$8000 a Year: Taco Bell ‘Truth Tour’ Highlights Poverty Wages

Busloads of impoverished immigrant farmworkers embarked on the Taco Bell Truth Tour this week, demanding that the fast food giant use its political and economic power to increase their wages and improve working conditions. Mexican, Guatemalan, and Haitian tomato pickers are traveling in two buses from their hometown of Immokalee, Florida to eight states through the Southeast and Midwest for the fourth annual tour. Along the way, they are protesting outside Taco Bell restaurants in partnership with student groups and speaking at churches, which offer them a place to sleep on the way. At a press conference in front of the Federal Building in Montgomery, Alabama, members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), the group organizing the tour, held up 32-pound buckets to show how many tomatoes they must pick to bring in 40 cents. To make 50 dollars, a worker must pick 2,000 pounds of tomatoes in one day. Most workers make less than $8,000 a year. The workers demand that Taco Bell force the agribusinesses that sell to the fast food chains' subcontractors to give their employees a penny-a-pound raise and provide a written guarantee that their workers will not suffer any human rights abuses. The CIW, created by farmworkers in 1995, aims to increase public awareness of the workers' plight. The coalition also operates a low-power radio station, and uses their office as a meeting room and cooperative store, where workers can buy staple foods, phone cards, and other necessities at affordable prices. Benidicto Mejia, who has been a migrant farmworker since childhood, noted that his pay used to provide him with enough for basic necessities, but said wages have not kept up with the cost of living. Minimum wage laws can be skirted by a per-piece picked pay scale, and, as a result, farmworker wages have declined in real dollars between 1989 and 1998. Currently, farmworkers do not receive overtime pay, they do not have the right to organize a union, and they receive no health insurance. [more]