Spied on by the King

FAST-FOOD giant Burger King was caught with its royal pants down this week after reports revealed the company was spying on farmworker rights activists in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA).

Burger King is one of the biggest fast-food restaurant chains to have defied the campaign led by the CIW and SFA to win better pay--a mere penny more per pound--for the largely immigrant farmworkers who pick tomatoes used by the company.

Burger King announced May 13 that it had fired two employees after the Associated Press confirmed it had received e-mails in January from someone who said they supported the CIW, but that the e-mails originated from the Burger King corporate server.

According to an AP investigation, in March, an individual using the same password-protected e-mail account sent a message to the SFA claiming to be a University of Virginia graduate student named "Kevin" and asked to listen in on the group's strategy call.

Burger King was also forced to announce that it planned to stop using a private investigation firm, Diplomatic Tactical Services (DTS), after it turned out the head of the firm, Cara Schaffer, was posing as a student activist in an attempt to infiltrate the groups.

Schaffer called the SFA offices and said she was a student at Broward Community College who wanted to plan a pro-farmworker event at her school. SFA's Marc Rodrigues thought something was odd when she asked about an upcoming conference call and how she could get on it. So he looked her up on the Internet and came up with DTS.

"Why would someone put an operative in the ranks of a nonviolent, peaceful group?" Rodrigues asked in an interview with the Fort Myers News-Press. "It's kind of scary and threatening that someone would hire a person like this to come after us."

But some Burger King executives did surveillance work of their own. On May 6, the News-Press reported that Burger King Vice President Steven Grover went online, using his middle-school-aged daughter's screen name. On YouTube, he called the CIW "an attack organization lining the leaders pockets."

His screed continued: "They make up issues and collect money from dupes that believe their story. To (sic) bad the people protesting don't have a clue regarding the facts. A bunch of fools!"

When a News-Press reporter asked Shannon Grover about the posts made by surfxaholic36, she said, "I don't really know much about the Coalition and Burger King stuff. That was my dad. My dad used to go online with that name and write about them."

The CIW's Gerardo Reyes told the newspaper, "It's one thing to imagine that there's some kind of anonymous Internet stalker out there obsessively tracking every story about the CIW, posting these vicious lies about us...When you realize the person posting those things is actually Burger King's vice president in charge of the ethical operation of the company's supply chain, it really makes you wonder just how high up does this whole thing go?"

THE CIW and SFA campaigns aim to win decent wages and working conditions for the farmworkers who pick the tomatoes used by fast-food companies like Burger King. The CIW, based in Immokalee, Fla., has won several important victories over the last few years, pressuring both Yum! Brands, which owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, and McDonald's to agree to pay pickers a penny more per pound of tomatoes.

This small increase means little to the corporations, but a lot to farmworkers--it adds an estimated additional $20 to their average daily wage of $50. But the agreement has yet to go into effect, since the bosses' tomato growers' association--in part under pressure from Burger King--has blocked members from giving pickers the wage increase.

Burger King claims it didn't know about Grover's undercover e-mail smear campaign, but admits it hired DTS.

As Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, said in a recent New York Times op-ed, "In an interview, a Burger King executive told me that the company had worked with Diplomatic Tactical Services for years on 'security-related matters' and had used it to obtain information about the Student/Farmworker Alliance's plans--in order to prevent acts of violence."

Burger King is afraid of "acts of violence" from a farmworkers' organization, so it hired a security firm whose former contractor Guillermo Zarabozo, Schlosser points out, "is now facing murder charges in United States District Court in Miami for his role in allegedly executing four crew members of a charter fishing boat, then dumping their bodies at sea."

Burger King seems willing to go to any length to "have it their way."