Anyone who knows me knows I hate fast food places and will not eat at McDonalds or Taco Bell and havent for the last 5 + years. These huge corporations are heartless unhuman monsters that feed on profits and greed. That aside my boycott is mainly because it’s low quality nasty food.

If I am going to eat fast food I do it at local chains and restaurants like Taco Mayo and Braums.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group that represents farm workers in southern Florida, announced that Taco Bell had acceded to all of the coalition’s demands and they are ending a four-year boycott of Taco Bell.

Mmmmm look at those tasty green tomatos...they look...umm...ripe for the picking?? Anyway what I found interesting about this particular photo is the guy (who is an Immokalee Worker picking tomatos) is wearing a nike hat. Nike still has a huge slave labor problem. So this photos has a sort of poignant irony to it.

April 6, 2005 - A Side Order of Human Rights The New York Times - By Eric Schlosser - Last month, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group that represents farm workers in southern Florida, announced that it was ending a four-year boycott of Taco Bell. The most remarkable thing about the announcement was the reason behind it: Taco Bell had acceded to all of the coalition’s demands.

Apparently the coalition was asking for a pay raise of one penny for every pound of tomatoes picked. The article says this is the first major wage increase in Immokalee since the late 1970’s.

The penny-per-pound supplement will nearly double the wages of migrants picking tomatoes for Taco Bell. And though there is some debate about the final cost to Yum Brands, the figure will most likely be a few hundred thousand dollars a year - not a huge sum for a fast food company with annual sales of about $9 billion worldwide.

It took 4 intense years and wasnt easy.

Asked about the possible link between slavery in Florida and Taco Bell’s food, Mr. Blum replied, "It’s heinous, but I don’t think it has anything to do with us." The company’s attitude gradually changed as the boycott gained support not only from students, but also from the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the National Council of Churches, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights and former President Jimmy Carter, among others.

"I have followed with concern for a number of years the appalling working conditions in the Florida-based tomato industry. While production costs in the industry have increased over the last 25 years, wages have been effectively stagnant, as giant cooperative buying mechanisms hold prices down. Conditions are so bad in parts of the industry that there have been two separate prosecutions for slavery in recent years.

In recent years, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has been publicly campaigning to bring attention to these abuses of human rights and for industry-wide change. In particular, CIW has led a campaign to ask Taco Bell, a subsidiary of Yum! Brand, Inc., the world’s largest restaurant company, to accept responsibility for ensuring that its profits are not derived from abuses of workers in its supply chain." - Nobel Peace Prize winner and former US President Jimmy Carter, writing from the Carter Center in Atlanta

And it looks like the CIW won. - NEWS

But I still won’t eat Taco Bell it’s nasty stuff.