Victory Over Taco Bell

Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA) is a national network of students and youth organizing with farmworkers to eliminate sweatshop conditions and modern-day slavery in the fields. They work in alliance with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a Florida-based, membership-led organization of mostly Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian low-wage workers. Their work has shown that when people stand up together, Goliath can be defeated and a different world is possible.

farmworkers + allies win historic, four-year boycott!

At the onset of the 21st century, farmworkers in the US toil in abysmal conditions for sub-poverty annual wages without basic rights and protections such as the right to organize, the right to overtime pay, or benefits of any kind. While fast-food corporations and grocery mega-chains report ever increasing sales and profit margins, the farmworkers responsible for picking the fruits and vegetables receive piece rates that have not changed significantly in three decades. In the most extreme cases, workers face modern-day slavery.

Amidst a climate of fear and violence, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers – a grassroots community organization of mostly Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian farmworkers – began organizing to confront these sweatshop conditions in the fields of Florida. After several years, the CIW began to analyze the role of the fast-food industry, with its vast purchasing power and enormous demand for fruits and vegetables, in driving down farmworker wages. Spotlighting the often invisible link between the fast-food industry and large Florida-based growers, the CIW launched the first-ever farmworker boycott of a fast-food corporation against Taco Bell on April 1, 2001.

What began as a local struggle in a remote Florida town quickly expanded into a national, worker-led movement over the course of the four-year boycott. In March 2005, the CIW – with tremendous support from youth, faith, labor and community allies – reached an unprecedented agreement with Taco Bell, forcing the corporation to take responsibility for the conditions faced by farmworkers who pick its tomatoes. The agreement established a partnership between Yum Brands, Taco Bell's parent company, and the CIW, setting several important precedents for real social responsibility in the fast-food industry.

 

Tomorrow's Violence Lies in Today's Injustice

Unless governments tackle injustice, especially that one perpetrated against children and youth, and demonstrate to the wide society a firm determination to establish justice as a foundation principle on which to build this world, crime and violence will grow. Where injustice and corruption reign, crime and violence thrive, resulting in economic deterioration.

No economy can grow in an atmosphere of corruption and injustice. In this type of social environment, only very few prosper; the majority of the people will see an increase in poverty and many will resort to crime, as they continue to lose confidence in the system.

The outrageous reality of the kids in the documentary below could be solved overnight if there were political will to put an end to the violation of children's dignity and rights. Nothing has more priority than defending the weakest members of our society.

The documentary shows what is happening in Leningrad, but this video might well have been filmed in any impoverished country and only the language would change.

It is essetial to exert liberating moral pressure to transform these children's world, our world. Some people may argue there is no hope, but even without hope, as the inhabitants of this global village our world is, we have the right and a moral obligation to protect our children.

The Children of Leningradsky

Branded Babies

Maximilian Kolbe

The Holocaust is a history of enduring horror and sorrow. The charred skeletons, the diabolic experiments, the death camps, the mass graves, the smoke from the chimneys ...

Auschwitz became the killing centre during WWII where the largest numbers of the Jews were murdered. One Christian man who died here became a martyr to the truth of evils of Nazism - a true hero for our time, a saint who lived what he preached, total love toward God and man ...

Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who died as prisoner 16770 in Auschwitz. When a prisoner escaped from the camp, the Nazis selected 10 others to be killed by starvation in reprisal for the escape. One of the 10 selected to die, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began to cry: My wife! My children! I will never see them again! At this Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in his place. His request was granted ...

The story begins on 8 January, 1894 - Raymond Kolbe was born the second son of a poor weaver at Zdunska Wola near Lodz in Poland. In 1910 he became a Franciscan, taking the name Maximilian. He studied at Rome and was ordained in 1919. He returned to Poland and taught Church history in a seminary. He built a friary just west of Warsaw, which eventually housed 762 Franciscans and printed eleven periodicals, one with a circulation of over a million, including a daily newspaper.

In 1930 he went to Asia, where he founded friaries in Nagasaki and in India. In 1936 he was recalled to supervise the original friary near Warsaw. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he knew that the friary would be seized, and sent most of the friars home. He was imprisoned briefly and then released, and returned to the friary, where he and the other friars began to organize a shelter for 3,000 Polish refugees, among whom were 2,000 Jews. The friars shared everything they had with the refugees. They housed, fed and clothed them, and brought all their machinery into use in their service.

Inevitably, the community came under suspicion and was watched closely. Then in May 1941 the friary was closed down and Maximilian and four companions were taken to the deathcamp Auschwitz, where they worked with the other prisoners. 

One day an SS officer found some of the heaviest planks he could lay hold of and personally loaded them on the Franciscan's back, ordering him to run. When he collapsed, the SS officer kicked him in the stomach and face and had his men give him fifty lashes. When the priest lost consciousness the Nazis threw him in the mud and left him for dead. But his companions managed to smuggle him to the camp infirmary - and he recovered. The doctor, Rudolph Diem, later recalled:'I can say with certainty that during my four years in Auschwitz, I never saw such a sublime example of the love of God and one's neighbor.'