Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
From the CIW:
Clearly not overly concerned about appearances, McDonald’s announced in February the payment of over $15 million dollars in bonuses — above and beyond baseline compensation — to CEO Jim Skinner and two other top executives. Meanwhile, McDonald’s continues to claim that the company can’t afford to pay farmworkers one penny more per pound for the tomatoes they pick for the burger giant.
You can read the story, “McDonald’s CEO gets $8.8 million bonus,” at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-070222mcbonus,0,1879773.story?coll=chi-business-hed
The announcement comes just weeks before farmworkers from Immokalee, who pick tomatoes at a per bucket piece rate that hasn’t raised significantly in nearly 30 years, and thousands of their supporters will be gathering in Chicago to demand that McDonald’s follow Taco Bell’s lead, work with the CIW to improve farm labor conditions, and pay a penny more per pound to help nearly double farmworkers’ wages when picking for McDonald’s.
The $15 million in bonuses, paid to three people, would easily cover 30 years of the penny per pound payout, to thousands of people.
Stay tuned for more news as the 2007 Truth Tour approaches, and be sure to check out the CIW website, http://www.ciw-online.org , for how you can join us in Chicago this April!
– thanks –
Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Friday, March 2nd, 2007
Immigrants are less likely to go to prison than U.S.-born residents of the same ethnic group and they boost pay for natives, research says. By Teresa Watanabe, Times Staff Writer
February 28, 2007Two new studies by California researchers counter negative perceptions that immigrants increase crime and job competition, showing that they are incarcerated at far lower rates than native-born citizens and actually help boost their wages.
A study released Tuesday by the Public Policy Institute of California found that immigrants who arrived in the state between 1990 and 2004 increased wages for native workers by an average 4%.
UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri, who conducted the study, said the benefits were shared by all native-born workers, from high school dropouts to college graduates, because immigrants generally perform complementary rather than competitive work.
As immigrants filled lower-skilled jobs, they pushed natives up the economic ladder into employment that required more English or know-how of the U.S. system, he said.
“The big message is that there is no big loss from immigration,” Peri said. “There are gains, and these are enjoyed by a much bigger share of the population than is commonly believed.”
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Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
(Baltimore Sun Opinion > op/ed) By E. G. Vallianatos
Originally published February 22, 2007
The tale is familiar by now, but that makes it no less horrifying: Migrant men and women, most of them from Mexico and Central America - along with some poor blacks and whites from the United States - following the growing and harvest seasons, working hard for pitiful wages while enduring dangerous lives.
In 1979, I was a new Environmental Protection Agency employee attending a government-funded seminar about the plight of farm workers. Expert after expert described conditions of horror. The threat came from farm sprays - the farm workers’ worst enemy. Many farm workers didn’t understand the instructions on the pesticide can or the advice of the farmers on when to enter sprayed fields. Sometimes workers were sprayed while harvesting crops, but most often the workers harvested crops with the toxin still on the leaves and fruit.
More than 25 years later, little has changed.
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