Alliances of tomato growers are working together to enforce low salaries for tomato pickers in Florida. The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is going so far in promoting grower collusion as to enforce it — threatening to extract $100,000 from any tomato grower that pays its workers a penny more. In an atmosphere of agribusiness cooperation to keep wages low, tomato pickers who haven’t had a raise in decades are trying to organize themselves in response — to get a raise of a just a penny per pound of tomatoes. Business-friendly politicians from both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have pushed for years to weaken workers’ right to organize, while simultaneously enacting laws and ignoring other laws in order to strengthen the ability of corporations to participate in cartel-style bullying. The priority of politicians bought out by business interests is literally inhuman — favoring the prerogatives of fictional legal entities over the needs of real living, breathing, hard-working people. It’s time to bring the point of political balance back toward the side of humanity. That means it’s time to vote progressive.

(Source: New York times November 29 2007; Coalition of Immokalee Workers)