CIW announces Florida Tour!

September 29 - October 7, 2007

Workers to visit 13 cities – holding workshops and protests along the way – laying the groundwork for the national mobilization at Burger King headquarters in Miami set for November 30th.

Click here for the press release.

Help organize a tour stop in your community!

We are calling on our Florida-based allies to help us keep the pressure on Burger King. The upcoming FLORIDA TOUR – starting September 29 in Naples and wrapping up on October 7 in Miami – will be a great opportunity to bring people together for education and action around the Burger King campaign and to mobilize Florida communities to join us this November 30th in Miami for a major March on Burger King headquarters.

If you are along the Tour route, we invite you to join us for all the action when the Florida Tour reaches your community! We also need help setting up meetings and presentations with student, community, faith, and labor groups, planning Burger King actions, and coordinating hospitality for the tour. If you have ideas or can help out in your community, e-mail us at workers (at) ciw-online.org

We will be visiting the following cities:

• Naples/Ft. Myers/Venice – Saturday, September 29
• Sarasota – Saturday, September 29 (evening) & Sunday, September 30
• St. Petersburg – Monday, October 1
• Tampa – Monday, October 1 (evening) & Tuesday, October 2
• Gainesville – Tuesday, October 2 (evening) & Wednesday, October 3
• Tallahassee – Wednesday, October 3 (evening) & Thursday, October 4
• Orlando – Thursday, October 4 (evening) & Friday, October 5
• Deland – Friday, October 5 (evening)
• Vero Beach/West Palm – Saturday, October 6
• Ft. Lauderdale – Saturday, October 6
• Miami/Homestead – Sunday, October 7

If you’d like to get involved in planning the tour stop in your community, please contact workers (at) ciw-online.org or (239) 657-8311. We look forward to being in touch and thank you in advance for your support and hospitality!

Background: Six years ago, a handful of farmworkers from Immokalee stood outside a Taco Bell restaurant on Hwy 41 in Ft. Myers with protest signs and a huge papier mache tomato. We gathered there to announce the launch of the Taco Bell campaign. From there, a month of spirited protests across the state – in St. Petersburg, Gainesville, Tallahassee, and Miami – set in motion an improbable national boycott, spearheaded by farmworkers from one of the country’s poorest communities taking on one of the country’s most powerful industries.

Today, six years later, we stand on the threshold of a more modern, more humane agricultural industry in Florida, having secured two groundbreaking agreements with both Yum Brands and McDonald's to improve wages and working conditions for thousands of Florida farmworkers. This remarkable success would never have been possible without the unwavering support of allies across the country, and especially here in our home state of Florida.

Over the past two years, we have asked Burger King to follow suit and demand higher standards of its tomato suppliers. Yet in the face of this historic opportunity to improve the lives of the men and women who pick its tomatoes, Burger King seems to have chosen business as usual over progress, continued exploitation over justice. And as a result, Burger King’s intransigence threatens to undermine the hard-won advances established in the Yum Brands and McDonald’s agreements.