by Chris Hedges
“What is happening in the tomato industry is huge and promising,” Germino says. “It is something new and genuinely exciting. I’ve been doing this for twenty years. I don’t get excited easily about something.”
Joe and I wait in the coalition’s small parking lot one Sunday morning to travel with a group of laborers to picket a Publix supermarket in Sarasota. The Coalition is trying to get tomato buyers to sign a deal, known as the Fair Food Agreement, which has already been accepted by the giants in the fast-food industry. If the supermarket chains, including Publix, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Kroger, and Ahold brands Giant and Stop & Shop, sign the agreement, the wages of the farmworkers could nearly double. The agreement could also significantly alleviate the draconian conditions that permit forced labor, crippling poverty, and egregious human-rights abuses, including slavery, in the nation’s tomato fields. If the campaign fails, however, the gains made by farmworkers could be threatened. Supermarkets are huge buyers of tomatoes and wield great influence, if they choose to, over conditions in the field.
The campaign has been resisted. The corporations have mounted a public-relations blitz to denounce the agreement. The supermarket chain Publix sent an employee posing as a documentary filmmaker into the coalition. And the activities of the coalition are closely monitored.
“Publix has a cabal of labor relations, human relations, and public-relations employees who very frequently descend from corporate headquarters in Lakeland, Florida—or one of their regional offices—and show up at our demonstrations,” says Marc Rodrigues, who works with the Coalition. “They watch us with or without cameras. They constantly attempt to deflect us. If we attempt to speak to consumers or store managers, these people will intercept us and try to guide us away. These people in suits and ties come up to us and refer to us by our first names—as if they know us—in a sort of bizarre, naked attempt at intimidation.”
The coalition organized a nationwide boycott in 2001 that forced several major fast-food chains including Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods Market, Compass Group, Bon Appétit Management Company, Aramark, and Sodexo to sign the Fair Food Agreement, which demands more humane labor standards from their Florida tomato suppliers and a wage increase of a penny or more for each pound of tomatoes harvested. But if the major supermarkets do not also sign this agreement, growers who ignore the agreement will be able to continue selling tomatoes to the supermarkets. This could leave at least half of all the fields without protection, making uniform enforcement of the agreement difficult, if not impossible.
“Supermarkets such as Trader Joe’s insist they are responsible and fair,” says Gerardo Reyes, a farmworker and coalition staff member, whom we meet in the coalition’s office:
They use their public relations to present themselves as a good corporation. They sell this idea of fairness, this disguise. They use this more sophisticated public-relations campaign, one that presents them as a friend of workers, while at the same time locking workers out of the discussion and kicking us out of the room. They want business as usual. They do not want people to question how their profits are created. We have to fight not only them but this sophisticated public-relations tactic. We are on the verge of a systemic change, but corporations like Trader Joe’s are using all their power to push us back.
Three protestors going to Sarasota, including a mother with her young son, ride with us. They sit together in the back seat. The woman, whom we will call Ana, begins to recount in Spanish her journey north. I translate for Joe as we drive to Sarasota. Ana talks to us, at times breaking down, for more than three hours, including about a half hour in the parking lot of a local church before we join the demonstrators. It is a story that, with a few variations, we could have heard from most of the workers around us.
Resistance came, as it often does, when workers found the courage to stand up to abuse, breaking the cycle of fear that keeps the system in place. One of those workers was Lucas Benitez, now thirty-six with two small children. He crossed the border into the United States at the age of seventeen from the impoverished Mexican state of Guerrero. He began as a migrant field-worker. He sent money home to support his parents and five brothers and sisters. He was driving tomato stakes into the ground one day when he found himself ahead of the other workers.
“Mi error fue trabajar rápido”—“My error was to work quickly,” he said when we spoke with him in Spanish one afternoon in the Coalition’s office. “I got ahead of the other workers, and thought I was being smart and could finish early and take a rest. The crew leader came over and told me to go back and work with the others. I told him I had finished my row. I should be able to wait. He yelled at me to go back and raised his fist. I picked up a stake and held it like a weapon.”
Benitez remembers that those around him looked the other way or turned their backs. The crew leader backed off.
“Él estaba sorprendido”—“He was surprised,” Benitez says. “He was used to hitting workers that did not defend themselves. He didn’t try and hit me. But he told me not to come to work the next day. He said I wouldn’t have a job.”
Benitez became an organizer. He began meeting other disaffected workers at night in the local Catholic church. These gatherings, which included Haitians who spoke only Creole, along with Mexicans and Central Americans, some of whom spoke the indigenous tongues of Mixtec, Kanjobal, Mam, K’iche’ or Tzotzil and only rudimentary Spanish, would become the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. They gathered to study the abuse and slavery in the fields. And they discussed ways to resist. Translators such as Asbed kept the various ethnicities in communication.
Benitez is sitting on a couch in the outer office where the meetings of the coalition are held. The walls around him are covered with posters, framed newspaper articles in Spanish and English, and signs from past protests. There is one poster with a caricature of a crew leader labeled “Don Tomato,” shouting: “I’m the Law! I’m the Boss!” and a placard reading “No Más Abusos”—“No More Abuses.” On the far end of the room is a small food pantry where workers can buy staples such as rice and beans at reduced prices to help counter the gouging that typifies most of the town’s bodegas.
“These conditions are hereditary,” Benitez says in Spanish. “They exist and have existed for generations. First you had slaves. Then you had freed slaves. Then you had poor whites and sharecroppers. Now you have immigrants. It is all part of a continuum we have to break.”
It was clear from the beginning, he says, that whatever organization arose, it could not revolve around a single leader. It would be too easy to decapitate. The model for organization would have to be consensus.
“What happened in Immokalee is similar to what is happening in the rest of the country with the Occupy movements,” he says:
We began because we were desperate. We didn’t see a solution through the system itself. We knew we had to change the balance of power between the workers and the corporations. And this is happening all over the world. Many people are desperate. They work hard and have nothing to show for it. You see in these Occupy movements young people who burned their eyelashes off studying and have no job and huge debts. There are differences. We are poor. We are isolated. But like the Occupy movements we are organic, we are responding to corporate power. We, too, are nonhierarchical. Everyone has a voice. There are no designated leaders.
Lucas Benitez.
In 1995 the growers attempted to reduce wages from $4.25 an hour to $3.85 an hour, and add 10 cents a bucket as an incentive. The reduced wage and incentive to earn a dime a bucket, in fact, was a swindle. If the worker was paid the proposed $3.85 an hour and the 10 cents incentive per bucket, they would make about $50 for a day, not $90, for the same two hundred buckets. To get the point across to the workers, the Coalition drew pictures of turtles working in the fields and told workers earning $3.85 an hour and a dime a bucket to work as slowly as possible to conserve their strength. The wage reduction, on top of the verbal and physical abuse, en
raged the workers. They gathered each morning in the supermarket parking lot and blocked the buses from entering the lot.
“This was a huge surprise for the crew leaders,” Benitez says:
They never thought Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Haitians would get together and strike. The crew leaders were frantic. They kept asking the workers: “Who told you to do this? Who is organizing this?” The strike lasted for a week. No buses could pick up workers. And after a week the growers said they would implement the $4.25 an hour, and some started to pay $5.50 and $4.75 an hour. When we heard this, we climbed on top of the cab of a truck to tell the workers. It was just like a General Assembly in the Occupy movements. We asked the crowd, “What should we do? Are you ready to go back to work?” And they said, “Yes.” We didn’t trust the promises of the growers. The next week we checked everyone’s pay to make sure the agreement was real.
The victory by the some three thousand migrant workers41 awakened a workforce that had, until that moment, been submissive. A Coalition of Immokalee Worker staff salary is commensurate with farmworker income, meaning minimum wage with no health insurance or benefits. And the coalition representatives usually live in trailers and run-down houses in Immokalee along with the workers.
“We realized that the only way there would be real change was when we yelled and fought for ourselves,” he says. “We discovered that we could not wait for someone from the outside to come and save us. We were our own saviors.”
A year later, in 1996, a sixteen-year-old Guatemalan named Edgar stumbled into the Coalition’s office splattered with blood.
“His nose was so red and his face was so swollen he looked like a clown,” Benitez says. “His shirt was saturated with blood.”
Edgar said he had taken a drink of water in the fields without permission. The crew leader savagely beat him, telling the other workers that if they disobeyed him they would also be beaten. The boy fled.
That night nearly two hundred workers crammed themselves into the Coalition’s office.
“We discussed the problem,” Benitez says. “We were frustrated. When we took cases like this to the police or the Department of Labor, they never responded. Nothing ever changed. We met for four or five nights trying to figure out what to do. People were angry. Finally, we decided to march to the crew leader’s house.”
A crowd of about three hundred workers left the Coalition’s offices and made their way through the dusty, poorly-lit streets. Other farmworkers joined them. The crowd swelled to five hundred. Police descended on the marchers with riot gear and twenty-eight vehicles. The crowd, holding Edgar’s bloodstained shirt above their heads, stood outside the crew leader’s home and chanted: “Golpear a uno es golpear a todos”—“When you beat one of us, you beat all of us.”
“But the biggest impact occurred the next morning,” Benitez says. “When the buses came to the parking lot, no one would get on the buses owned by the crew leader who had beaten Edgar. His buses were boycotted for the entire season. We broke the crew leader. He was wiped out. And he was one of the biggest.”
The coalition decided that if the cause of farmworker poverty lay with the market power of highly consolidated retail food chains, then the solution would be found there as well. It designed its Campaign for Fair Food and built coalitions with student groups, faith communities, and the labor movement to carry out protests outside of major fast-food chains and supermarkets. It pressured the nine multibillion-dollar retail food chains to sign the agreement, which calls on buyers to pay a Fair Food premium to support a raise in workers’ wages, support the Fair Food Code of Conduct that regulates conditions in the fields, purchase only from participating growers, and shift purchases away from any grower who fails to comply with the Fair Food Code. The agreement includes an education program in the fields in which workers learn of their rights under the Fair Food Code. There is now a participatory Complaint Investigation and Resolution Process, or grievance system, through which workers can identify abusive bosses and workplace conditions and eliminate them, without fear of retaliation. They can also work to eliminate “cupping”—the forced overfilling of buckets, until now a standard practice in the industry that can reduce a worker’s piece-rate wages by as much as ten percent. The agreement also created Worker Health and Safety Committees to create a space for discussion of workers’ concerns, ranging from pesticide poisoning to sexual harassment. And it brought concrete changes in the fields, from the provision of shade to prevent heat-related illnesses to the institution of time clocks, so that workers are paid for all the hours they are on the job. All this is new to the produce industry in Florida. If the major supermarkets can be pressured to sign the agreement it will be one of the most significant victories for farmworkers in decades.
Immokalee is dotted with tiny, hole-in-the-wall coffee shops and tiendas. I sit in one at the end of the day where the food items are listed on pink, orange, and green poster board on the wall behind the counter. The full-throated blast of a Mexican telenovela reverberates from a television mounted on the wall. I read the items on the poster board. Pan con bistec costs $5.59. Huevo con chorizo costs $1.25. There is a glass case with a few Krispy Kreme doughnuts. When the telenovela concludes, an announcer with frizzy blond hair begins to read the horoscopes.
“Virgo,” she says in Spanish, lips heavy with gloss, eyes coated in blue eye-shadow, “will have interesting experiences.”
The woman behind the counter tells me she lives in a trailer with her husband and two sons, ages ten and five. She is undocumented. She said her greatest fear is deportation. She cannot get a driver’s license. She drives to her work without one.
“Si yo estoy parado por la policía, me van a deportar”—“If I am stopped by the police, they’re going to deport me,” she says.
She came to work in the fields as a young woman with her father and two brothers.
“I wouldn’t get on a bus to go work in the fields unless I was with one of them,” she says. “You can’t be alone there as a woman. If I went to the bathroom I always went with another woman.”
Her father, who because of his age is no longer able to find work, went back to Mexico. One brother is working construction in North Carolina. Another is employed on a poultry farm. Her husband still works in the harvest—el labor. She has a job now in the coffee shop. She hopes to keep it and stay out of the fields.
“I could not put my boys to bed when I worked in the fields,” she says:
I was not there when they woke up. They slept every night in a trailer with other children whose parents went to find work at 5:00 in the morning with the crew leaders. Our boys were taken to school by a woman who charged parents $25 a week for the service. Now I have this job, but for how long? Now I can put them to bed and take them to school, but for how long? And what will happen when my husband gets too old to work in the fields? Poverty here. Poverty at home. It is a vice. We sacrifice our lives for our boys, but we wonder if their future will be any different.
5
DAYS OF REVOLT
Liberty Square, New York City
Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for years, but it is hard for them ever to lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people.
—ALEXANDER HERZEN
It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. But when it comes, it moves irresistibly.
—VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN
THERE COMES A MOMENT IN ALL POPULAR UPRISINGS WHEN THE DEAD ideas and decayed systems, which only days before seemed unassailable, are exposed and discredited by a population that once stood fearful and supine. This spark occurred on September 17, 2011, in New York City when a few hundred activists, who were easily rebuffed by police in their quixotic attempt to physically occupy Wall Street, regrouped in Zuccotti Park, four blocks away. They were disorganized at first,
unsure of what to do, not even convinced they had achieved anything worthwhile, but they had unwittingly triggered a global movement of resistance that would reverberate across the country and in the capitals of Europe. The uneasy status quo, effectively imposed for decades by the elites, was shattered. Another narrative of power took shape. The revolution began.
The devastation on Pine Ridge, in Camden, in southern West Virginia, and in the Florida produce fields has worked its way upward. The corporate leviathan has migrated with the steady and ominous thud of destruction from the outer sacrifice zones to devour what remains. The vaunted American dream, the idea that life will get better, that progress is inevitable if we obey the rules and work hard, that material prosperity is assured, has been replaced by a hard and bitter truth. The American dream, we now know, is a lie. We will all be sacrificed. The virus of corporate abuse—the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters—has spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague our communities with foreclosures and unemployment. This virus has brought with it a security and surveillance state that seeks to keep us all on a reservation. No one is immune. The suffering of the other, of the Native American, the African American in the inner city, the unemployed coal miner, or the Hispanic produce picker is universal. They went first. We are next. The indifference we showed to the plight of the underclass, in Biblical terms our neighbor, haunts us. We failed them, and in doing so we failed ourselves. We were accomplices in our own demise. Revolt is all we have left. It is the only hope.
There is a mysterious quality to all popular uprisings. Astute observers know the tinder is there, but never when it will be lit. I had watched this dynamism in the Middle East in late 1987. The brutality of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, which included extrajudicial killings, mass detentions, mass incarcerations, house demolitions, deportations, and crippling poverty in the West Bank and Gaza, was sending out waves of rage, especially through the young, whose dignity, hopes, and dreams were being crushed in the concrete hovels of the Palestinian refugee camps. But none of us expected that a general uprising would be ignited on December 8, 1987, after four Palestinians from the Jabalia refugee camp were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli truck. Rioting erupted throughout the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, followed by commercial strikes, boycotts, and mass demonstrations by tens of thousands of people, including women and children. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the largest and best organized of the Palestinian resistance groups, was as surprised as the Israelis.
