So it's come to this. Yesterday March 5 hundreds of farm workers and students began a week long fast for fair food in front of the corporate headquarters of Publix Supermarkets in Lakeland, Fl. Their physical struggle will be on display for the upper management of Florida's largest private corporation. Management that has refused to sign the Fair Food Agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers(CIW), an agreement which would stop the company from purchasing tomatoes from suppliers who abuse workers, and pass on an extra penny per pound of tomatoes directly to the workers. After over two years of emails, petitions, letters, massive marches, and demonstrations, the farmworkers will turn to this most basic of arguments: we are human and deserve a living wage.
"Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals." Dr. Martin Luther King
Throughout history, the act of fasting has been a show of faith, a form of political protest, a weapon of the powerless.
Virtually all the major faiths include long-held traditions of fasting as a spiritual discipline, a way to seek the holy amidst the temporal, through sacrifice and prayer. Social movements throughout modern times -- from the women's suffrage movement of the early 1900's to Mahatma Gandhi and his use of non-violent protest to challenge British colonial rule -- have also turned to fasting when other forms of protest have failed to produce change.
Currently, a workers needs to pick 2.5 tons of tomatoes in a day in order to make minimum wage. There is a lack of work security, lack of shade, sexual harassment, routine pesticide exposure. And, at the extreme, slavery.
Let's find a way to join their protest, in spirit but also in concrete terms. I will be having a talk with my local Publix manager on this issue this week and I will follow that with contact to Publix corporate offices in Lakeland.