Having it THEIR way

It's high time Burger King follows the competition and agrees to pay a penny a pound more for tomatoes picked from the Immokalee area. After all, McDonald's and Taco Bell (Yum! Brands, Inc.) thought it was important enough to join the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to finally get pickers a little closer to a livable wage.

That penny a pound translates into 32 cents more per bucket of tomatoes picked, nearly doubling the wage for farm workers who toil in the fields to earn 45 cents for a bucket of tomatoes that weighs 32 pounds.

Today, just to earn minimum wage ($5.85 per hour) workers must pick 3,328 pounds of tomatoes in an 8-hour day. That's a lot of burger garnish for $46.80. It's also an annual salary of $12,000 per year for 52 forty-hour weeks, which wouldn't pay for a decent health insurance policy for a middle-class family.

But Burger King has dug in its heels.

In today's Florida Weekly, officials of the King said that they're not convinced the workers will get the money, that they already require vendors to pay workers according to the law, and that growers have threatened not to sell tomatoes to the King if they agree to pay the extra penny. The King has also said it has no relationship with the growers and buys its tomatoes from repacking vendors.

Weak arguments at best for a would-be corporate and community leader.

But the King did offer the coalition one thing. They agreed to train Immokalee farm workers to work in their restaurants. That way they could earn minimum wage in air conditioning.

And if you think this is an immigration issue, it isn't. It's a human issue.

We all need to work towards bringing outdated labor practices into the 21st century. Farm workers are not modern slaves. They deserve a livable wage. They deserve protection against predator labor bosses. And they deserve our support.

The additional cost to Burger King for a wafer-thin tomato slice on a Whopper will insure that the lives of the often abused farm workers will get a little better.

McDonald's and Yum have put their principles into action.

Apparently, Burger King has too.