I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took on the Fast Food Giants and Won by Susan L. Marquis

The Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has been garnering recent attention for its successful advocacy of farmworkers’ fair treatment at a time when many basic needs—a minimum wage; overtime pay; and rest, shade, and water in the fields—are still not given to the majority of the nation’s agricultural laborers. While there is now a solid body of literature on the older and California-born United Farm Workers (UFW) union, scholarship on newer organizations is still emerging, and Susan L. Marquis’s book I Am Not a Tractor! is a passionately researched and accessibly written contribution to this field of study.A dean at the Pardee RAND Graduate School whose previous work focused on national security organizations and public sector governance, Marquis did not intend to produce a book about the CIW. However, she did identify as a consumer concerned with eating healthy and ethically sourced food, and she became interested in Florida tomato workers after reading Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book Fast Food Nation and Barry Estabrook’s 2009 Tomatoland. After being serendipitously introduced to some CIW activists by a colleague, she conducted several interviews and site visits with those involved with the organization.Like many other farmworkers across the United States in the twentieth century, those in Immokalee were paid so little that they had to join the migratory stream up and down the East Coast, following certain crops to piece together a living. Even if they did work year-round, farmworker families still suffered from poverty, malnutrition, substandard housing, and a lack of education. Until the late 1970s, Immokalee’s farmworkers were predominantly African American, but soon after, immigrant workers—first Hai-tians, then Mexicans, then Central Americans—became the majority.The challenge of reaching a workforce so diverse in citizenship status, language, ethnicity, and literacy level was apparent to Florida Rural Legal Services, which began attracting workers’ trust in the 1990s by offering movie nights, listening sessions, and an informal food co-op. Gradually, the Southwest Florida Farmworker Project emerged, operating under the slogan “todos somos lideres” (we are all leaders) and encouraging workers to get educated about their rights and the potential for protest (23). In the fall of 1995, tomato workers refused en masse to get on their work buses after their bosses tried to institute a new piece rate system that would lower daily pay. In response, their employers reversed the change, which built up workers’ confidence to ask for further reforms.Legally established in 1996, the CIW began demanding—from Florida’s tomato industry as a whole—fair wages for workers, the right to organize without retaliation, better housing, and stronger laws and punishments for those who held people in socially unjust conditions, debt bondage, or—as Marquis reveals—actual slavery. What I Am Not a Tractor! does that makes it especially valuable is that it rightly connects the historiogra-phies of agricultural labor and human trafficking. When we think of human trafficking victims our minds might go to sweatshops, nail salons, or domestic and sex work before they go to fruit orchards, vineyards, or vegetable fields. Marquis discusses disturbing cases of crew leaders who kept workers trapped in dilapidated camps and trailers, refused to pay them, chained them to poles during the hours they were not in the fields, and beat or even killed them if they tried to escape.Though in its beginnings the CIW conducted hunger strikes and long marches reminiscent of those led by the UFW in earlier decades, it distinguished itself by trying to keep a larger food system in view and not automatically considering tomato growers to be the farmworkers’ main enemy. After all, above the growers sat the corporate buyers of the tomato supply—fast-food chain restaurants and supermarkets. By constantly negotiating lower tomato prices, those buyers then forced growers to squeeze more productivity out of farmworkers for less money to maintain their own profit margins. Buyers like Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Walmart were the ones who could afford to pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes, the CIW rationalized, and this small price hike would have tremendous trickle-down effects to employers and laborers. It framed the additional penny as a premium for a buyer to enter into the Fair Food Program, which certified food that came to consumer-eaters via humane working conditions.It took years of negotiation to get Florida’s tomato growers to sign on to the Fair Food Program, and Marquis uses one chapter to tell the compelling story of grower Jon Esformes, whose personal history of homelessness, addiction, and religiously influenced rehabilitation caused him to embrace the CIW’s mission and be its first contract signer. Though initially shunned by his peers, Esformes eventually influenced all of them to agree to the Fair Food Program’s Code of Conduct (paying workers fairly, meeting health and safety requirements, and firing any staff or supervisors who abused the fieldworkers) and a third-party monitoring agency that would conduct audits and settle complaints. After that, the CIW targeted corporations, including Taco Bell, Burger King, McDonald’s, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Aramark, and Sodexo. The stories of the CIW’s struggles with each of these businesses—many of whom resisted signing on to the program until they needed a public relations boost or competitive edge—will certainly make us look at these entities with a more critical eye than we already had.I had hoped Marquis would keep threading CIW-UFW connections throughout her work to perform much-needed transregional analysis at some points. This, however, leaves the door open for future scholarship to better connect the farmworker struggles of the US West and East. Overall, Marquis’s work taught me a great deal about a labor organization I have been following with interest for its effective approach to an interconnected food chain of worker, supplier, and buyer who “need each other and . . . [thus] need to work together” (226). This book’s important content and accessible style will appeal to academic and general readers interested in the histories of agricultural labor, business, food, immigration, and the US Southeast

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