DRUMPF has a nefarious reason for everything, why he serves Wendy's on his personal jet
********QUOTE*******
http://harpers.org/blog/2016/03/trumps-tomatoes/
[font size=5]Trump’s Tomatoes[/font]
The story behind the billionaire’s fast food of choice
By Andrew Cockburn
According to the Washington Post, guests on Donald Trump’s luxurious personal 757 jet—gold-plated seat-belt buckles!—who get peckish and order a burger are served Wendy’s. It would have to be Wendy’s. No other food chain strives so hard to avoid buying tomatoes from Florida, where they are almost guaranteed to have been picked by immigrants, a policy surely appealing to Trump. Admittedly, the tomatoes in question are quite possibly picked by a worker confined in conditions of near slavery, paid minimal amounts and forced to scavenge for food, but at least he or she is not an immigrant working in this country.
To understand the background to the Wendy’s guarantee, we have to go back to the beginning of the century, when a workers’ rights group in Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, pioneered an innovative and effective strategy. ....
... In 2001, however, the C.I.W. conceived and adopted a new strategy, targeting not the agribusinesses that employed and exploited them, but the farmers’ corporate customers, using the leverage of consumers’ social conscience. In the first such campaign, the group fomented a nationwide boycott of Taco Bell. The demand was simple: Commit to paying an extra penny a pound directly to the pickers. This Boycott the Bell movement, augmented with widely publicized hunger strikes by C.I.W. organizers, caught on across the country, especially on college campuses. Eventually Yum! Brands Inc., the parent company of Taco Bell, caved and accepted the terms.
Over successive years other giant enterprises have fallen into line. Burger King, McDonald’s, Chipotle, and Walmart all eventually signed on to the Fair Food Program, a C.I.W. initiative in which participating retailers agree to purchase Florida tomatoes exclusively from suppliers who observe a specified code of conduct that includes zero-tolerance for slavery and sexual violence, as well as the direct penny-a-pound payments.
The program has been a big success. Fourteen major companies, including Walmart and McDonald’s, have now signed on, as have growers responsible for over 90 percent of Florida’s tomato production.
Only one major fast-food enterprise has refused to join: Wendy’s. ....
********UNQUOTE********
= new reply since forum marked as read
the immoral stance of Trump? Lots for me, none for you.
********QUOTE*******
http://www.ciw-online.org/blog/2016/03/harpers-magazine/
[font size=5]Now we know: Explosive new article in Harper’s Magazine reveals Wendy’s tomato supplier in Mexico…[/font]
March 18th, 2016
[font size=5]… And the supplier’s history is not pretty: Bioparques was the subject of a massive slavery prosecution in 2013.[/font]
We also wrote on two separate occasions about the Bioparques case in these pages, once in 2013 when the story first broke and then again in 2014 following the Los Angeles Times exposé that delved deeper into the outrageous abuses there. Both posts are valuable reflections on the endemic nature of human rights violations in the Mexican produce industry and the near total lack of effective mechanisms — and the powerlessness of Mexican workers themselves — to address those violations, much less to prevent them.
What this latest revelation means…
At this point, there can be little doubt that the Florida tomato industry is light years ahead of Mexico when it comes to social responsibility and the protection of farmworkers’ fundamental human rights. It will take years, perhaps even a generation, for the Mexican produce industry to catch up, and that only if Mexico is first able to address the underlying societal ills of deeply-rooted corruption and hyper-violence born of its pervasive drug wars. Mexico must rebuild a functional civil society before it can make any credible claims to verifiable social responsibility in its massive produce export industry.
Another article that came out this week in the food justice online news site Civil Eats (“Tomato Workers Call for Wendy’s Boycott After the Chain Shifts its Sourcing to Mexico”) cited a recent US government report listing Mexico “as one of three countries known to harbor exploitive labor practices in tomato fields.” That report is issued by the US Department of Labor’s International Bureau of Labor Affairs, which describes its mission on the USDOL website in these words:
ILAB maintains a list of goods and their source countries which it has reason to believe are produced by child labor or forced labor in violation of international standards. The List is intended to raise public awareness about child labor and forced labor around the world, and to promote and inform efforts to address them. A starting point for action, the List creates opportunities for ILAB to engage and assist foreign governments. It is also a valuable resource for researchers, advocacy organizations and companies wishing to carry out risk assessments and engage in due diligence on labor rights in their supply chains. ....
http://www.ciw-online.org/blog/2016/03/special-comment-democratic-presidential-primary-race/
[font size=5]A Special Comment on the Democratic Presidential Primary Race and the Fair Food Program:[/font]
March 10th, 2016
In recent days, the Democratic presidential primary race has cast a surprising amount of public attention on the CIW and the Fair Food Program. That attention has been generated both by a powerful five-minute video released this week by one of the candidates that revolves around the profound changes brought to the lives of tens of thousands of farmworkers through the Fair Food Program, and by a brief mention of our work in last night’s Democratic debate in Miami.
We are fortunate to be able to count both Democratic presidential candidates as friends of the CIW and longtime supporters of our work. Senator Sanders traveled to Immokalee in 2008 to speak with workers and then held a hearing in the United States Senate later that year that gave our Campaign for Fair Food a crucial push at a very important juncture in our history. Secretary Clinton, while at the State Department, cited our work as a model for an important new supply chain focus in the Department’s anti-trafficking efforts, and has twice recognized the unique power of the Fair Food Program to eliminate longstanding human rights abuses in the fields and in corporate supply chains more broadly. First, in 2010 when she was Secretary of State, she awarded the CIW the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Hero Award for our fight against modern day slavery, and in 2014 she honored us with the Clinton Global Citizen Award.
We deeply appreciate both Secretary Clinton’s and Senator Sanders’ longstanding support for the Fair Food movement and for farmworkers’ fundamental human rights.
********UNQUOTE********
