Immokalee tomato workers seek higher wages in McDonald's campaign

Published: 2006-05-01

IMMOKALEE, Fla. (CNS) -- AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy, began a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Poverty Tour April 23 by spending a day with farmworkers in Immokalee. The day culminated in an outdoor Mass. Before the Mass Sweeney and Kennedy publicly signed letters to McDonald's CEO James Skinner asking the fast-food chain to help increase tomato farmworker wages by paying a penny a pound more for the tomatoes they purchase, to be passed on to the workers who pick the tomatoes. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, leader of the penny-a-pound campaign, last year succeeded in a similar campaign with Taco Bell, a restaurant chain owned by Yum! Brands, following a four-year boycott against Taco Bell. The poverty tour recalls the 1966 tour by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, to meet with Cesar Chavez and farmworkers in the vineyards of Delano, Calif., and similarly impoverished workers in the Mississippi Delta and in Appalachia. That tour brought national attention to the efforts of poor workers to gain economic rights.

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