Chanting “No more slaves! Pay a living wage!”, hundreds of farmworkers, students and others marched 22 miles through central Florida for three days, calling on the Publix supermarket chain to pay an extra penny to the impoverished workers who pick their tomatoes.

CIW member farmworkers at a rally in Lakeland, Florida on Apr. 18. Credit: Andrew Stelzer/IPS

The three-day long march was organised by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a collective of Mexican, Guatemalan and Haitian migrants based in the small south Florida town of Immokalee. The procession passed through the cities of Tampa and Plant City, and then culminated with a rally in Lakeland, where Publix corporate headquarters is located.

The farmworkers are calling on Publix to pay them a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they pick, which would almost double their meager wages. They also want Publix to sign onto a code of conduct, co-written by the workers themselves, which would prevent the supermarket chain from buying tomatoes from any growers that did not meet certain basic working conditions.

“We get paid 45 cents for picking a bucket of tomatoes,” says farmworker Wilson Perez.

The workers have to pick about 4,000 lbs of tomatoes per day (1,818 kg) to earn more than 50 dollars a day, a pay rate that has remained virtually unchanged since 1980, accounting for inflation.

Since 2001, the CIW has waged successful campaigns against fast food chains, food service providers, and now supermarkets – always calling for the same penny per pound raise and binding code of conduct agreement.

Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell and several other chains, was the first to agree to the CIW’s demands in 2005; they were followed by McDonalds, Burger King, and Subway. More recently, pressure from college students allied with the CIW led to agreements with food service providers Aramark, Bon Appetit and Compass. Health-oriented supermarket company Whole Foods also signed on in 2008.

Farmworker and CIW organiser Gerardo Reyes Chavez says the goal of the “Campaign for Fair Food” is to make U.S. citizens more aware of where their food comes from. “This movement, it’s aiming not just to change the mentality of Publix, but it’s aiming to change first and foremost the mentality of the consumers so that we can achieve greater changes.”

The “Farmworker Freedom March” featured a box-truck turned into a traveling exhibit about farmworkers being beaten, and even kept captive as slaves in the modern agricultural industry, an extreme example of the lack of rights afforded to the mostly immigrant workforce in Florida who provide about half of the tomatoes for the entire United States. (See sidebar for more on the Florida Modern-Day Slavery museum).

“The workers are being exploited and it’s not just,” said Natalia Margolis, a college student who came from Washington DC for the march.

Margolis learned about the CIW from a group at her school called the Georgetown Solidarity Committee. Support from college students has been key to the CIW’s campaigns throughout the past decade. Most significantly, students kicked more than 20 Taco Bell outlets off college campus as part of a four-year boycott which began in 2001.

“Since a lot of these corporations are targeting students as their audience, or who they are advertising to, I think students have a lot of power,” said Margolis.

The CIW has also written letters to several other supermarket chains with the same demands. Publix would be the first mainstream supermarket to sign on with the CIW, which Chavez says would be an opportunity for Publix to “set an example for other corporations in the world of the supermarket industry”.

The CIW’s campaigns are based on the notion that companies that buy the tomatoes have a responsibility to make sure everyone in their supply chain is paid fairly. So far, Publix has responded by claiming that wages are determined by the growing operations, not by the supermarket. And Publix spokesperson Shannon Patten says she’s satisfied the growers who supply Publix all pay minimum wage.

“This is a labour dispute between the supplier and their employees. It’s not something that Publix is involved in, and it’s not something that we’re going to get involved in,” she told IPS.

Publix, which has more than 1,000 supermarkets in the Southeast U.S., brought in 24 billion in revenue last year and made a profit of over a billion dollars.

“They are trying to escape responsibility,” the CIW’s Chavez responds. But he’s confident the farmworkers will prevail and Publix will grant their demands.

“It’s just a question of time. We are going to continue pressure,” he said. “We know what we deserve…We are entitled to a decent way of living, we are entitled to our human rights.”

In 1998, San Francisco stepped up and joined the world.

(Front left) Emily Murase, Tina Tchen of the White House Council on Women, Ann Lehman and (back) Andrea Shorter of the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. Credit: Dept. on the Status of Women

Tired of the U.S. government’s refusal to ratify CEDAW, women’s activists pushed the city government to adopt the convention’s principles, in an effort to improve local women’s lives.

An ordinance was passed, and now, more than a decade later, San Francisco is reflecting on their success in reforming the city’s government agencies, and taking on a push for change in the local private sector.

The original ordinance created a dedicated staff person; soon after, a task force was established, and ‘Guidelines for a Gender Analysis’, emerged: a tool for city departments to evaluate where and how discrimination was taking place.

“We knew that the city departments on their own, didn’t have the mechanism or the understanding just to take the ordinance and say ‘here’s where we are failing’,” says Krishanti Dharmaraj, a member of the task force until 2004.

“(City departments) had to report their findings to the CEDAW task force, and had to tell (the task force) what they were hoping to do to eliminate discrimination,” she says.

Predictably, the needs and the results varied by department.

The Department of Environment went from being male-dominated to having a majority of female engineers on staff.

The city’s department of juvenile justice identified the need for a girls advocate on staff, and instituted gender specific programs for young women in the system.

The department of public works now takes the safety of women into consideration when choosing the distance between streetlights, and making other night time lighting decisions. They also established a job centre where open positions were posted; previously an ‘old boys’ network resulted in many jobs going to friends of current workers.

“A woman with childcare responsibilities couldn’t make it there at 8:00 am, so she was repeatedly losing out on this lottery.”

After initial resistance, the arts commission agreed to allow proxies to come and represent the artists, in order to pick up a permit.

“That doesn’t just help women, but any person with care-giving responsibilities who can’t show up in person,” points out Murase.

“Not all of this can be attributed specifically to CEDAW,” says Ann Lehman, senior policy analyst for the city’s Department on the Status of Women. “But it all grew out of the work that was done initially, raising the consciousness level of people around these issues.”

“What CEDAW did was take something from the bottom that was not considered a priority for the city – because there were other pressing issues – and place it on the top,” adds Dharmaraj.

Overall, Lehman says the entire city government went from being “Very bureaucratic, be here at 8:00 in the morning, work until 5:00, no exceptions” to a “much more flexible work style across the board…now we have things like paid parental leave…which most cities and counties and states still don’t have.”

Unfortunately, the ordinance doesn’t allow legal action against city agencies that do not make policy changes. As a result, Murase says, “The fundamental philosophy behind our approach is that it’s voluntary.”

“We want departments to do this without having to hammer them…We’ve had really great success in the departments that want to do the right thing, they want to be seen in the right light, they want to be in an attractive place for women,” she says.

The original task force was disbanded in 2006, and has been folded into the Department on the Status of Women. Without any actual budget, the five staffers in that department do CEDAW monitoring as part of their normal job.

The Department on the Status of Women is currently working on a gender analysis of the entire city budget, to and has begun to take aim at reforming companies that do business in San Francisco, with a series of roundtables involving local corporations. (see sidebar)

Although advocates hope that with Barack Obama in office, the United States may finally ratify CEDAW, in the meantime, local initiatives like San Francisco’s may be the only way to proceed. But while Lehman and others frequently provide advice to other cities interested in adopting CEDAW principles, Los Angeles is the only U.S. city to do so thus far – and L.A. is plagued with a common problem – a lack of resources to put CEDAW into action.

“We’ve been speaking to a number of different commissions on the status of women (in other cities) but nobody has permanent staff,” says Murase. “There isn’t this sort of institutional agency that can carry it forward.”

Dharmaraj says that inaction, often motivated by the economic fears of corporations, is short sighted. She adds that while San Francisco still has a long way to go until all women’s lives are significantly improved, the city’s success is proof of the benefits of CEDAW.

“If the workforce is happy, our productivity would be better,” she says. “If you look at the country at large, and the quality of life of people, and the quality of life of the production services that we would provide. Then I think it is a win-win.”