For Immediate Release:
Friday, March 24, 2006 9:00 AM EST

Contact:
Student/Farmworker Alliance (www.sfalliance.org)
Sean Sellers, Immokalee, FL, 239-821-5481
Guadalupe Gomez, South Bend, IN, 219-902-6662

Students join Florida farmworkers' action to demand McDonald’s eliminate sweatshop conditions in its tomato supply chain

IMMOKALEE, FL – Students from across the country will join farmworkers from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to travel by caravan from Immokalee, FL, home of one of the largest farmworker communities in the country, to Chicago, IL, home of the world’s largest restaurant chain, McDonald’s [NYSE: MCD]. In a span of just 10 days, the Real Rights Tour will visit students in 17 cities including Chicago, Madison, Ann Arbor, St. Louis, Nashville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and South Bend.

On April 1st – the fifth anniversary of the launch of the successful Taco Bell Boycott – the caravan will be joined by supporters from throughout the region for a major march and rally in Chicago, where they will call on the fast-food giant McDonald’s to work with the CIW and help establish real labor rights for the workers who pick tomatoes for McDonald’s suppliers.

McDonald’s spends over $1.5 billion annually on marketing and recently named 18- to 24-year-olds as its new brand "sweet spot" (Nation's Restaurant News, 4/11/05). Already, activists at dozens of campuses – from San Bernardino, California to Stony Brook, New York – are organizing educational events and McDonald's protests to support the Real Rights Tour and the national Student Labor Week of Action.

Sean Sellers, co-coordinator of the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA), said, “Through the Taco Bell boycott, students and youth have already demonstrated our ability to affect change in the fast-food industry. We have a track record of success in pushing the fast-food industry towards real corporate social responsibility. It's time for McDonald's to work with the CIW to ensure real rights for farmworkers.”

Guadalupe Gomez, an organizer with Student/Farmworker Alliance at the University of Notre Dame added, “Young consumers care about human rights, and no amount of hip marketing can erase this simple fact. As the largest restaurant chain on the planet, McDonald’s must be held accountable for the brutal treatment of the women and men who pick its tomatoes."

The Taco Bell boycott victory on March 8th, 2005, established important new precedents for corporate social responsibility in the fast-food industry. But since that time, McDonald’s has taken a path that threatens to undercut the wage gains won by farmworkers in the Taco Bell boycott and to push workers back away from the table where decisions are made that affect their lives.

Student/Farmworker Alliance, a national network of youth and students in partnership with the CIW, worked with students at over 300 universities and high schools to support the four-year Taco Bell boycott. By the end of SFA's "Boot the Bell” campaign, student activists had cut or blocked new campus contracts with Taco Bell at 22 universities and high schools nationwide, including high-profile victories at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Chicago, and University of Notre Dame.

Presently, Florida tomato pickers earn 40-45 cents for every 32-lb bucket of tomatoes they pick. At this rate, a farmworker must pick two tons of tomatoes to make just $50 in a day. Additionally, farmworkers regularly work 10-12 hour days with no overtime pay, no health insurance, no right to organize, no sick days and no benefits whatsoever. The CIW is a community organization based in southwest Florida that has been nationally and internationally recognized for its leadership in human rights, including uncovering and assisting in the successful prosecution of five farmworker slavery rings since 1997.

SFA is a national network of youth and students organizing in solidarity with farmworkers to eliminate sweatshop conditions and modern-day slavery in the fields. SFA is a founding member of the Alliance for Fair Food, a network of human rights, religious, student, labor, and grassroots organizations promoting principles and practices of socially responsible purchasing in the corporate food industry that advance and ensure the human rights of farmworkers at the bottom of corporate supply chains. For more information, visit http://www.sfalliance.org

##END##