Trader Joe's & Slavery ~ @change #trafficking #humanrights #farmworkers #traderjoes

Trader Joe’s: Sell slave-free tomatoes Dear Ray, A remarkable number of major supermarkets, restaurants and food service companies have joined farm workers to fight wage theft, widespread sexual harassment -- even slavery -- in Florida's tomato fields. But not Trader Joe's. Burger King, Subway and others are on board, paying $0.01 more per pound of tomatoes to the farm workers who pick them and guaranteeing their tomatoes are slave-free. But Trader Joe’s, despite their progressive image, refuses to follow suit. The Student Farmworker Alliance has started a petition on Change.org calling on Trader Joe's to sell only slave-free tomatoes. The Florida tomato season starts in October, so getting an agreement from Trader Joe’s in the next few weeks would be a huge victory. Will you sign the petition to get Trader Joe's to join the Campaign for Fair Food and sell slave-free tomatoes now? More than, 1,000 cases of real-life slavery in Florida’s tomato fields have been investigated by the Department of Labor in the past 10 years. In these cases, workers were housed in overcrowded shacks on the fields, paid poverty-level wages, had their identification documents taken away and were robbed of their wages by employers who fabricated debts to keep them working. Trader Joe's works hard on its image and prides itself on responding to customers' preferences. If enough customers (and potential customers) tell Trader Joe's they'll only buy slave-free tomatoes guaranteed through the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Campaign for Fair Food, it will have to join. Sign the Student Farmworker Alliance's petition to get Trader Joe's to make sure its tomatoes are slave- and abuse-free by joining CIW's Campaign for Fair Food now: http://www.change.org/petitions/ask-trader-joes-to-sell-slave-free-food Thanks for being a change-maker, Amanda and the Change.org team