I didn’t know what to expect when I went to visit the Coalition of Immokalee Workers this past February, with a delegation of rabbis organized by Rabbis for Human Rights. Since Dorshei Tzedek became involved with CIW’s Fair Food Campaign two years ago, I’ve learned that this farmworker organization has had remarkable success in getting major retailers who purchase tomatoes – starting with fast food giants like Taco Bell and Burger King, and moving on to supermarket chains including Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s – to sign on to a Code of Conduct to better working conditions in the fields, and to pay a premium of a penny per pound of tomatoes that goes directly to the farmworkers. Along with CDT members, I’ve participated in a wintry march to a local Stop & Shop, gone on delegations to local Trader Joe’s outlets, and even met with the Vice President for Corporate Responsibility of the Ahold Company, the parent corporation of the Stop & Shop chain. But would exactly would I experience in Immokalee?
Immokalee is an unincorporated town in southwest Florida, near many of the tomato fields that provide the majority of winter tomatoes eaten east of the Mississippi. During the growing, it is home to thousands of migrant workers who pick those tomatoes. In the late 1990s, some of the farmworkers began to organize to protest horrific conditions in the tomato fields—conditions which, in some cases, descended into outright slavery. During our trip, we visited the Farmworker Modern Slavery Museum, a portable exhibit organized by the Coalition. We saw chains that had held migrant workers captive, and read newspaper accounts of workers being locked into trailers and having their shoes taken away overnight, to prevent escape. We learned that the CIW has been instrumental in exposing these cases of human trafficking, working with the Department of Justice to free over 1,000 people from slavery since 1999. And since 2002, when it launched its “Fair Food Campaign,” the CIW has won historic concessions from the Florida tomato industry, and is finally eliminating the kinds of abuses in the fields that provided fertile soil for slavery.
We also got the chance to experience the CIW’s creative, fun approach to campaigning for fair food. While in Immokalee, our little group of rabbis planned and participated in two actions: the first an abbreviated “pray-in” over the tomatoes at a local Publix (the manager ushered us outside rather quickly!), the second the installation of a symbolic “mezuzah” on the doorpost of a soon-to-be-opened Trader Joe’s, with a blessing calling on the supermarket to chain to “establish justice.” At least one of those actions was successful—the day after we returned from our trip, Trader Joe’s signed on to the Fair Food Agreement!
In Immokalee, I saw firsthand what powerful, inspirational—and successful—grassroots organizing looks like. Membership in the CIW is free and open to anyone who is a farmworker (staff are also current and former farmworkers). The group holds open meetings every Wednesday evening, to which all members are invited. At these meetings, the staff engages the members—mostly immigrants from Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala—in creative analysis of the issues they face and strategies for moving the Campaign forward. Together, through a consensus process, they decide on actions—whether a bike ride from Immokalee to a new Trader Joe’s opening 30 miles down the road, a hunger strike in response to the Publix chain’s refusal to sign on to the Fair Food agreement, or a trip to some far-off locale like Boston. As I remarked to one of our hosts from an ally organization, Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida, “Americans would have no patience for this!” Every proposed action goes through weeks and even months of discussion, until everyone who participates is on board. It is time consuming, but it means that every step has the full commitment of the membership behind it. Ally organizations—including Interfaith Action and the Student-Farmworker Alliance, which organize in the faith community and on college campuses, respectively—bring folks like me into the mix, to add needed voices and pressure.
What I ended up learning in Immokalee is that is indeed possible for the poorest, least powerful people in our society—immigrant farmworkers who receive none of the protections of U.S. labor law—to achieve victories that those with many more resources could barely imagine. Not one tomato grower or major retailer entered into dialogue with the CIW without facing intense pressure, and one by one, they have realized that it is ultimately in their best interest to do the right thing. With its belief in the leadership potential of every person no matter how poor or uneducated, in the possibility of respectful alliances across ethnicity and class, and in the basic decency of human beings at each end of the food supply chain, the CIW has inspired me to believe that, when it comes to achieving justice, anything is possible.
To learn more about the CIW, visit www.ciw-online.org.
