Burger King and the Price of a Penny

By Colman McCarthy

Ever stiff as the competition is, the champion for corporate greed these past years has to be Burger King. The fast food chain, based in Miami, did it by penny-pinching—literally, as in refusing to pay a one cent increase to Florida farm workers for every pound of tomatoes they picked. In their outdoor sweatshops, they are among the nation’s poorest paid and most exploited laborers.

When it came to paying the extra penny, Burger King, whose current advertising mantra is “have it your way,” reversed it by telling thousands of impoverished field hands, “we’ll have it our way.” Some 33,000 tomato pickers start work before dawn in the fields of south Florida in a growing season from mid-October to mid-June. Tnbey haul forty-five percent of the nation’s tomato crop which is 2006 totaled 1.2 billion lbs. As many as 80 percent of the workers are undocumented immigrants, Lou Dobbs and Tom Tancredo notwithstanding.

Company executives, as greasy as the hamburgers they sell, were hanging tough. So much so that they contracted with a private security firm to spy on farm worker groups and their allies in the Campaign for Fair Food that began in 2001. It was the well-worn boardroom game of trying to discredit the other side. This time it meant looking for dirt among those who work in the dirt.

It failed. The company’s whopper seven-year holdout against basic decency ended in late May when Burger King agreed to a one cent increase. It marks the first raise in decades. For every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes that workers carry from the rows to a waiting truck, they will earn 75 cents--up from 45 cents. For Burger King, the increase represents a mere side order of money: an estimated $300,000 a year, out of revenues well above the 2007 take of $2 billion.

A number of forces created the victory, starting amid the crammed shacks and trailers of Immokalee, the rural town in where the workers subsist. One group was the Student-Farm Worker Alliance, which took the tomato pickers’ message to the country’s college campuses--a prime market for Burger King. For one example among many, a group of Georgetown University students spent this past year visiting Washington D.C. high schools collecting signatures on petitions sent to Burger King and its headquarters on 1 Whopper Way, Miami Fla.

The students were inspired by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a non-profit begun in 1993 and which won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2003. In 2001 it organized against Taco Bell, a campaign that took four years before the company agreed to raises. From 2002 to 2007, it was McDonalds. And finally Burger King. These are companies traded on Wall Street, are guided by boards of directors of seemingly upstanding and civic-minded citizens and which advertise daily their all-American wholesomeness. And yet with no compunction, and little evidence of a collective conscience, they hired teams of lawyers, publicists and crisis managers to resist sharing bulging corporate profits with workers who have next to nothing.

The jump from 45 cents to 75 cents a bucket appears large. It isn’t. If adjusted for inflation, the wage increase--the first since 1978--would have come to $1.44. These and other realities were brought before the public by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent who befriended the Immokalee workers by going to their fields and then holding hearing in Washington.

Among those in Immokalee who were grateful to the senator was Brigita Gahr, a teacher of migrant workers for 23 years and currently at Immokalee High School. In Washington last week where she brought students to spend a week enrolled in a civics program run by the Close Up Foundation, she spoke admiringly of the stamina and courage of the tomato pickers to endure: “They do the work that many Americans are not willing to do.”

Ms. Gahr’s empathy for the workers is grounded in experience. Her parents are immigrants from Latvia who left during World War II. They lived in refugee camps in Germany for five years until the Displaced Persons Act of 1949 allowed them entry into the United States. They came to Minnesota and worked in agriculture. “Being the daughter of immigrants,” she said, “I’m thankful for the opportunities I had. Other immigrants should have the same.”

In Immokalee, she and others are working mightily to make it happen.