Tomato industry's pay denial puzzling

Businesses around the country struggle with ever-increasing competition and seek out cheap labor. Consumers look for less expensive goods. With these price pressure points, immigrants - both legal and illegal - have become a valuable commodity to the nation's economy.

While our country's leaders, including the presidential candidates, struggle with designing an immigration policy that will pass muster with the American people - many of whom demand wholesale deportation - there are narrower issues at hand today. This week the Senate ordered up an investigation into the tomato industry over claims of paltry pay and deplorable working conditions.

The wage issue alone raises disturbing questions.

At Tuesday's meeting of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. and Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, called for the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the tomato industry is paying migrant farmworkers as much as claimed.

This comes on the heels of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange thwarting efforts by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to get an additional penny per pound of picked tomatoes from fast-food chains.

A single penny.

This is where the issue becomes unsettling.

The field workers in the Collier County farming community of Immokalee average 45 cents per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they harvest. Several fast-food giants - McDonald's Corp. and Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell and Pizza Hut - agreed to pay workers an extra penny per pound, which would have been the first raise for field hands in several decades.

But the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange reportedly put tremendous pressure on member tomato growers to shun the extra pay, threatening fines of $100,000.

Why, we wonder.

Why would an industry organization deny its workers a pay raise when its buyers already have agreed to pony up the money?

The exchange maintains that pickers already get a fair wage, averaging $12.50 per hour, but that's hard to figure at the 45-cent-per-bucket rate.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., determined that 2,500 tomatoes would have to be picked an hour to hit that hourly pay, with workers filling a bucket every two minutes. Lucas Benitez, co-founder of the Immokalee coalition, told the Senate panel that was an impossible task.

Yet the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange is digging in, citing attorneys' warnings that if the organization participates in the extra penny proposal it could be exposed to litigation over antitrust and labor laws.

That looks like a desperate and bogus stand.

At Tuesday's hearing, Sen. Sanders showed off a letter signed by 26 labor law professors who called the alarm over lawsuits "entirely ill-founded."

"You might want to reconsider the attorneys that you are currently consulting," he told the exchange representative at the hearing.

Yes indeed. Hiding behind dubious legal advice is a disingenuous reason for denying workers a pay hike - one that won't even come out of the industry's pockets.

Concerned senators vow to continue their efforts to secure better working conditions and increased pay for Florida's 30,000 tomato-field workers. We applaud those efforts. The back-breaking work merits its first wage boost in decades.