Coalition of Immokalee Workers win against McDonalds

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a community-based worker organization, are immigrants working in low-wage jobs picking tomatoes throughout the state of Florida. They have been taking on major fast-food companies that use their tomatoes, and last weekend they celebrated a huge victory against McDonalds.

McDonalds agreed to:

• A penny more per pound to workers harvesting tomatoes for McDonald's;


• A stronger code of conduct based on the principle of worker participation;


• And a collaborative effort to develop a third party mechanism for monitoring conditions in the fields and investigating workers' complaints of abuse.

Here in Chicago they had a "Concert for Fair Food" to celebrate the victory, where Zach de la Rocha and Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine) played, among others. Tom Morello had this to say:

"We worked the entire set up 20 minutes before we went onstage, but it went pretty well. It was very exciting for everybody in the room, myself included. I mean, the place was just packed to the rafters and even the stage was packed with this ring of 25 photographers two feet away from us while we were playing, so it was kind of a trippy, you know, way to do our first show. But it was a great cause and we were happy to be a part of the Immokalee farmworkers victory."

Find out more here:

http://www.ciw-online.org/CIW_McDs_Agreement.html

Mourning with Virginia Tech

As the nation mourns with Virginia Tech after the mass killings there last Monday, our inability to understand such a tragedy burns inside of us. In the Virginia Tech memorial convocation Tuesday evening, professor and poet Nikki Giovanni said:

"We are Virginia Tech.We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.We are Virginia Tech.We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.We are Virginia Tech.We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.We are Virginia Tech.The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.We are the Hokies. We will prevail. We will prevail. We will prevail. We are Virginia Tech."
http://www.vt.edu/tragedy/giovanni_transcript.php



As we struggle to undertand this tragedy, our prayers go out all those who mourn at Virginia Tech, that God's healing presence would be felt.