FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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https://www.ciw-online.org
Melody Gonzalez, 239-986-0847
Julia Perkins, 239-986-0891

As workers from Florida converge on McDonald’s Headquarters, report illuminates conditions in McD’s supply chain; Workers to picket McD’s restaurants across the city 10/21

CHICAGO, IL — According to an expose published recently in North Carolina’s Raleigh News and Observer, entitled “Ag-Mart workers land in poor housing,” North Carolina labor officials found 30-40 workers who pick grape tomatoes for Florida-based tomato giant Ag-Mart crowded into a former nightclub building with “no hot water, no shower, and not enough beds.”

The story reports that the workers were placed in the housing by their labor contractors, “who not only hire and supervise Ag-Mart workers but also arrange housing.” Ag-Mart is a key supplier of grape tomatoes to McDonald’s. The story goes on to say that “many of Ag-Mart’s workers live crowded in fly- and roach-infested dwellings.”

This is apparently not the first time that AgMart worker housing has been the focus of state investigations:

“State regulators have launched previous investigations of housing for Ag-Mart workers. State law requires that migrant housing be registered with the Labor Department. Inspectors check the housing before workers move in to assure that it meets minimal standards for plumbing, electricity and other basics.

In 2003, the Labor Department cited three labor contractors — Salvador Ponce, Sergio Salinas and Pasqual Sierra, all of Florida — and fined them a total of $20,000 after inspectors found dozens of Ag-Mart employees living in squalid, unregistered housing in Pender and Duplin counties. The company still uses Ponce and Salinas, Long said.”

“The conditions exposed in the North Carolina article are the reality that McDonald’s continues to turn its back on in response to the Campaign for Fair Food,” said Gerardo Reyes-Chavez, farmworker from Immokalee, FL. “But these are the conditions that we as farmworkers who pick tomatoes for companies like McDonald’s face every day. We can’t escape these conditions, and we together with consumers across this country aren’t going to let McDonald’s escape them either.”

Tomato pickers receive the same per bucket piece rate as paid in 1980, earn sub-poverty annual wages and receive no benefits of any kind – no overtime pay for overtime worked, no right to organize, no health care, no sick leave, holiday leave or paid vacation.

Farmworkers from the (CIW) and their allies have traveled over the past week from Immokalee, FL — home of one of the largest farmworker communities in the country — to Chicago, IL, home of the world’s largest restaurant chain, McDonald’s to call attention to McDonald’s attempts to evade their responsibility to bring about real solutions to the human rights crisis in America’s fields. On Friday afternoon the CIW delegation from Florida was joined by 50 local allies in front of McDonald’s Headquarters in Oak Brook, IL. The protests will continue on Saturday, Oct 21 in a series of consecutive pickets in front of McDonald’s restaurants across Chicago:

• 10:00 AM – 12 noon, 6536 N Sheridan Rd (Loyola Red Line Stop)
• 12:00 Noon – 2:00 PM, 1951 N Western (Western and Armitage)
• 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM, 3867 S Archer Ave (Archer and Rockwell)
• 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM, 1664 Blue Island Ave (18th and Blue Island, Pilsen)

These actions are part of the CIW’s “Campaign for Fair Food.” The Campaign has gained impressive new support in recent months, including the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, actor Martin Sheen, and Nobel Prize laureate Jody Williams.

Background: The Coalition and allies are calling on fast-food giant McDonald’s to work with the CIW and help establish real human and labor rights for the workers who pick tomatoes for McDonald’s suppliers, including:

• The right to a fair wage, after more than 25 years of sub-poverty wages and stagnant piece rates;
• The right for farmworkers to participate in the decisions that affect their lives, after decades of sweatshop conditions and egregious abuses in the fields;
• The right to a real code of conduct based on modern labor standards, after McDonald’s and its suppliers unilaterally imposed a hollow code of conduct comprised of minimal labor standards and suspect monitoring.

March 8th, 2005, after a 4-year national boycott, the CIW entered into an historic agreement with Taco Bell and its parent company Yum! Brands, establishing important new precedents for corporate social responsibility in the fast-food industry. But since that time, McDonald’s has taken a path that threatens to undercut the wage gains won by farmworkers in the Taco Bell Boycott and to push workers back away from the table where decisions are made that affect their lives.

For more background on workers’ wages & conditions, the Campaign for Fair Food, and the CIW-Yum! Brands agreement, visit www.ciw-online.org or www.allianceforfairfood.org.

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