Florida Farm Workers Picket Taco Bell

About 60 tomato pickers from Florida picketed the Irvine headquarters of Taco Bell on Monday and began a hunger strike, accusing the Mexican-style fast-food chain of producing “sweatshop tacos.”

Shaking picket signs shaped like tomatoes and Chihuahuas, a dog breed once used in Taco Bell advertising, the farm workers from Immokalee, Fla., protested low wages and a lack of paid overtime and health benefits from the companies that sell tomatoes to Taco Bell.

“Taco Bell doesn’t produce fast food,” said Lucas Benitez, 27. “Taco Bell produces exploitation food.”

Monday’s protest capped a four-day cross-country trip with rallies in five other cities. A larger protest is planned at Taco Bell’s Irvine offices at midday Friday, organizers said.

Benitez, a member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, said the group wants Taco Bell to pressure growers into improving working conditions and to pay growers an extra penny for each pound of tomatoes it buys in order to boost pickers’ wages. Currently, the laborers earn between $7,000 and $7,500 a year, Benitez said. A penny increase would nearly double workers’ earnings, according to some estimates.

But Taco Bell said the labor dispute is between the workers and their employers.

“The coalition efforts are misdirected,” Taco Bell spokeswoman Laurie Gannon said. “They do not work for Taco Bell.”

Gannon said Taco Bell bought only 2.8 million pounds of tomatoes from one Florida grower, for instance, accounting for less than 1% of the tomatoes distributed by the company.

“We don’t have the influence they seem to think we have,” she said.

Taco Bell executives, who met with coalition members during a similar protest a year ago, do not plan on meeting with workers again, Gannon said.

Timoteo Andrade Ramos, 34, one of the workers who made the trip by chartered bus and who joined the group’s hunger strike Monday, said he is discouraging relatives from migrating to the United States because wages are not as good as they expect.

“The United States is not like what they think in Mexico,” Ramos said. “I don’t want them to come suffer the way I suffer.”