Thu Aug 12, 2010 at 14:14:46 PM EDT
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| Jordan Buckley works with Interfaith Action of SW Florida in Immokalee, Florida. He recently shared this eye-opening article he wrote with me about the intersections of marketing, modern day slavery, and where we buy our groceries. The article is below... Supermarkets Ignore Slavery In Florida Tomato Supply
An intriguing ad just appeared in the Immokalee Bulletin, local paper of the four-traffic-light-long agricultural community in south Florida.
In it Publix, the dominant supermarket of the southeastern United States and Florida’s largest private company, boasts of EarthSmart flowers that “you’ll feel as good about what they stand for as you will their beauty.” According to the ad, the bouquets are cultivated in a “socially responsible working environment.” |
| Mae Singerman :: Supermarkets Ignore Slavery In Florida Tomato Supply |
I showed the clipping to Neli Rodriguez -- a staff member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), the grassroots farmworker group with whom our organization Interfaith Action works in partnership – to ask what she makes of Publix touting the social responsibity of its supplier’s working environment.
“It’s good they care about their flower supply chain, but what about tomatoes for those of us struggling to improve our working conditions and do away with slavery?”
The CIW has played a vital role in the investigation and successful prosecution of six distinct modern-day slavery rings, resulting in freedom for more than 1,000 captive workers. (Just weeks ago, federal officials unveiled yet another slavery indictment from Florida’s fields, this one involving more than a hundred Haitian guestworkers.)
Additionally, the CIW has struck landmark agreements with eight food industry leaders – including McDonald’s, Whole Foods, Compass Group and Aramark – to directly improve the miserable wages and working conditions that allow slavery to flourish.
In 2007, in an Immokalee neighborhood where the newspaper with Publix’s flower ad is distributed, several men escaped from a brutal slavery operation; they were harvesting tomatoes on nearby farms by day and locked inside a cargo truck at night.
The workers had been chained, stabbed, beaten and taken by their crewleader (and captor) to work in the fields of two of Florida’s largest tomato growers: Pacific and Six L’s.
“For months and months Publix has ignored letters, phone calls and pickets on behalf of farmworkers and supporters asking that it buy from more socially responsible tomato suppliers as part of a code of conduct signed with the CIW,” Neli explained.
KROGER’S CEO CONFRONTED WITH TOMATOES FROM SLAVERY-TAINTED FARM
Your browser may not support display of this image. Brigitte Gynther of Interfaith Action informed Kroger, the country’s largest grocery chain, at its annual shareholder meeting June 24 that she had discovered Sunripe tomatoes the day before in a nearby Kroger. (The “Sunripe” label is a product of Pacific Tomato Growers, one of the two farms at which enslaved workers were brought to work in the aforementioned slavery prosecution.
Brigitte, speaking as a proxy, asked Kroger’s CEO David Dillon when his company will at last partner with the CIW to address slavery and the everyday labor abuses that enable it to take root.
Mr. Dillon stated that provisions of Kroger’s code of conduct prohibit slavery, a puzzling declaration given the day-old receipt and pint-size box of ripe cherry tomatoes Brigitte held at the mic while he answered.
Mr. Dillon said while he understood the seriousness of the issue and shared CIW’s objectives that Kroger “can make more progress ... working directly with the growers than we can by working with a third party.”
Your browser may not support display of this image. A week prior, that “third party” traveled to DC upon the invitation of the State Department for a special award during the release of its annual Trafficking in Persons Report, a global evaluation of slavery. At the ceremony, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton honored CIW’s anti-slavery coordinator Laura Germino as a 2010 “Hero Acting to End Modern-Day Slavery” - making her the first-ever U.S.-based recipient of the distinction.
The State Department also had CIW display its Florida Modern Slavery Museum for the occasion. The slavery museum lives in the belly of a produce truck – a replica of the one that housed captive workers in the recent case – and offers details on Florida’s many recent prosecutions, and CIW analysis on why slavery continues to thrive.
AHOLD ALSO REJECTS CIW IN FAVOR OF COLLABORATION WITH GROWERS
Shoppers of Giant and Stop & Shop – popular mid-Atlantic grocers owned by Dutch company Ahold -- will soon have the chance to visit the museum that during its Sunshine State debut the Village Voice proclaimed “may be Florida’s most important new attraction.”
In late July, the CIW’s slavery museum began a tour of the Mid-Atlantic states -- stops in Boston, Baltimore and other cities in the coming week -- surely sparking consumer curiosity about Ahold’s own tomatoes. (Check www.ciw-online.org/museum for tour details.)
Your browser may not support display of this image. Ahold has adopted a similar position to Kroger in preferring to trust Florida’s tomato industry to police itself than work together with the CIW. In a letter dated May 4th, 2009, Ahold VP Harriet Hentges declined CIW’s invitation to join other retailers in ending farm labor exploitation by explaining that “our supplier is audited by Socially Accountable Farm Employers (SAFE).”
For years, SAFE has come under fire as a toothless program initiated by tomato growers to avoid true reform; it has been roundly exposed as a certification program whereby “the foxes guard the henhouse.”
One crystal clear example: when growers praised SAFE in a Miami Herald article on Nov. 20, 2007, announcing that audits of Immokalee tomato farms “have found no slave labor,” it was the very same day that farmworkers in Immokalee broke out of the cargo truck to escape months of brutal enslavement.
During last month’s ceremony in DC, Secretary Rodham Clinton made it clear that corporations must become more involved in putting an end to slavery: It is everyone’s responsibility. Businesses that knowingly profit or exhibit reckless disregard about their supply chains…all of us have to speak out and act forcefully.
For now Publix, Ahold and Kroger instead remain allegiant to the old guard leadership of Florida agriculture – an industry that’s averaged a federal slavery operation every other year since the mid-1990s. Acting together, we can change that.
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The CIW invites supporters to mail pre-printed postcards (available here) to Publix, Ahold, and Kroger urging them to join the Campaign for Fair Food. Also, print out a letter to the manager of your local grocer asking them to share your concern for farmworkers’ human rights with upper management. |
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