Sarah Menor (FGCU); Coalition of Immokalee Workers

I recently visited the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which for those of you who are not familiar with the coalition it is an organization that fights for fare wages and fare working conditions for workers in the fields of immokalee. I visited immokalee with my sociology of food class. We went to immokalee to examine first hand all the complicated political issues surrounding food. The more i dig into these issues the more complicated they seem to become, i witnessed first hand the injustice these workers have to endure. Many people think that the majority of these workers are undocumented workers but in fact most are documented. The coalition gave us an extensive presentation which helped us understand  is what happening in immokalee. The coalition is fighting for fair pay for the workers, they are fighting the growers to charge one more penny per pound. They are having trouble getting the growers to pass the one penny on to the workers, there is a grower’s commission that is imposing a $100,000 fine on growers who pass the penny on even thought all the big buyers are paying that extra penny??? that seems so unfair and where is all that money going, will they ever receive it?

From a sociological perspective this seems to fit in best with the conflict theory. The conflict theory would suggest that in the struggle for power and resources that the farm workers are making unjust wages and have unjust wages at the expense of the farm owners and large corporations buying the tomatoes. In order to have a working society we need the farm workers to continue with these injustices occurring. The conflict theory might also suggest that conflict is everywhere and this is just one more to add to the pile, as well as inequality is widespread and the farm workers are not the only ones experiencing inequality.

This entry was posted on 10. April 2009 at 16:53 and is filed under Introduction to Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.