Blogs: Dmitri Iglitzin

Florida Tomato Pickers Threaten Burger King Boycott

Dmitri Iglitzin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:12:42 -0400

There are almost 2 million fieldworkers in this country. On average, these workers make less than $12,000 a year. Almost a third of migrant workers' families are officially poor. These workers often fail to receive the same legal rights and benefits granted to other U.S. laborers.

Case in point: Florida tomato pickers. Their wages have stayed almost the same in real dollars for nearly 20 years -- a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each worker picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. That's 125 buckets per day which, at $.45 per bucket, equals $56.25 for a ten- or twelve-hour day of backbreaking labor.

In recent years, a concerted effort to raise these wages and improve these workers' working conditions has made surprising gains. In the spring of 2005, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a small farm laborers' group in Immokalee, Florida, won a surprising victory against the world's second-largest fast-food company. After a four-year boycott, Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, agreed to pay an additional one cent per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra penny going directly to the farm workers.

In April of 2007, McDonald’s agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket.

But fast food giant Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny. In the face of continued pressure to do so, Burger King has instead told its suppliers that it may stop buying tomatoes from southwestern Florida entirely. Evidence has also surfaced suggesting that Burger King has hired a professional infiltrator to spy on the Coalition's planning sessions and attack it on the web and through e-mail.

In the meantime, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, which represents 90 percent of the state's growers, announced that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers, and will in fact fine its members $100,000 apiece if they do so. According to Eric Schlosser, an investigative reporter and author of Fast Food Nation, who wrote a powerful op-ed about this situation for the New York Times, Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the group, has described the surcharge for poor migrants as “pretty much near un-American.”

The Growers Exchange has even asserted that allowing its members to collect that surcharge might be a violation of federal antitrust laws, even though legal experts suggest that it is the concerted refusal to collect the surcharge that actually violates the law.

There is no reason to think that any of these moves will stop the efforts of the tomato pickers to improve their wages and working conditions. Instead, the Coalition has launched a national petition drive calling on Burger King and other food industry leaders to work with the CIW to improve the wages and working conditions of the men and women who harvest their tomatoes.

The petition serves notice that those who sign are “prepared to stop patronizing Burger King now, and other food industry leaders in the future, should they fail to do so.” The Coalition plans to deliver the petition and signatures to Burger King at the company's Miami headquarters on April 28, 2008.

Unionization Improves Pay and Benefits of African Americans

Dmitri Iglitzin — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:49:04 -0400

The increasing wealth gap between the rich, the middle class, and the poor has become too obvious too ignore. The top 10% of income earners in the United States now own 70% of the wealth, and the wealthiest 1% own more than the bottom 95%, according to the Federal Reserve. In 2005, the top 300,000 Americans enjoyed about the same share of the nation's income - 21.8% - as the bottom 150 million.

A study released on March 31, 2008, by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) demonstrates how unions can provide a key counterweight to this phenomenon, especially for African Americans, who remain in many ways at the bottom of this country’s economic food chain. This report shows that unionized African Americans make substantially more money and have substantially better benefits than their non-union counterparts.

The report, "Unions and Upward Mobility for African-American Workers," found that unionized black workers earned, on average, 12 percent more than their non-union peers. In addition, black workers in unions were much more likely to have health-insurance benefits and a pension plan.

"The data demonstrate that unions raise wages and increase access to health insurance and pensions," said John Schmitt, a Senior Economist at CEPR and the author of the study. "Unions continue to be a central element of any plan to improve economic equality in this country."

The report, which analyzed data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS), found that unionization raises the pay of African-American workers by about $2.00 per hour. According to the report, black workers in unions were also 16 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 19 percentage points more likely to have an employer-provided pension plan than black workers who were not in unions.

According to the study, unionization has an even more dramatic effect on black workers in low-wage jobs. Among African-American workers in the 15 lowest-paying occupations, union members earned 14 percent more than those workers who were not in unions. In the same low-wage occupations, unionized black workers were 20 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 28 percentage points more likely to have a pension plan than their non-union counterparts.

Union membership in the United States is now hovering at around 12 percent of the workforce, down from 35 percent in the 1950's, with unionization in the private sector now at 7.4 percent, the lowest in a century. An April 2007 study by the Campaign for America’s Future, estimated that an increase in union membership of just 10 percent would provide an additional 3.5 million people with health insurance and nearly 2.8 million more people with pensions.

Just such an increase in unionization was anticipated as a result of passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which passed the House of Representatives in March of 2007 on a 241-185 vote, only to be defeated in the Senate. EFCA would allow workers to form unions through so-called "majority signup" elections, mandate binding arbitration for first contracts where the parties cannot agree, and impose financial penalties on employers for firing pro-union employees.

Unionization is still a major driving force – perhaps the driving force – in the creation and maintenance of a true “middle class” in this country. Nothing else on the progressive agenda comes close to promising this type of reduction in the disparity of wealth that is a constant presence in our society.

Circuit City: The 1-Year Anniversary Worth Noting

Dmitri Iglitzin — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:29:52 -0400

It’s been almost exactly one year since March 28, 2007, the date Circuit City Stores set a new low in corporate morality by laying off 3400 experienced workers whose relatively high salaries – typically, about $15 per hour – allegedly made them a liability. The company’s plan was to hire other new, untrained workers at $10.22 an hour to do the same work, thus saving the company … well, something. Not much, apparently, if you look at the steady decline of the company’s stock price, which has dropped from over $19 per share down to around $4 per share since they implemented this decision.

A year is a long time. After four months of unemployment, according to the Economics Policy Institute, most workers will no longer be covered by their state’s unemployment benefits program. They will have either found a new job, been disqualified for some alleged infraction – such as supposedly having given up looking for work – or will have exhausted the monetary benefits to which they are entitled. After one year, these laid-off Circuit City workers will certainly, in one way or another, have moved on.

That doesn’t mean that everybody who learned of this corporate atrocity has moved on, however, nor that they should. And we don’t mean that that people should still simply be griping about Circuit City’s outrageous conduct, although that’s probably worth doing, too.

Instead, this one-year milestone should lead thinking people to ask themselves one important question, which is: why don’t workers unionize?

After all, if those Circuit City workers had lifted their blinders and formed a union, they could never have been disposed of so casually by their employer. Most likely, they would have had a contract with a just-cause provision guaranteeing their jobs except for misconduct or lack of work. Even if they hadn’t ever obtained a contract, they would have had the money, solidarity and political strength to shut Circuit City down through a strike, picketing, or a boycott, had the idea of replacing them this way even been raised.

One thing is for sure: if those workers had been unionized, this mass layoff would never have happened, no matter how much money the bean-counters might have thought it would save.

The debate over perceived inadequacies of the National Labor Relations Act, such as those which have given rise to the push to adopt federal legislation such as the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it much easier for workers to unionize, will no doubt continue at all levels of our society.

Wholly aside from that legislative dispute, however, there is one lesson that we can all take from the Circuit City debacle, which is that appealing to the higher moral sense of corporate CEOs is a dead-end street.

The plain truth is no different now than it was at the dawn of the industrial revolution: the only way to stop companies from behaving outrageously towards their workers is worker solidarity and mass action -- in other words, unions. In today’s economy, they’re not only the best answer; they’re the only answer.

If you don’t believe us, ask any laid-off Circuit City worker.