Burger King A Penny Saved
Love fast foods? I don’t know how fast food made the restaurant list, but, it appears that Burger King also doesn’t care how their vegetables get to them. Businesses, like Burger King, are always concerned with the bottom line. But, does that mean that a living wage needs to be tossed aside? It’s sad to say, that all those tomatoes on all those Burger King burgers, cost BK 40 to 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket. To me, that’s reprehensible, inexcusable and slave labor. By the way, these abused farm workers are not in some remote part of the world, they are in
Burger King has refused to give a one penny increase per bucket to the workers. Instead, BK released this very compassionate statement:
Burger King has suggested that if the poor farm workers of southern Florida need more money, they should apply for jobs at its restaurants.”
So, as all the shareholders of Burger King enjoy their wonderful holiday meals, don’t you wish they would think about those farm workers they profit from and exploit.
Farm workers who toil to pick tomatoes for Burger King’s sandwiches earn 40 to 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick, a rate that has not risen significantly in nearly 30 years. During a typical 10-hour day each migrant picks, carries, and unloads two tons of tomatoes giving them just enough piece work to earn close to minimum wage.
But instead of joining other fast-food chains who agreed in 2005 to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, this Christmas Burger King is working to undermine agreements that have been made with the Coalition for Immokalee Workers (CIW). As a result, already impoverished tomato pickers in Florida are facing the prospect of losing the first significant raise some of them have seen in nearly 30 years as tomato growers have been encouraged and emboldened to cancel deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald’s.
As the great muckraking writer Eric Schlosser wrote in a New York Times op-ed last November, “The prominent role that Burger King has played in rescinding the pay raise offers a spectacle of yuletide greed worthy of Charles Dickens. Burger King has justified its behavior by claiming that it has no control over the labor practices of its suppliers…Yet the company has adopted a far more activist approach when the issue is the well-being of livestock. In March, Burger King announced strict new rules on how its meatpacking suppliers should treat chickens and hogs. As for human rights abuses, Burger King has suggested that if the poor farm workers of southern Florida need more money, they should apply for jobs at its restaurants.”
A farm-labor activist coalition, led by the CIW and the Student-Farmworker Alliance, is now asking concerned citizens to tell Burger King to stop acting like Scrooge and to start paying farm workers fair wages. The Sojourners’ website has been devoting regular coverage to the issue and has created an action center from which you can email Burger King management and spread the word about the campaign.
As Schlosser concluded, asking Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost BK only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs–the private equity firm that controls much of BK’s stock–that sort of money shouldn’t be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top twelve Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year.
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December 20th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Thank you for the action link, action taken. what a viscious cycle we are in , low wages compel people to cheap fat filled meals, and this mega food giant is part of our precarious food chain of corps that exploit cheap labor. Like a miserly king in medievil times. The tamotoe issue came up for Taco Bell and a boycott was successful.
One of the most suppressed news stories is how precarious our food supply really is, and how we are and have been consuming “frankenfoods” Genetically modified foods for yrs now. In the EU they err on the side of safety..but not here ohh nooo, as corporations have more rights than ourselves. They are pattening life forms, (gasp) and if it turns out we get harmed..opps too bad too sad – that is legally termed an “exturnatily” kind of like “collateral damage”
Its time to put some renewed fire under the consumer rights advocacy groups, like Public Citizen, through donations, so that lawsuits can be brought. Its time to start even a small garden at our own homes and support our closest local farmers.