Farm workers protest wages, conditions
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The Coalition of Immokalee Farm Workers organized the protest, called the “Taco Bell Truth Tour,” and rallied at the headquarters of Yum! Brands, the Louisville-based parent company of Taco Bell.
The protest group, based in Immokalee, one of the poorest areas in the United States, wants Yum! to acknowledge the harsh conditions farm workers toil under to supply tomatoes used by Taco Bell.
Jonathan Blum, Yum! Brands Senior Vice President, said the workers’ complaints aren’t directly related to anything Yum! is doing.
“Most people understand this is about workers unrelated to us, but rather about employees of Six L’s packing company seeking higher wages,” Blum said. “They’re asking us to put pressure on Six L’s but we buy so few tomatoes from them that we’re not in a position to influence their decision. We understand from Six L’s that their employees earn an average of $9 per hour and we continue to urge them to resolve their labor differences between the two of them.”
The workers want Yum! to pay an extra penny for every pound of tomatoes they buy. Yum! now pays 40 cents per pound for the fruit. The extra money raised would almost double the workers’ salaries, said Lucas Benetiz, a farm worker and one of the organizers of the protest.
Currently, the average farm worker earns about $7,500 a year, with no health benefits, overtime pay or sick leave, according to the coalition.
“We are not machines,” Benetiz said. “We are human beings with families, too.”
Messages left at Six L’s in Immokalee on Friday weren’t returned.
Farm workers spent the morning marching through Louisville and protesting outside Taco Bell restaurants. They reached Yum! headquarters by midafternoon and draped dirty clothes over the fence to symbolize the sweat and hard work that goes into picking the tomatoes Yum! buys, said Laura Germino, one of the demonstration organizers.
The demonstrators, who swapped stories and chatted in English and Spanish, also stacked 120 buckets that each hold 32 pounds of tomatoes — a symbol of how much a worker must pick to earn about $50 a day, Germino said.
The demonstrators, which included both farm workers and college students, waved signs decrying the wages and working conditions on the farms, which have drawn national attention in recent years.
College students with the group Student/Farm Worker Alliance joined the protest to show support for the workers.
“There’s so much poverty there,” said Brigitte Gynther, a senior at Notre Dame. “They do the most important job in the country in a way and they get paid the least.”
There have been protests in Immokalee and Louisville, and there is another one planned in Irvine, Calif., on March 5.
Domingo Jacinto, a farm worker in Immokalee for 11 years, supports his wife and five children on what he makes in the fields.
A small pay increase for the hard work isn’t too much to ask, Jacinto said.
“That is why we are all here today, looking for justice.”