On her book I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won
Cover Interview of December 03, 2017
In a nutshell
I Am Not A Tractor! is about the courage, vision, and
creativity of the farmworkers and community leaders of the Coalition of
Immokalee Workers (CIW), who have transformed what had been the worst
agricultural situation in the United States to one of the best. Florida’s
tomato fields have long been known for abuses that included toxic pesticide
exposure, beatings, sexual assault, rampant wage theft, and even,
astonishingly, modern-day slavery. In the past seven years, violence has
largely disappeared, working conditions are now safe, worker pay has increased
by as much as 60%, and there has been but one (quickly identified and
prosecuted) reported case of slavery. And all of this has happened without new
legislation, regulation, or government participation. Tractor! answers
the question, Why has this effort succeeded when so many other “social
responsibility” and labor reform efforts have failed?
Who are the people who imagined and led this effort? A
teenage immigrant from Mexico whose standoff with a violent crew box was a
first step to co-founding the CIW; a man who was a neuroscience major at Brown who
takes great pride in the watermelon crew he’s on; a leading farmer/grower who
was once homeless, pushing a shopping cart on the streets of LA; a woman who began
working just with the farmworker community in Immokalee and now, as part of
that same work, trains law enforcement, diplomatic, and criminal justice
officials in identifying and eliminating modern-day slavery; and a retired
New York State judge who volunteered to stuff envelopes and ended up building a
ground-breaking institution. These are the people who have built the
Coalition and the Fair Food Program that changed the lives of more than 30,000
field workers and are offering a solution to a problem with long roots in
our nation’s slave history and continuing conflict over immigration.
The reason I wrote I Am Not A Tractor! is because I
wanted to get at the big questions of not only what the Coalition has
accomplished but how they did it, what they’ve achieved, why the Fair Food
Program has worked, and what this tells us about effective social change.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
In a nutshell
I Am Not A Tractor! is about the courage, vision, and creativity of the farmworkers and community leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), who have transformed what had been the worst agricultural situation in the United States to one of the best. Florida’s tomato fields have long been known for abuses that included toxic pesticide exposure, beatings, sexual assault, rampant wage theft, and even, astonishingly, modern-day slavery. In the past seven years, violence has largely disappeared, working conditions are now safe, worker pay has increased by as much as 60%, and there has been but one (quickly identified and prosecuted) reported case of slavery. And all of this has happened without new legislation, regulation, or government participation. Tractor! answers the question, Why has this effort succeeded when so many other “social responsibility” and labor reform efforts have failed?
Who are the people who imagined and led this effort? A teenage immigrant from Mexico whose standoff with a violent crew box was a first step to co-founding the CIW; a man who was a neuroscience major at Brown who takes great pride in the watermelon crew he’s on; a leading farmer/grower who was once homeless, pushing a shopping cart on the streets of LA; a woman who began working just with the farmworker community in Immokalee and now, as part of that same work, trains law enforcement, diplomatic, and criminal justice officials in identifying and eliminating modern-day slavery; and a retired New York State judge who volunteered to stuff envelopes and ended up building a ground-breaking institution. These are the people who have built the Coalition and the Fair Food Program that changed the lives of more than 30,000 field workers and are offering a solution to a problem with long roots in our nation’s slave history and continuing conflict over immigration.
The reason I wrote I Am Not A Tractor! is because I wanted to get at the big questions of not only what the Coalition has accomplished but how they did it, what they’ve achieved, why the Fair Food Program has worked, and what this tells us about effective social change.