Letter Celebrating a Birthday and an Award
Posted by Billy Shore on Thursday, November 6, 2003
Usually awards are given to those who delight and please us: Oscars go to movie stars, Pulitzers to writers. But occasionally an award is bestowed to those who irritate, agitate, provoke, and unsettle. Just such an award is being presented today and the winners happen to work in very much the same business in which we work, but they could hardly be further away in either distance or lifestyle.
Today is Robert F. Kennedy's birthday, and this morning, on the 3rd floor of the Russell Senate Office Building, his widow Ethel will present the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award which is given annually to "honor creative individuals who are, often at great personal risk, engaged in strategic and nonviolent efforts to overcome serious human rights violations." The award is intended to reflect RFK's "opposition to tyranny and his belief in the power of individual moral courage to overcome injustice." There have been 34 award winners in the past, from 20 countries. But this is the first time the award will go to American human rights activists.
The winners are three migrant farmworkers -- Julia Gabriel, Lucas Benitez, and Romeo Ramirez -- who became leaders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The coalition consists of Guatemalan, Haitian, and Hispanic immigrants who pick citrus fruit, tomatoes and other crops in southwest Florida for forty cents per every 32 lb. bucket they fill. That's one quarter, one nickel, one dime.
Five times during the last six years the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has helped government officials investigate and successfully prosecute growers who utilize forced labor practices like economic servitude and armed guards in the fields. The group also works to improve working condition and wages. Currently their primary effort is a boycott of Taco Bell, which gets many of its tomatoes from the migrant workers whose 32 lb. bucket, earns them one quarter, one nickel, one dime.
If Immokalee sounds familiar, that's because it is where we first engaged in service more than five years ago with our partner, Timberland, where Timberland CEO Jeff Swartz and his father Sidney first visited a Share Our Strength grant recipient, and where I wrote about walking into the roadside trailers of workers who kept their food tied in nets hung from the ceiling so that it wouldn't be eaten by rats, the food they were able to purchase with one quarter, one nickel, one dime.
The award includes a $30,000 prize to each of the activists, which must seem like a tremendous amount of money. But it's the recognition that will be most valuable. Not just the well-deserved recognition of the farmworkers heroic efforts, but our own recognition that the sweet and tasty meals we savor often mask the bitter experience of those who helped bring them to our table.
November 6, 2003 | | Tags: activism, awards, human rights, timberland
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