McD’s CEO Jim Skinner answers to farmworkers, allies; Protests greet shareholders in the street… And we’ve got the video!…

CIW and Alliance for Fair Food representatives asked tough questions of McD’s CEO Jim Skinner in Chicago on Thursday, while a crowd of allies protested outside the McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting, demanding the fast food giant put aside its public relations campaign and begin to work with the CIW for real labor reform in Florida’s fields. Check out the original video produced by one of the allies protesting outside for a sense of the message sent to shareholders as they arrived for the meeting by clicking here!

The AP story on the shareholders meeting, carried in papers across the country, (click here to see the story that ran in the Washington Post, 5/26) reported:

“A farmworker and a human rights activist assailed the company at the meeting for running a public relations campaign instead of addressing what they called a human rights crisis in the tomato fields of Florida. “The workers who pick the tomatoes that go on McDonald’s sandwiches and salads work under conditions that can only be described as sweatshops – poverty wages, no overtime pay, no right to organize and no benefits,” said Lucas Benitez, co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in southwest Florida.” READ MORE

The actions were also reported in the Chicago Tribune. For the full article, entitled “Enough, Skinner says of Food Foes,” click here. Also, be sure to check out the latest AP article about the Fair Food Campaign that ran in papers across the nation, entitled, “Their Sweat, Your Burgers”!