Of Mortgages And Men

At deadline the jobless rate in Florida was creeping toward 9 percent, according to January statistics, the latest available. The figure could well be over 9 percent by now. The last time it was this bad was in 1976. But don’t despair. Jobs are out there, and I have the inside scoop on hundreds of openings that will be available in just a few months.

South Floridians who are out of work, or soon to be, are especially lucky because this exciting new career opportunity is only about 100 miles away from Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. Unemployed condo owners who were tricked, or dove headlong, into mortgage payments that now wildly exceed the value of their properties and ability to pay should find it particularly appealing. For a couple hundred bucks per month, with no money down, you can move into a trailer home in the rural town of Immokalee, along with five or six of your fellow tomato pickers.

If you prefer more privacy you can rent a two-bedroom apartment for about $600, as long as you have two months worth of rent to give the landlord for a deposit. Because most of your coworkers simply can’t afford that $1,200 deposit, you’ll have no trouble finding an available apartment that is conveniently located near the parking lot where you’ll board a bus to the glistening fields at the crack of dawn each morning. Further dampening your competition, 60 percent of tomato pickers in Immokalee don’t return for a second year.

But wait. It gets better. Since 2005, several huge corporate consumers of Florida tomatoes—including Burger King, McDonald’s, Subway, Whole Foods, and Yum Brands (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, et al.)—have agreed to a one-cent per pound pay hike from which you, too, will benefit. It took only about a decade of organizing and protesting by a group of dedicated pickers who call themselves the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (a group you will be able to join at no cost) to win that raise. The additional penny means that instead of making 45 cents for each 32-pound container you fill, you would earn 75 cents per bucket. Fill just 100 of them during your ten-hour shift (i.e. one bucket every six minutes) for a fast $75. That translates to about $1,500 per month, or $12,000 per year. And, you get the summer off , because there are no tomatoes to pick then.

Still, no job is perfect. For example, some seasoned tomato pickers think the pay is still a little low. “If a worker made a better salary—and got maybe $20,000 a year—you could probably get a car or find a better house to live in,” Leonel Perez, a 20-year-old picker from Guatemala who migrated to Immokalee three seasons ago, told me.

There’s a small hitch, though. After Taco Bell agreed to the first penny-per-pound raise in 2005, some Immokalee workers actually received their extra pennies per pound. But in late 2007 Florida tomato growers started withholding the extra cents. “None of the money is getting to the workers currently,” says Julia Perkins, a Coalition of Immokalee Workers spokeswoman. “That stopped when the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange threatened a fine of $100,000 against any of its members who participate.” The FTGE maintains the extra-cent agreements violate anti-trust laws.

You’d probably just spend your escrowed pennies anyway. In the meantime, pressure to release them is mounting. Tomato pickers demonstrated in Tallahassee in March to make Gov. Charlie Crist and the Florida Legislature aware of the situation. So, optimistically speaking, there is an extremely remote chance that the pay issue could be resolved by the time you report to Immokalee for work next September.