jakeratner
CIW Community Center
Bleary-eyed, we cringed as we flicked on the light switch we had just turned off a few short hours before. We were staying in Immokalee, Florida at the house of Lucas Benitez, a long-time farmworker organizer who on the eve of a week-long protest tour from Boston to Tampa still took the time relate to us how it all began fifteen years ago. He had gone to the asphalt expanse of parking lots where workers wait in the pre-dawn haze to be hired as day laborers in the fields and began by calling a general strike. Benitez and others then proceeded to hold a 30-day fast, pressuring the tomato growers to pay their workers a living wage.
Fifteen years later, though a number of significant victories have been won, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or CIW, (a group that represents some 4,000 farmworkers) continues their struggle with that same initial passion and energy. We arrived at the newly-constructed community center and CIW office to find a weeks of planning frantically come to fruition as CIW members emerged from the dark, muggy night and the buses were loaded.
CIW Community Center
Bleary-eyed, we cringed as we flicked on the light switch we had just turned off a few short hours before. We were staying in Immokalee, Florida at the house of Lucas Benitez, a long-time farmworker organizer who on the eve of a week-long protest tour from Boston to Tampa still took the time relate to us how it all began fifteen years ago. He had gone to the asphalt expanse of parking lots where workers wait in the pre-dawn haze to be hired as day laborers in the fields and began by calling a general strike. Benitez and others then proceeded to hold a 30-day fast, pressuring the tomato growers to pay their workers a living wage.
Fifteen years later, though a number of significant victories have been won, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, or CIW, (a group that represents some 4,000 farmworkers) continues their struggle with that same initial passion and energy. We arrived at the newly-constructed community center and CIW office to find a weeks of planning frantically come to fruition as CIW members emerged from the dark, muggy night and the buses were loaded.