Call on Publix to help end Florida's harvest of shame!

By leveraging their high-volume purchasing power, corporations like Publix – with nearly $25 billion in sales in 2009 – play an active role in farmworker exploitation. Through its Campaign for Fair Food, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a membership-led Florida farmworker organization, is changing this reality. The CIW has reached agreements with eight food industry leaders – including McDonald's, Subway and Whole Foods – to directly improve farmworker wages and working conditions and eliminate the poverty and powerlessness at the root of modern slavery.

Publix, however, has refused to similarly take responsibility.

Subject:

Your Letter:

I am contacting you to urge Publix to work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an internationally recognized farmworker organization, to address the sub-poverty wages and abuses faced by the farmworkers who pick Publix’s tomatoes.

Florida tomato pickers are among this country's most exploited workers.  They earn sub-poverty wages, lack most standard rights and benefits, and have not received a significant raise in over 30 years. In the most extreme cases, workers are held against their will in situations of modern-day slavery. There have been seven farm labor operations – involving well over one thousand workers in total – to be prosecuted for servitude in Florida in the past dozen years.

Since 2007, the CIW has been urging Publix, Florida’s largest privately held corporation, to enter into an agreement to improve wages and working conditions for tomato pickers in its supply chain. Similar agreements have already been reached between the CIW and eight leading food retailers, including McDonald's, Burger King, Subway, Yum Brands, Compass Group, and Publix competitor Whole Foods. The latest 'Fair Food' agreement was struck just this month with foodservice leader Aramark.

The agreements require those companies to demand more humane labor standards from their Florida tomato suppliers (including a zero tolerance policy for slavery), to pay a price premium for more fairly produced tomatoes, and to shift purchases to growers who meet those higher standards. East Coast Growers and Packers, along with specialty growers Alderman Farms and Lady Moon Farms, have shown their early support for this effort by agreeing to pass along the pay premium to their tomato harvesters, and to abide by a code of conduct under which workers have a voice and slavery is not tolerated.

I am extremely disappointed that Publix has turned its back on human rights. As a conscientious consumer and supporter of the CIW's Campaign for Fair Food, I urge Publix to work together with the CIW to ensure human rights and fair wages for those who harvest the tomatoes sold in your stores.

Sincerely,

Ed Crenshaw

Publix Super Markets
Corporate Office
P.O. Box 407
Lakeland, FL 33801
US