Taco Bell isn't facing expulsion from UT

The Austin-American Statesman 2/25/05

By Laura Heinauer, American-Statesman Staff

Looks like UT students with a hankering for those Grilled Stuft Burritos can rest easy, for now.

Organizers with the University of Texas Student Labor Action Project said Thursday that they will withdraw their request that the Texas Union Board boot Taco Bell from the student union. The corporation is accused of underpaying and mistreating tomato pickers in Florida.

The move, members said, came after they saw a draft of a decision expected today in which the board would not recommend that Taco Bell be moved off campus.

"It shows they haven't taken us seriously," said Jordan Buckley, a senior who helped start a boycott of Taco Bell in 2003. "We don't want to do them the favor of letting them insult us like that."

Nada Antoun, a radio-television-film graduate student and president of the union board, said the board will vote on a planned compromise. Antoun said the resolution would recommend a ban on businesses that get tomatoes from Six L's Packing Co. Inc., a vendor the franchise owner denies is its tomato supplier.

Six L's is at the center of a national campaign based in Immokalee, Fla., where a coalition has formed to expose companies that they claim exploit tomato pickers.

Buckley, who is taking the semester off and is in Immokalee, said that no one vendor is the target and that by prohibiting only companies that use Six L's, the board is letting Taco Bell off the hook.

"I'd like them to explain how . . . any of the rest of the suppliers are any less complicit or any better," he said.

As the leading buyer who profits from the handpicked-tomato industry, Buckley said, Taco Bell Corp. and its parent company, Yum Brands Inc., keeps tomato prices low by demanding bulk discounts. Those discounts, he said, result in wages as low as $6,500 a year on some farms.

More than 20 universities across the country have severed relations with Taco Bell over issues involving Florida's farmworkers. At UT, it has been one of the most sustained student movements in recent years.

Antoun said the board is ready for closure. She said replacing the Taco Bell would be a financial risk for the board because a portion of the union's restaurant sales go toward its programming and special events.

The availability of inexpensive food on campus is another issue the board has to consider. Students want places where they can get lunch for less than $4, she said.

Dirk Dozier, chief executive officer of Austaco Inc., the franchise company that owns the Taco Bell in the student union and about 70 other Taco Bells in Central Texas, said the corporation has offered to pay a tomato surcharge to support the Florida workers, but neither the Immokalee coalition nor the students who organize these boycotts seem willing to cooperate.

Rather, he said, the groups seem content using the Taco Bell brand name to drum up publicity for their cause. He called Six L's a "very good organization" and said the fact that Taco Bell Corp. buys less than 1 percent of its tomatoes from the company makes alleged human rights abuses a nonissue.