2016/08/02 by Andy Walter, Walter, Andy
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Global trade, sustainability, and social impact #Organic Food and Agriculture
paper · doi:10.14288/acme.v12i2.1401
openalex publication_date 2016/08/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
In 2005 the Coalition of Immokalee Workers won a four-year campaign against Taco Bell that resulted in the food retailer agreeing to contribute to a pay raise and system for strengthening and monitoring the rights of workers who pick the tomatoes it purchases from growers in the Immokalee-area of southwest Florida. This paper examines the spatiality of the CIW’s praxis in that campaign. I focus explicitly on the spatial thinking and practices that were central to the CIW’s Taco Bell campaign. Previous studies observed a scalar element involving the upscaling of the tomato pickers’ “local” dispute over wages and workplace rights. In this paper, I interpret the CIW’s scale jumping as part of a larger relational politics of space incorporating a “global sense of place” that connected Immokalee, the place in which workers experienced exploitation and rights violations, to a larger system of socio-spatial relations, connections, sites, and flows. This understanding was fundamental to the CIWs presumption that a small organization of farmworkers could successfully engage a “global” force like Taco Bell as well as to the strategic actions that it undertook.