Your Tomatoes May Have Been Picked by Slaves

Slavery in America isn't just a subject in history textbooks. It's alive and well — and it's taking place throughout America's crop fields.

The tomato industry is rife with unfair labor practices and poor treatment of farm workers. Thousands of tomato pickers and growers perform back-breaking labor underneath the sweltering sun for hours on end. That type of job is grueling enough, but in many cases, workers get paid less than minimum wage for their endeavors. As the Coalition for Immokalee Workers (CIW) reports, farm laborers earn about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. That rate hasn't gone up in the past 30 years — to even earn minimum wage, a worker must pick more than 2.25 tons of tomatoes over a 10-hour day. While supermarkets typically charge upwards of $2.99 a pound for tomatoes, workers earn a mere 1.4 cents per pound of produce.

Besides the abysmal pay, workers endure inhuman treatment on the tomato fields themselves. As Amanda Kloer, Change.org's Human Trafficking Editor reports, CIW has "documented farm workers being locked in trucks, forced to pick produce for long hours under the watch of armed guards, beaten and threatened with violence, and force-fed cocaine to make them work faster." I bet you never knew your BLT came with such a sordid past.

That's where the CIW's Campaign for Fair Food comes in. The non-profit launched a campaign specifically targeting supermarkets like Publix, Ahold, Kroger, and Trader Joe's. The new push asks supermarkets to raise the amount they pay for tomatoes by one penny a pound. It's just a pocket-change increase, but it could bring big benefits to struggling agricultural workers.

The reason tomato pickers get the shaft on their wages is because supermarkets demand rock-bottom prices from tomato suppliers. Suppliers meet those requests by paying workers literally pennies per bucket of tomatoes they pick. If supermarkets would shell out a little more dough as the result of CIW's campaign (and let's face it, they can certainly afford it), it would push suppliers to give a little more to their workers.

CIW's Campaign for Fair Food has been targeting restaurants, supermarkets, and food distributors for awhile now, and they've had some success. Taco Bell, McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, Whole Foods, Aramark, Sodexo, and Bon Appetit Management Company have all agreed to stop buying from growers who enslave workers. Supermarkets, though, have been lagging behind on joining the anti-slavery cause.

To find out more about CIW's campaign and how you can help, check out the organization's site here, and be sure to watch its new video included in this post. You can also push Trader Joe's to join CIW's Fair Food campaign by signing our petition.

Photo credit: jacki-di via Flickr