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Romney’s Firm Refuses to Protect Farm Workers from Sweatshop Conditions |
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) founded Bain Capital in 1984. In December 2002, Bain Capital joined with two other buyout firms to purchase Burger King for $1.5 billion. To date, Bain Capital and its partners have nearly tripled their original out-of-pocket investment. Bain Capital and its partner firms own roughly 43 percent of Burger King and control six seats on the company’s board. During his tenure at Bain Capital, he stayed on the sidelines as the firm slashed jobs at the office supply manufacturer “in marked contrast to his recent pledges to beleaguered autoworkers in Michigan and textile workers in South Carolina to ” ‘fight to save every job.’ “
During the same time, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a community organization in Immokalee, Fla., organized the Campaign for Fair Food, calling on major buyers of Florida tomatoes to take responsibility for the chronic poverty and horrific labor abuses faced by tomato workers. Earlier this month, federal officials arrested Antonia Zuniga Vargas with virtually enslaving immigrant workers in south Florida, charging her with conspiring to make money off workers from Mexico and Guatemala, forging documents and committing identity theft. (Click here to view photos of farm workers in the fields for 10 to 12 hours a day and the broken-down trailers they return home to each night.)
The CIW campaign achieved several unprecedented successes, bringing companies like McDonald’s and Yum! Brands behind two key principles: economic relief for farm workers through a penny-per-pound surcharge passed on directly to workers in the form of a raise in the piece rate and a code of conduct with strict consequences for violating workers’ rights.
Burger King has chosen to join with the most extreme elements of Florida’s tomato industry to undermine these agreements and enable a “harvest of shame.” Will Mitt Romney and Bain Capital continue to support a system that keeps workers in subpoverty conditions? Will they stand silently as these workers’ modest gains are rolled back?
In the past decade, there have been six federal criminal prosecutions in Florida for forced labor and slavery of farm workers, resulting in prison terms and the freeing of more than 1,000 workers. Farm workers have few protections, with most workers earning subpoverty wages and excluded from the right to overtime pay and to organize and bargain collectively.
In the latest Florida slavery investigation, prosecutors filed charges against four farm labor employers in Immokalee accused of locking and chaining workers inside U-Haul trucks, holding workers in debt and beating workers who tried to leave.
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Don’t you mean Romney’s FORMER firm that he left ten years ago?
To you this may be torture, but to those clamoring to work here it might be called something else. OPPORTUNITY.
To Ryan U…. yu don’t think this torture? living in squalor, robbed of the few pennies they earn and forced to work 12 hrs. a day bending over picking crops?
Romney’s dog probably lives in better conditions, eats better than those Romney has as slaves.
Opportunity you say, what a bigot…
Ryan U, FU
Ryan U:
I’m sorry…WHO exactly are “those clamoring”? WHERE are they “clamoring to work”? Finally, HOW do you define “torture” and “opportunity”?
Never mind any rudeness you may encounter, here. I am genuinely trying to understand where you are coming from. Can you elaborate?
I’ve said it before, why are we so interesting to these people that they are on a union blog? I live in Florida, not too far from Immokale, and I can tell you, that no one is clamoring to be tortured and mistreated the way these workers are. Even our local media has commented on the Burger King situation. You know what, FraternalOrder, I don’t mind being rude to these anti-union, right wingers who just have to make these absurd statements on our blog. They think they fool our union members, but we know who they are.
CIW (Coalition of Immokalee Workers) earn no more today than they did in 1980. They receive about forty-five cents for a thirty-two pound bucket of tomatoes.
They have to pick twice as much today as they did in 1980 in order to earn anywhere near a “minimum wage”. (Please note: A “minimum wage” is far less than a living wage.)
Three private equity firms (Goldman Sachs, Texas Pacific Group, and Bain Capital) are major stockholders in Burger King. In 2006, 12 Goldman Sachs executives received more than $200 million in “executive bonuses”. Contrast that with the lousy one cent per pound increase that the CIW seeks. Such a tiny increase would cost Burger King just $250,000 more per year.
Why, in God’s name, would any worker alibi and make excuses for those three holding companies? If the shoe was on the other foot and it was the wages and working conditions of the alibi artists that were on the line, they would clamor for a nationwide boycott of the products produced by the offending company.
What? Is the final determinant based on whose ox is being gored? (That sure isn’t working class ideology!)
An injury to one is an injury to all. All is everyone. All is not “I, me, and mine”.
Brothers and Sisters, NO Republican candidate - including Romney - is a friend of working class families.
Boycott Burger King!
Whoa…hang on a second. Don’t get me wrong, here. I love it when these “anti-Union” nuts blogg on our site. It immediately tells me 2 things. One; that what we are saying is relevant conversation to them (else they wouldn’t be reading it.) Two; that what we are saying is bugging the hell out of them (else they wouldn’t be blogging back at us.)
This kind of positive re-enforcement is like a shot in the arm for my passion to progress the Labor Movement. It really motivates my spirit, and if you are honest with yourself; doesn’t it get your resolve all charged up to thunder away at them?
My strategy is to give them all the rope they are willing to take. I think Ryan U is too cleverly conniving to bite at the bait. It’s too obvious where the answers to my question are going to lead us should he engage in further dialog. Perhaps upon reading this, he will get drawn back. It’s easy to predict that he would avoid staying on the issue at hand, though.