CREA: Center for Reflection, Education and Action
Corporate
Responsibility
Sustainable
Living Wage
Systemic Analysis
Publications
and Resources
Faith In Action
CREA House
and Staff
Contact Us
Support Our Work
YUM! Brands, Inc.
YUM! Brands owns Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken. CREA became involved in dialogue and shareholder resolution activity with YUM! Brands in 2001. CREA's executive director, Dr. Ruth Rosenbaum, received an invitation from the Coalition for the Immokalee Workers (CIW) to do a series of workshops on purchasing power and the role of socially responsible investors for migrant workers who pick tomatoes in Immokalee, Florida. She spent two days with the workers in the workshops, where they described their working conditions as tomato pickers and their wages.
The workers were paid 40 cents for each cubeta of tomatoes they picked. A cubeta is a large plastic container holding 32 pounds of tomatoes. It has no handles and must be carried on the workers' shoulders. Picking the tomatoes, lifting the cubeta, walking to the truck, emptying the tomatoes into the truck...this had to be done over and over again, at 40 cents a cubeta. They are paid the same per bucket as the rate paid in 1978.
The workers have no sick leave, no paid holidays, no health insurance. The U.S. Fair Labor Act does not guarantee farm workers the right to organize or the right to overtime pay.
Dr. Rosenbaum went with CIW leaders to several housing compounds. One, owned by the tomato growers, is a group of small building built on company land. Each building has a small cooking area, a bathroom and one large sleeping are with individual beds and bunk beds crammed so closely together that privacy is virtually non-existent. Similarly small buildings on a privately owned plot of land are clustered together with only two showers and two toilets for all the buildings. The workers are predominantly immigrants from Guatemala, Haiti, and Mexico.
CREA then collaborated with the CIW, Trillium Asset Management, and the United Church of Christ in initiating and participating in dialogue with YUM! Brands. However, the dialogues did not move the company to action, and the investors filed a shareholder resolution in 2003. This resolution received 39% of the vote, an extraordinary response from the other shareholders.
Continuing dialogue following this shareholder meeting resulted in a commitment from Yum! Brands to increase wages by a penny a cubeta. Dialogue continues with the company.
Copyright © 2005 CREA, Inc. All Rights Reserved