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."
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