Tomato pickers, church groups and other supporters marched on the Burger King annual stakeholders meeting in Miami on November 30 in an effort to bring pressure on the fast food giant to participate in a controversial plan to increase compensation for pickers.

Picking tomatoes is tough, unpredictable work. Many pickers are migrants who travel to Florida to fill our demand for fresh tomatoes year round. They come and wait for the tomatoes to get perfectly ripe, perhaps getting only an hour or two of work early in the harvest, then the work builds to a frantic pace as the crop ripens. The workers are day laborers, paid on a piece work basis: around forty or fifty cents for a 32 pound bucket of tomatoes. Like most day labor, the work is not dependable; it is subject to the vagaries of weather and finding a good crew leader. Sometimes a worker will spend all day waiting and only wind up with an hour or two of paid time.

When work is available, the pay rate today is the same as it was in 1980, according to the Coalition for Immokalee Workers (CIW) an advocacy group working to improve the lot of the tomato pickers. CIW came up with a simple formula: "a penny a pound for pickers". Over the past two years they successfully negotiated with Taco Bell, Yum Foods, McDonalds and other tomato buyers to agree to pass an extra penny a pound directly back to the pickers.

However, Burger King and the Florida Tomato Growers have decided to fight the program and have launched a counter campaign in the press. The Florida Tomato Growers are citing fears of legal problems with antitrust and racketeering laws as the reason for their opposition. An Associated Press story reports that the growers association has threatened to fine growers $100,000 if they participate in the program to raise wages for pickers.

Although Burger King estimates the extra penny a pound would cost $250,000 a year, the Miami Herald reports that it's not about the money for Burger King-- it's about the legal issues surrounding the plan. So Burger King has offered a $25,000 grant to the Redlands Christian Migrant Association as an alternative way to assist the migrants.

Cheap charity instead of an honest wage.

Fortunately, Burger King is not typical. At this point Taco Bell and McDonalds are still standing behind their agreement to pass through a penny a pound to the workers, but it's going to be tough to honor the agreement without the cooperation of the growers.

For more on this, check out Eric Schlosser's opinion piece Penny Foolish in the New York Times.

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