Today the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is holding a hearing on ending abuses and improving working conditions for tomato workers.

Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, is chairing the hearing. In January Sanders went to Immokalee, Florida, to see first hand the working conditions of tomato pickers. He met with members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers who want Burger King to pay a penny a pound more for tomatoes.

AP reports, “the hearing comes months after Burger King and Florida tomato growers joined to overturn the symbolic gains the workers won from fast-food giants McDonald’s Corp. and Taco Bell owner Yum Brands Inc. Both agreed to fund the increase, which was to be passed on to workers. But the growers’ organization said it would fine members $100,000 if they participated.”

At the beginning of today’s hearing, Sanders said, “In talking with workers who go out into the fields I learned that they make approximately 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. This wage has not increased since 1998; and in fact, farmworker wages have dropped 65 percent in the last 30 years, after adjusting for inflation. I also learned that while it is possible under optimum conditions to make as much as $10-$12 an hour, the average hourly wage is far lower than that. In fact, most workers in the tomato fields earn about $250 a week in income. Why are wages so low?”

In the past ten years, the Justice Department has prosecuted half a dozen cases of slavery among farm workers in Florida. In January, a federal grand jury indicted six people for beating workers and holding them against their will. “Slavery, plain and simple,” is what prosecuting U.S. attorney Doug Molloy called it.

Today’s hearing coincides with a national petition drive urging Burger King and the Florida Tomatoes Growers Exchange to improve conditions and wages for tomato pickers. The petition drive is led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Alliance for Fair Food.

“What is going on in Immokalee and other regions of Florida is deplorable and at its core repugnant to the values that our country is built upon,” said Sanders at the hearing. “I hope Senate hearings will begin to shine a spotlight on the harvest of shame that is going on to this day in the tomato fields in Florida and will lay the groundwork for the legislative changes that will be needed if the large buyers of tomatoes in the fast food and supermarket industry and the large growers continue to resist the reforms that are desperately needed.”

All of this comes on the heels of a Fort Myers News-Press story about Burger King allegedly spying on the CIW and the Student Farmworker Alliance. Reporter Amy Bennett Williams traced threatening emails directed at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Student/Farmworker Alliance to Burger King’s corporate headquarters in Miami, Florida.

“In the United States of America, millions of workers are being forced into a race to the bottom,” Sanders said at today’s hearings. “We must address their plight [of farmworkers] not only from a moral perspective, but with the understanding that if we look the other way, and accept the terrible exploitation they are suffering, every American worker is in danger as that race to the bottom accelerates.”