Early History
The CIW, initially called the Southwest Florida Farmworker Project, was formed in 1993 in Immokalee, Florida, the epicenter of the state's $600 million tomato industry. The group's organizing philosophy is based on principles of popular education and leadership development. One of the CIW's first accomplishments was to establish a cooperative to sell staple foods and other necessities at cost in order to combat price-gouging by local merchants. Today, the CIW also owns and operates WCIW-LP (107.9 FM, "Radio Conciencia"), a low-power FM radio station that features music, news, and educational programing in several languages.
Between 1995 and 2000, the CIW organized several major actions to protest declining real wages for tomato harvesters, as well as frequent violence from supervisors towards field workers. This period included community-wide work stoppages in 1995, 1997 and 1999; a 30-day hunger strike undertaken by six members in 1998; and a 230-mile march from Ft. Myers to Orlando in 2000. By 1998, these protests “won industry-wide raises of 13-25% (translating into several million dollars annually for the community in increased wages).... Those raises brought the tomato picking piece rate back to pre-1980 levels (the piece rate had fallen below those levels over the course of the intervening two decades), but wages remained below poverty level and continuing improvement was slow in coming.”
Read more about this topic: Coalition Of Immokalee Workers
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