Naples Daily Noose defending Burger King's "right" to exploit farmworkers/my response

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2008/jan/25/editorial-burger-king/#comments

Editorial: Burger King
Chain’s hint of tomato ban is volley back at coalition

Daily News staff
Friday, January 25, 2008

Burger King has announced it may stop buying tomatoes from Southwest Florida packing houses if the Coalition of Immokalee Workers continues pressuring the fast-food giant to pay a penny more per pound for one of customers’ favorite toppings.

Burger King’s announcement comes amid word that prior commitments from other fast-food chains such as Taco Bell and McDonald’s to help migrant workers get a better break — approximately doubling their pay per 40-pound bucket picked — may be falling apart as growers now back away.

We understand there has been resistance in the past to coalition initiatives out of concern for the organization becoming a union and agribusiness losing control. Still, we wonder whether Burger King’s bold move may simply be an overdue acknowledgement that what the coalition proposes turns fundamental economics upside down. It asks that buyers in the free marketplace pay more than they have to for a raw material. The coalition asks companies to take less of a profit or pass the added expense on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

As a result, Immokalee agribusiness and migrant workers themselves may lose jobs.

The logic, leveraged by street demonstrations outside targeted firms’ corporate headquarters, has been ripe for someone to blow the whistle, and now Burger King has.

Comments

I see that Lytle and the other lapdogs of corporate power at the Naples Daily Noose still know on which side their Milkbone is buttered, and as usual, the growers/bosses/those in power are still breaking treaties.

“[T] here has been resistance in the past to [C]oalition [of Immokalee Worker] initiatives out of concern for the organization becoming a union and agribusiness losing control.” Well, of course, heaven forbid there should be any working-class organization because those poverty-stricken agribiz bosses like Collier Enterprises et al won’t make quite as many millions, pobrecitos.

Notice Burger King makes “bold moves.” Talking about turning logic and decency upside down! A powerful corporation using its muscle to extort more sweat for less pay from the workers producing its wealth is a brave thing to the Noose, while those same workers trying to make a tiny bit better living are threatening to turn the Noose’s beloved capitalism “upside down.” Somebody has to “blow the whistle” on these workers trying to survive? Holy Orwellian twisting of what whistleblowing means!

However, there is some truth in this editorial: it is anathema to capitalism that the people actually producing the wealth (workers) have some decent share of it. (The lower the wages, the higher the profits).

The good news, though, is that there is an alternative to higher prices for those consumers (also working people) the Noose says it’s worried about, an alternative that never gets mentioned in the discourse of those defending the “right” of corporations to make more and more money no matter what: BK could choose to make a little less money while still paying a little more for tomatoes without charging more for their crappy food.

It is not a natural law that the only choice is EITHER higher wages OR no jobs and higher prices. “Passing on the expense to consumers” is only an excuse to demonize workers.

Ian Harvey