·        Wage theft was rampant. The worker runs his or her bucket to a truck where a person in the truck would dump it out and give the empty bucket back with a token inside. The worker would keep track of the tokens and get paid 45 cents per token at the end of the day. But if the dumper doesn’t think the worker filled the bucket to his standards, he would dump the tomatoes out but not give the picker a token, sending him back to pick another bucket more to his standards.

 What I just described used to be the typical experience of tomato worker. However, there is a spectrum of experience, where what I just described is on the more normative end, but it gets worse from there. Because these workers work at the whim of their particular bosses, who were not accountable to any outside standards or authorities for how they treated the workers, the workers were, and still are in some cases, incredibly vulnerable to abuse.

In fact, workers not only risked their jobs, but even their lives if they complained about unhealthy or abusive conditions. They are regularly exposed to pesticides. But it used to be that if someone was actively spraying in a nearby row, a worker would risk getting fired if he stopped picking to move away from the spraying. Beatings were not uncommon, regular sexual abuse and assault of women, and regular verbal abuse. No recourse, no standards, not job security.

Famous case of a 17 year old boy who was beaten  - one of the early CIW actions, organized a march to perpetrator’s house with the bloody shirt as a banner.

Tonight I’m not going to go into detail on the worst of the worst on this spectrum which has in many cases constituted conditions that meet the stringent legal standards for prosecution as modern-day slavery. But just to give you a sense – cases of no escape, locked in at night, debt peonage – not only for illegal immigrants. You may pay for a visa and show up to find there is no job for you. Or, with guest worker program – stuck with the employer who hired you. If conditions are not good, there is nowhere to go.

CIW’s work:

Started with general strikes and hunger strikes in the 90’s, getting the DOJ to investigate and prosecute slavery cases.

More recently, changed tactics – use market pressure. Get corporations who buy from the growers to sign a Fair Food Agreement – will only purchase from growers who pass one penny per pound of tomatoes picked on to the workers and observe a code of conduct – zero tolerance for abuse, wage theft, sexual harassment, slavery

This has been very successful – 11 major corporations (Taco Bell, McD’s, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Chipotle, food service companies @ college campuses) and now 90% of growers. Working now on Publix supermarket (SE) and Wendy’s – last of the 5 top restaurant chains. Very challenging, but it’s working.

Impact: the workers are the ones who have made these changes

Time clock

Minimum wage guarantee, even if raining, or waiting for dew to dry

CIW trains workers and growers on zero tolerance for harassment, wage theft, etc.

3^rd party takes complaints and investigates – Judge Laura Safer Espinoza

But – need everyone on board. Risks of abuse, slavery still exist as long as not all growers are signed on. And, still a risk that growers will pull out if we don’t keep the pressure on. This is about changing a culture.

I left with so many impressions. Here are some:

·        Immigration/illegal immigration – most of these workers were subsistence farmers at home. No longer can sell their produce – now, competing with US prices b/c of NAFTA – can’t compete, so have to become part of the US food production industry and send $ home

·        Ag workers, along with domestic workers and restaurant workers are the most vulnerable

·        History of slavery in South continues, just in a different form – still most marginal/vulnerable population in the country can be enslaved (we see this in case of young runaways lured into prostitution as well)

·        How vast the tomato farms are and how hidden from view for most consumers.

·        These changes impact 100,000 workers – this makes a very big difference in real people’s lives.

·        Empowerment of laborers

Sign letters to Wendy’s asking them to sign on to CIW’s Fair Food program –the letters will be hand-delivered the week of Nov 11-17^th.

You may have seen the photo of me praying with the other tomato rabbis in a supermarket – we won’t be doing that. But we will be going to a Wendy’s to attempt to deliver the letters to the manager, and to hand information out to customers to raise awareness.