Trader Joe’s Tomatoes
Would you pay one penny more per pound to buy a tomato if you knew it would go a long way toward alleviating labor abuse in the fields?
When asked that same question, not a single supermarket chain in the country—with the notable exception of Whole Foods Market—said yes.
No grocery giant has a legitimate excuse not to pay that extra penny, but of all the holdouts, none is more perplexing than Trader Joe’s, which promotes itself as a cheerful bastion of all things ethical.
A penny a pound wage increase might seem insignificant, but if you harvest Florida tomatoes, it’s the difference between making $50 a day and $80—the difference between a wage that doesn’t allow you to properly feed and shelter your family and a livable, albeit paltry, income. “It’s the difference between a nineteenth-century workhouse and a modern factory,” said one member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a human rights group based in southwestern Florida that has long struggled on behalf of farmworkers.
Even with the wage increase and a few other basic improvements in working conditions, the job still falls well below what most Americans take for granted (no overtime, no benefits, no sick leave), but the improvements amount to nothing short of a revolution for the 30,000 workers in Florida who pick nearly one third of the tomatoes Americans eat.
Last fall, it looked like that revolution was going to sweep the Florida tomato industry. After nearly two decades of demonstrations, petitions, hunger strikes, and one boycott, the CIW convinced the dozen or so huge companies that grow virtually all Florida tomatoes to sign its Fair Food agreement and pass along the penny a pound if—and this is a very big if—the supermarkets, fast food chains, and food service corporations they sell to would pay it.
The participating companies also agreed to abide by a Fair Food Code of Conduct that included the following:
a job training program outlining workers basic rights
a mechanism to ensure harvesters actually get credited for every tomato they pick
a grievance system for uncovering and eliminating workplace abuses
?health and safety committees to address such common jobsite occurrences as pesticide poisoning and sexual harassment.
All of the large fast food chains have agreed pay the cent and deal only with growers in compliance with the Fair Food Code of Conduct. The major food service companies that supply colleges, museums, and national parks also came aboard.
But the “old” system still applies to about half the Florida tomatoes sold. It is a national disgrace. In 2000, the United States Department of Labor described farmworkers as “a labor force in significant economic distress.” With annual incomes of between $10,000 and $12,500, their poverty rate is twice as high as other working people in this country.
On trips to Immokalee to research my book, Tomatoland: How Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit, I toured a decrepit trailer with neither heat nor air conditioning. It had one miserable shower stall and toilet to serve the 10 men who called the place home and paid a rural slumlord $2,000 for the privilege. I spoke with a “crew boss” who quit her job after seeing her workers sprayed on an almost daily basis with some of the most toxic pesticides in factory farming’s chemical arsenal. And I did something I never imagined doing in the 21st century: I interviewed a man who had toiled as a slave, receiving no pay, being locked in the back of a produce truck at night, and getting beaten if he refused to work or tried to escape. He was one of more than 1,000 people freed in seven Florida slavery cases since 1997. A United States Attorney told me that southwest Florida was “ground zero for modern day slavery.”
As part of the CIW’s campaign for Fair Food, a contingent of workers approached a Trader Joe’s store in Manhattan this spring to deliver a letter to its manager. They were not met by the usual chipper Hawiian-shirted greeters but by security guards who turned them away. Following protests at 23 Trader Joe’s stores across the country in April, the company, which is owned by the trust of the founder of Aldi, a discount chain based in Germany, posted a headline on its website Traderjoes. “A Note to Our Customers about Florida Tomatoes and the CIW” claimed that the agreement for Fair Food was “overreaching, ambiguous, and improper.” It accused the CIW of “spreading misleading and not factual information.”
Their charge rings hollow. The CIW has received awards from Anti-Slavery International of London, The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, and the United States Department of State, to name a few. F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller sent a letter of commendation to the CIW. The lawyers of such behemoths as McDonald’s would have never allowed their executives to sign the Fair Food agreement if it was “improper.”
At the very least, Trader Joe’s management should follow the lead of a past adversary of the CIW and issue a statement along these lines: “The CIW has been at the forefront of efforts to improve farm labor conditions, exposing abuses and driving socially responsible purchasing and work practices in the Florida tomato fields. We apologize for any negative statements about the CIW . . . and now realize that those statements were wrong.”
The speaker was Burger King C.E.O. John Chidsey during the 2008 ceremony in which he signed the Fair Food agreement.
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