Looking back, it was quite a year…

Robert Weissman of the Huffington Post took a look at “important gains in 2007 that suggest countervailing forces to concentrated corporate power are on the rise” and chose the CIW’s victory in the McDonald’s campaign as one of the Top Ten.  You can read the rest of his list here.

The Huffington Post piece got us thinking about 2007 ourselves, and it was, without doubt, an extraordinary year, one that surely augurs even bigger victories to come for the Campaign for Fair Food in the year ahead.

Of course, that is not to say that there are not difficult challenges — and powerful forces — facing the campaign in the year to come. Indeed, those challenges, and those forces, have been the focus of much of the reporting on this site for the past several months. Rather, we hope that, by taking a moment to look back and reflect on the ground we have covered through the battles of the past twelve months, we might gather our strength and refuel our faith to continue our fight against those forces so that crucial new ground may be won in the months ahead.

And so, here it is, your month-by-month look back at the highlights of 2007 in the Campaign for Fair Food:

JANUARY: CIW wins the 2006 World Hunger Year Award, given in recognition of “innovative and creative approaches to fighting domestic hunger and poverty by empowering people and building self-reliance.”  In announcing the award, WHY calls the CIW “more than an organization.  It is a movement that empowers workers to resist exploitation and demand justice.”

FEBRUARY: Palatka servitude case sentencing — Three labor bosses on a North Florida farm owned by Frank Johns, former Chairman of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, are sentenced to 30, 20, and 10 years respectively for their roles in what federal prosecutors termed “a form of servitude that is morally and legally reprehensible.” The CIW’s role in bringing the operation to justice is called “nothing less than heroic” by the Naples Daily News.

MARCH: In the build-up to the 2007 McDonald’s Truth Tour, thousands attend the CIW’s “Year of the Worker” block party in Immokalee.

APRIL:

April 9 – Victory over McDonald’s — On the eve of a major action at McDonald’s headquarters in Chicago, the CIW, McDonald’s, and McDonald’s suppliers reach an agreement to improve farmworker wages and working conditions, building on the principles established in the historic Taco Bell accord.  Lucas Benitez of the CIW says in the press statement following the announcement of the agreement at the Carter Center in Atlanta (right):

“Two years ago, our agreement with Yum Brands marked the first step toward a distant dream of ensuring human rights for workers in Florida’s fields,” said Lucas Benitez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. “Today, with McDonald’s, we have taken another major step toward a world where we as farmworkers can enjoy a fair wage and humane working conditions in exchange for the hard and essential work we do every day. We are not there yet, but we are getting there, and today’s agreement should send a strong message to the rest of the restaurant and supermarket industry that it is now time to stand behind the food they sell from the field to the table.”

April 15 – Concert for Fair Food — Historic celebration of McDonald’s victory brings 2,000 Fair Food activists to Chicago’s House of Blues (left), reunites Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha, and launches the Movement for Fair Food.

MAY: Yum Brands extends the Taco Bell agreement to the rest of its brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Long John Silver’s, and A&W Restaurants), bringing both the world’s largest restaurant chain (McDonald’s) and the world’s largest restaurant company (Yum Brands) fully behind the principles of the Campaign for Fair Food.

JUNE-AUGUST: Protests in Miami and across the country begin to focus the Campaign for Fair Food squarely on Burger King.

SEPTEMBER: The CIW is featured in a “brilliantly reported” new book on modern-day slavery, “Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy” by John Bowe.  The financial news giant Forbes gives the book a thumbs up in its review entitled, “Slaves to Profit,” writing, “Although the plight of the Immokalee workers has been the subject of numerous documentaries and newspaper articles, Bowe’s renewed account adds an unsettling dimension — that slavery has become a crutch for globalized business.”

OCTOBER: 2007 Florida Tour lays the groundwork for the historic march on BK in Miami, as a delegation of CIW members and allies takes the call for “Fair Food that respects human rights, not fast-food that exploits human beings,” to the streets, churches, schools, and union halls of Florida.

NOVEMBER:

November 22 – CIW wins the 2007 Anti-Slavery Award. Declaring, “In the tradition of the abolitionist movement here in Great Britain, where consumers and workers joined to demand sugar free of the scourge of slavery and so helped bring an end to the slave trade, we are building an alliance of workers and consumers today in the United States to demand Fair Food and an end to slavery in its modern-day form,” CIW members accepted the 2007 Anti-Slavery Award in London. The award is made by Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest international human rights organization.

November 30 – 2007 March on Burger King in Miami is an unprecedented success. Nearly 2,000 people join 9.5-mile march from Goldman Sachs offices in downtown Miami to Burger King corporate headquarters in a colorful, dramatic protest.  President Carter enters the fray, accusing Burger King and its partners, the Florida Tomato Growers’ Exchange, of, “continuing to support a market system that keeps workers in sub-poverty conditions and stand silently as modest gains are deliberately rolled back,” and calling on them to “restore the dignity of the Florida tomato industry.”

DECEMBER: “Slave Labor that Shames America: Migrant workers chained beaten and forced into debt, exposing the human cost of producing cheap food”…  Latest slavery investigation in Immokalee reveals brutal operation in the tomato harvest, sparking headlines that reach all the way to the UK. Case comes on the heels of Burger King’s high-profile public relations visit to Immokalee, during which representatives of Intertek, Burger King’s “third party monitor,” told reporters their audits “have found no slave labor” and gave the tomato industry a clean bill of health.