If someone offered to carry your groceries home, you’d probably thank them. But every day, a typical migrant farmworker in Florida could gather over two tons of tomatoes for America’s supermarkets and fast-food joints and be thanked only with sheer poverty.

The immigrant workers who toil in Florida’s farm “sweatshops” are finally getting their due. Following a series of collective-bargaining agreements with major restaurant chains, the Florida-based Coalition of Imokalee Workers has scored a victory against the trade association that has for years blocked wage increases for tomato pickers. The Coalition has reached a breakthrough agreement for a higher per-pound pay rate with two firms, the food service company Compass, and East Coast Growers and Packers.

Through media campaigns and grassroots organizing, the CIW has pressured corporate behemoths like Burger King and Whole Foods to agree to pay an extra penny per pound of tomatoes, which would ideally be passed directly onto workers through the production chain. But the weak link has always been the resistance of the region’s major tomato producers, led by the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange.

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