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Farmworkers’ Truth Tour heads toward corporate headquarters
in Chicago
March 28, 2006
Press Contacts: RFK Memorial Center
for Human Rights (Amanda Shanor, 203-247-2195);
the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) (the Rev. Noelle Damico, 631-371-1629); Interfaith
Action (Brigitte Gynther, 239-986-0688); Student Farmworker Alliance
(Sean Sellers, 239-821-5481); National Economic and Social Rights
Initiative (Cathy Albisa, 917-407-0857).
Immokalee, FL — As the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
(CIW) launches the “McDonald’s
Truth Tour 2006: The Real Rights Tour,” the Alliance for
Fair Food (AFF) amplifies its call for McDonald’s to work
with the Florida farmworkers to improve workers’ wages
and ensure the full participation of farmworkers in the protection
of their own rights in the company’s supply chain.
The Real Rights Tour will pass through seventeen cities and
culminate in a march and mass rally at the Rock n’ Roll
McDonald’s in Downtown Chicago on Saturday, April 1st.
The rally will feature farmworkers from the CIW, as well as Stewart
Acuff, Director of Organizing for the AFL-CIO, and national leaders
from the human rights, student, and religious communities.
“All along the tour route, students, religious congregations,
labor unions and community groups are sponsoring educational
forums, turning out for protests at McDonald’s restaurants,
and providing food and housing for the workers. Through these
actions, consumers are amplifying our call for McDonald’s
to work with the CIW to ensure its food is not just fast, but
also fair” said the Rev. Dr. Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated
Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “The
AFF is an incredibly broad and strong base of consumers, and
we are growing daily.”
Instead of working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers – the
southwest Florida-based farmworker organization that led the
successful and precedent-setting Taco Bell boycott – McDonald's
has chosen to devolve responsibility for farmworkers’ poverty
wages and lack of rights to its suppliers while simultaneously
claiming that the conditions in its tomato supply chain are satisfactory.
“McDonald’s has put out a lot of PR about what it
is supposedly doing for farmworkers, but McDonald’s has
yet to meaningfully work with farmworkers themselves to address
stagnant poverty wages and their systematic lack of rights” said
Todd Howland, Director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center
for Human Rights. “Farmworkers are neither objects nor
children. They are human beings who must be accorded a role in
the protection of their own rights.”
Cathy Albisa, Executive Director of the National Economic and
Social Rights Initiative, explained, “to recognize that
it is responsible for human rights abuses in its supply chain
and simultaneously refuse to sit down with the victims to craft
solutions, as McDonalds is doing, is to continue to deny worker’s
full humanity. To guarantee human rights, McDonalds has no
other path but to walk in full partnership with workers, and
allow their voices to be heard and presence to be felt.”
Cross-country tours and high-profile actions have been a powerful
tool for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers over the past five
years. By generating awareness and mobilizing thousands of consumers
during a four year boycott of Taco Bell, Yum! Brands (Taco Bell's
parent company) was convinced to work with the CIW to establish
ground-breaking principles and practices that have improved farmworkers’ wages
and advanced their rights.
The CIW and AFF are now calling on McDonald’s to recognize
and implement the principles of corporate responsibility for
improving farmworkers’ wages, the full participation of
farmworkers in the protection of their own rights, and the establishment
of transparency in its tomato supply chain, just as Yum! Brands
did one year ago.
“Not only is this the right thing for McDonald’s
to do,” insisted Sean Sellers of Student Farmworker Alliance, “the
model we have in place with Yum! Brands is working well. If the
largest fast-food company in the world can work with the CIW,
there’s no excuse for McDonald’s to turn its back
on a proven partner and a proven approach.”
The Alliance for Fair Food is a newly-formed network of nationally
and internationally recognized human rights, religious, student,
labor, and grassroots organizations working in partnership with
the CIW to promote 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.
Founded by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights,
the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the National Economic and Social
Rights Initiative (NESRI), Student Farmworker Alliance and Interfaith
Action, the AFF has been endorsed by nationally and internationally
respected organizations and individuals, including: Congressman
John Lewis (D-GA), Amnesty International USA, the AFL-CIO, United
Students Against Sweatshops, SEIU, author Eric Schlosser (Fast
Food Nation), NAACP Board Chairman Julian Bond, Grammy Award-winning
singer/songwriter Bonnie Raitt, and Rev. Dr. Robert Edgar, General
Secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the
U.S.A.
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