THE COALITION OF IMMOKALEE WORKERS
Immokalee, FL
By Mary Jo McConahay

In 1993, farm workers calling themselves the Coalition of Immokalee Workers began meeting in a borrowed room in a local church. Facing a time honored tactic of local bosses of divide and conquer, Haitian, Mexican and Guatemalan farm workers refused to take the bait of working against each other. Within five years members had used work stoppages, a hunger strike, a 230-mile march and alliances with supportive groups to win raises and respect for indigent farm workers. Egalitarian and rooted in non-violence, members expect attention from top industry executives to abuses by their suppliers such as withholding wages, deplorable living conditions, and involuntary servitude, and they are receiving it. The CIW is growing and receiving enormous attention, especially after its recent hard-won victory over Taco Bell. CIW’s agreement with the fast food giant is a model of private enterprise collaboration with a group that stands for grassroots social justice.

First, They Took On Taco Bell. Now, the Fast-Food World -- New York Times
Deal a Big Win for Small Migrants' Group – National Public Radio

In the months after the scruffy Coalition of Immokalee Workers won its celebrated victory over the world’s largest restaurant company, the sun shone down just as hard on tomato pickers’ heads. There was no more elbowroom than before in the trailers and glorified sheds where they live like sardines, and the rickety vans and buses that bounce them to migrant picking jobs felt no safer. But something had changed, and it felt irreversible.

“If you don’t do it, no one will do it for you,” said 25-year old Ermalinda Cortez, holding 2-year old son Mael at CIW headquarters in a low-rent building just off the main street. For five years Cortez has been taking time from the fields to carry protest and demands across the country with other CIW members. She has picketed and leafleted, explained the farm workers’ position to customers in fast food drive-through lines, to students and church congregations, allowed herself to freeze and become drenched with rain and sometimes suffer humiliation at the hands of mockers during the boycott of Taco Bell, a division of the behemoth Yum Brands. In the end the company committed to new labor rules that strictly forbid indentured servitude by suppliers, and pledged to pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes.

The extra penny means each 32-lb bucket now earns its picker 72 cents, not just 40 cents as it did before, and no one should disdain that penny’s economic benefit to workers: Before, Ermalinda Cortez had to work 7 days a week, but now works 6 days to earn the same and spends more time with her child. The penny has simply but dramatically bought family time for many. Today Rolando Sales and his wife Victoria can save a little from their combined field wages for their coming baby, instead of spending all for food and rent. Roberto Mendez, who is single, can send more every month to his family in Guatemala, and perhaps return home sooner.

For Ermalinda Cortez and the others however the penny a pound gain is more than a pay hike. With it has come a fundamental shift in worldview, a sense that powerlessness in the country’s worst-paid and worst-treated labor force is not inevitable. “I would do this again,” she said firmly.

Not since the historic campaigns of Cesar Chavez and the California farm workers has a group of agricultural laborers turned the national spotlight so effectively on its own conditions, accumulating tons of newsprint and hours of radio and television time and prestigious rights awards for members. With victory comes the best story of all because David has won, inspiring hope in dark times, overcoming Goliath peacefully without the killer rock, even persuading the giant to become a partner in enforcing rights by issuing the tough new Taco Bell obligatory labor rules for suppliers. Behind the headlines however is what Ermalinda was talking about: the growing, fundamental shift in how CIW tomato pickers see themselves and the world in which they work. It is a product of members’ own sense of what justice is, how decisions should be taken, and an ever-developing sense of who they, the farm workers, are.

Unlike the California movement for instance, which was also pledged to non-violence, the Immokalee Coalition has no single face like Chavez’ to symbolize the struggle, no single charismatic figure or leader. “We workers are the charismatic figures,” said Lucas Benitez, a founding member. Poorly educated or even illiterate laborers find themselves speaking in public for the first time. “A worker speaking of his own reality – that’s the charisma,” said Benitez.

This is the same territory where Edward R. Murrow’s classic 1960 Thanksgiving television documentary Harvest of Shame was filmed, shocking Americans with its picture of the bleak and underpaid lives of the workers who put food on their tables. “We used to own our slaves, but now we just rent them,” is a resonant line from the film, which could be made today with immigrant Mexican, Central American and Haitian faces replacing those of poor blacks and whites.

“We are timid, but college students want to learn my experience and that’s a matter of pride,” said Roberto Mendez, 21, who heard about Immokalee from other migrants when an employer in Oklahoma fields failed to pay them for picking cucumbers and watermelon. The students are surprised, Mendez said, “that it’s happening in this country, not a foreign one.” Ermalinda Cortez recalls telling 12 year-olds about life in the fields and later discovering they asked parents not to eat at Taco Bell. “I was emotional – we’ve never seen something like that,” she said. Insults at protests and talks hurt, but you “recuperate” and “go back to it.”

To say the CIW has no single leader figure is not to say workers like Mendez and Cortez are not developing leadership skills, often in the trenches of protests and by speaking out about abuses. Members also know they need knowledge of a wider world inhabited by those with whom they must negotiate. In one event, they flipped the idea of a solidarity tour where supporters venture into rough neighborhoods to see a slice of poor people’s living conditions: some 90 Coalition members split away from the most recent protest at Yum Brands headquarters in Louisville to tour neighborhoods where wealthy executives live. “A peasant from Guatemala generally has no idea of what’s behind a gated community, what you do when you play golf, or what a Mercedes Benz costs,” said staffer Julia Perkins. On the bus home some tried to figure how many buckets of tomatoes they would have to pick to afford the luxury car.

Coalition staffers (all pickers except for Perkins, who worked in farm worker health before coming to Immokalee) draw the same minimum wage as a 40-hour a week farm worker -- no overtime, no benefits, no health insurance. Volunteers for protests and educational tours miss wage work in the field, and all face the same cheap travel and accommodations on the road. Money saved, they say, goes to launching more actions. In regular open Wednesday night meetings where actions and strategy are discussed, there is little to distinguish a long-time member from a recently arrived migrant.

What distinguishes the Immokalee Coalition from many other organizations, perhaps more than any other characteristic: its decisions are not handed top-down from an executive committee, nor even made by voting, but arrived at by consensus. This is the way of communal decision-making honored in the hometowns and native villages of many migrants, the way questions of where to put a school or whether to ask the authorities for a clinic or a road are resolved, for instance. It is a method that aims at keeping peace in a community when questions arise in times of crisis, a system that guarantees eventual unanimity and inclusion no matter how much discussion needs to unfold.

CIW members may not even share a common language – many speak Spanish but are most comfortable in Creole, Mixtec, Zapotec or the Maya tongues of southern Mexico and Guatemala – but the consensus is based on shared experience of hard work in an unfair farm labor system. Ask members what they think of as “justice” and responses are down to earth, mutually understood: “When the employers receive punishment for beating you… When they have to give you time to go to the bathroom because they are afraid something will be done to them if they don’t… When they have to treat you like they would treat someone with papers.” Agricultural laborers long deprived of decent housing or fair play can become fatalistic and passive, but at Immokalee the emphasis is on developing consciousness of just how strong they can be as individuals and working together, often using the methods of “popular education” made famous by the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire.

“Theatre reaches your heart,” said Cortez, describing a popular piece in which Taco Bell begins as “a big giant” and shrinks progressively. “It’s just like when we told people waiting in their cars what we were doing and they left, and the line to buy tacos got smaller.” Photocopied drawings are posted on walls or handed out as fliers for members to mull over and discuss at meetings. “You can’t read or write but you can understand the picture, and you can talk and listen to others,” said Benitez, 29, who has worked the tomatoes, watermelon and other crops since he came from Guerrero, Mexico at age 17. “This is what the organization is based in – we wouldn’t have arrived at where we are without it.”

Members don‘t apologize for a campaign demanding just a penny more a pound, or for unsubtle methods of raising each other’s awareness of individual dignity and strength in numbers. “The biggest changes are done with simple things,” Benitez said. “Gandhi made a revolution in his country with a simple message and commitment. Martin Luther King changed the laws of this country by changing consciousness.”

The straightforward attitude applies to negotiation too. At first, actions demanded better conditions from immediate bosses who worked for suppliers; but when members saw little real change they went back to meetings and group analysis of their situation. An article in an industry paper to which the Coalition subscribes revealed it was Taco Bell for instance, not its growers, who set the price to pay for tomatoes. A light went off. “In my home town a merchant was cheating so the people made a boycott of his store,” one older Mexican worker offered at a meeting. There would be no more dealing with middlemen – members decided from then on they would focus on those who had the power to make the big decisions. While the CIW and Taco Bell met sporadically over the years, alliances were wrought with church groups and national figures, and student groups on more than 20 campuses who persuaded administrations to kick the franchise off campus or cancel contracts until the company agreed to Coalition demands. At the final negotiation there were no second-tier administrators sitting on the company’s side of the table, no facilitators or native English speakers to mediate for the workers. Top executives reached the agreement with two men and a woman – the Zapotec and Creole speakers also spoke Spanish – delegated to represent the other 4000 members.

Members also remind you they believe the Immokalee movement has only just begun. Contacts are under way with McDonalds and other fast-food mega-companies. “The vision of the campaign was never to stop with Taco Bell – we need the other giants to make a change in the industry,” said Benitez. “If one worker leaves there is another and another. It’s a sustainable movement -- it won’t disappear. We’re making the changes for all farm workers.”