““… The retail food giants today – companies like, but not limited to, WalMart — buy tens of millions of pounds of tomatoes a year. At those historically unprecedented volumes, they are buying an ever-bigger share of any single grower’s production and are therefore able to leverage that tremendous market power to demand ever-lower prices from their suppliers. In 1992, according to USDA statistics, the farm share of the US consumer dollar spent on tomatoes was 40.8%. 40 cents of every dollar spent at the cash register on tomatoes went back to the farmer in 1992. By the end of the decade, that number had fallen to 20.5%. Farms lost fully half of their share of the retail price to the retailers themselves. Yet those farmers, at the same time, are faced with rising input costs for diesel fuel, tractors, land, and pesticides. Caught in this cost/price squeeze, the only place growers can turn to maintain shrinking margins is to labor… Increasingly unequal bargaining relations mean that, when farmers bring their crops to market, the buyers almost always win. And the farmworkers pay the price. In its excellent working paper entitled, “Ending Walmart’s Rural Stranglehold,” the United Food and Commercial Workers quoted none other than John Tyson of Tyson foods who, when confronted by an activist farmer on the untenably low price paid for meat to the farm, said, “Walmart’s the problem. They dictate the price to us and we have no choice but to pay you less.” That exact same dynamic – that exact same unequal bargaining relationship – exists at the next level down the chain, between the farmer, or grower, and his labor. And so the cut in pay is passed along to the last person, the picker, after whom there is no one left to turn to in the chain. As a result, tomato picking piece rates have remained stagnant — and in real terms, wages have steadily fallen — over the past thirty years. This parallels exactly the rise of corporate food giants like WalMart, Kroger, Giant, Stop & Shop, and Publix (Florida’s largest privately held corporation), not to mention the fast-food industry where single chains combine the purchasing power of tens of thousands of restaurants.””
- Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)
- Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)