Dear Wendy痴: I知 Boycotting You, but I知 Not the One You Should Be Worried About
Dear Wendy’s: I’m Boycotting You, but I’m Not the One You Should Be Worried About
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Watch out, Wendy's. The CIW is coming. (Photo: Mike Mozart/flickr/cc)
Dear Wendy’s,
In the summer of 1988 I worked in Lowell, Massachusetts painting houses. The pay was lousy, the heat oppressive, and the work was exhausting. Many nights I would collapse, fully clothed, on my mattress on the floor of the dingy, mouse-infested apartment I rented. But before I hit the sack, there was one thing I usually looked forward to: your Superbar (now defunct). For about $3.00 I could get my fill of salad, fruit, Mexican food, and pasta. And that’s the only reason I’m writing you today, Wendy’s. I have nostalgic feelings for your SuperBar, even though I now know it’s tainted. But I’m offering you a heads up anyway: the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is coming for you, and you will lose.
That’s not a threat, it’s a statement of fact. The CIW is the most effective, winningest anti-poverty group I know. It was founded in 1993 by a small group of farmworkers in little-known Immokalee, Florida. They had the audacity to believe that they could take on the state’s agriculture industry—once described by a federal prosecutor as “ground zero for modern slavery”—and fundamentally change the business. The harsh opposition and backwards thinking that the workers needed to overcome was evident during a hunger strike in 1997, when the farmworkers’ single demand was a dialogue with the tomato growers. One grower told the CIW, “Let me put it to you like this—the tractor doesn’t tell the farmer how to run the farm.”
The CIW is coming for you, and you will lose.But ultimately, the farmworkers’ unity and savvy tactics led to most tomato growers in South Florida coming to the table and reforming their practices. Today, the CIW is internationally recognized for its wins in addressing social responsibility, human trafficking, and gender-based violence. But nothing epitomizes their work more than the Fair Food Program (FFP), which protects workers by creating real economic consequences for violations of human and labor rights.
And that brings us back to you, Wendy’s. The CIW announced a national Wendy’s boycott because you are theonly major fast food corporation that has not signed onto the FFP—and that matters.
,. . .
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/08/13/dear-wendys-im-boycotting-you-im-not-one-you-should-be-worried-about
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