The Struggle for Fair and Just Food

By Chris Heneghan

For the past 15 years the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a community-based worker organization consisting of Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian immigrants who work low-wage agricultural jobs in the state of Florida, has been fighting for fair and just working conditions and an end to "indentured servitude in the fields of Southwest Florida."

Immokalee is the state's largest farm working community, made up of over 2,500 workers, 50 percent of whom are Mexican, 30 percent Guatemalan, and 10 percent Haitian and other nationalities. The majority of these workers are employed as day laborers for large agricultural corporations in the tomato and citrus harvests.

CIW began its work in 1993 as a small group of workers meeting weekly to discuss "how to better [their] community and [their] lives." Migrant workers are unable to join any of the North American trade unions. As a result, the CIW does not have the ability to bargain collectively or leverage deals through labor talks. Direct action has been the only way for workers to get the goods in the Florida fields. In a decade and a half the CIW has put heat on the agricultural industry by organizing community-wide work stoppages, general strikes, a month-long hunger strike, and a 230 mile march from Fort Myers to Orlando.

These inexhaustible organizing efforts won industry-wide wage increases of 13 to 25 percent in 1998. The raises were the first of their kind in over 30 years and brought the tomato picking piece rate back to pre-1980 levels. These wage increases, 28 years behind the rate of inflation, were not enough. Farm- workers still live in deep poverty.

Z Magazine. July / August 2007

Volume 20 Number 7/8