The organizer and human-rights activist, Greg Asbed, co-founded the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, (CIW) which has worked with major retailers and food companies to guarantee better pay and treatment for farmworkers through the coalition’s Fair Food Program. Asbed recently won one of the 24 MacArthur ‘genius’ grants, worth $625,000, for his leadership. As he told The New York Times in a phone interview, he plans to turn over all of that money to the coalition.
Speaking of the time, in 1991, when he first came to Immokalee, Florida’s tomato fields — where CIW got its start — Asbed said, “It was a very harsh, dog-eat-dog kind of world. You would regularly see people getting beaten in the parking lot on payday, by the crew leader or the crew leader’s henchmen, because they complained about not getting paid. Nobody would come to their defense.”
Asbed, 54, and others organizing with him at the time, realized that the violence they witnessed didn’t start in Immokalee and it couldn’t be solved there. “It was actually at the top of the food system. There were these massive fast-food chains and supermarket chains that had an unprecedented level of market power over their suppliers. So they could demand lower and lower prices,” he said. “So we realized if we were actually ever going to have the ability to improve workers’ lives in a meaningful way, we were going to have to take the conditions that we saw and confront those corporations with those conditions.”
Today, CIW has partnered with Walmart, McDonald’s and a dozen other major companies who have agreed to pay a small premium on top of the price they pay for crops in exchange for an agreement from farmworkers to abide by certain codes of conduct on issues like safety rules. The premium goes toward worker pay.