Taco Bell is an American-based chain of fast food restaurants founded in 1962 by Glen Bell (1923–2010) in Downey, California. Taco Bell is a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc. The restaurants serve a variety of Mexican-inspired foods, including tacos, burritos, quesadillas, nachos, novelty and speciality items, and a variety of "value menu" items. As of 2018, Taco Bell serves over two billion customers each year, at 7,072 restaurants, more than 93 percent of which are owned and operated by independent franchisees and licensees.
The United Farm Workers of America, or more commonly just United Farm Workers (UFW), is a labor union for farmworkers in the United States. It originated from the merger of two workers' rights organizations, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by organizer Larry Itliong, and the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. They became allied and transformed from workers' rights organizations into a union as a result of a series of strikes in 1965, when the mostly Filipino farmworkers of the AWOC in Delano, California, initiated a grape strike, and the NFWA went on strike in support. As a result of the commonality in goals and methods, the NFWA and the AWOC formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee on August 22, 1966. This organization was accepted into the AFL–CIO in 1972 and changed its name to the United Farm Workers Union.
The Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) is a labor union representing migrant farm workers in the Midwestern United States and North Carolina.
Baldemar Velásquez is an American labor union activist. He co-founded and is president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989, and awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle in 1994, the highest honor Mexico can bestow on a non-citizen.
Social movement unionism (SMU) is a trend of theory and practice in contemporary trade unionism. Strongly associated with the labour movements of developing countries, social movement unionism is distinct from many other models of trade unionism because it concerns itself with more than organizing workers around workplace issues, pay and terms and conditions. It engages in wider political struggles for human rights, social justice and democracy. Social movement unionism grew out of political struggles in developing countries and was theorized as a distinct industrial relations model in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a worker-based human rights organization based in Immokalee, Florida, which focuses on the fields of social responsibility, human trafficking, and gender-based violence at work. Built on a foundation of farmworker community organizing starting in 1993, and reinforced with the creation of a national consumer network since 2000, CIW's work has steadily grown over more than twenty years to encompass several overlapping spheres:
McDonald's has been involved in a number of lawsuits and other legal cases in the course of the fast food chain's 70-year history. Many of these have involved trademark issues, but McDonald's has also launched a defamation suit which has been described as "the biggest corporate PR disaster in history".
Colocation is the act of placing multiple entities within a single location.
Frontlash was a non-profit organization founded in 1968 to help minority and young people register to vote and to engage in voter education. Initially sponsored by the AFL-CIO, the United States Youth Council, and the NAACP Youth Council, the AFL-CIO became the group's most important financial sponsor and essentially took over Frontlash in 1971, becoming the labor federation's outreach program to younger Americans. Frontlash folded in 1997.
The legal issues of Burger King include several legal disputes and lawsuits involving the international fast food restaurant chain Burger King (BK) as both plaintiff and defendant in the years since its founding in 1954. These have involved almost every aspect of the company's operations. Depending on the ownership and executive staff at the time of these incidents, the company's responses to these challenges have ranged from a conciliatory dialog with its critics and litigants to a more aggressive opposition with questionable tactics and negative consequences. The company's response to these various issues has drawn praise, scorn, and accusations of political appeasement from different parties over the years.
Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, more commonly known by the acronym PCUN, is the largest Latino union in the U.S. state of Oregon. PCUN is located in Woodburn. According to the Statesman Journal, the meetings that led to the formation of PCUN were held at Colegio Cesar Chavez, the nation's first fully accredited and independent Latino college. PCUN was founded in 1977 by Cipriano Ferrel, who graduated from Colegio Cesar Chavez and worked closely with Cesar Chavez himself. Ferrel was motivated to create the organization after an increase in immigration raids in Oregon. PCUN has organized the creation of migrant housing and farmworker housing. Cipriano Ferrel worked closely with Cesar Chavez.
The Burger wars are a series of off-and-on comparative advertising campaigns consisting of mutually-targeted advertisements that highlight the intense competition between hamburger fast food chains McDonald's, Burger King and others in the United States. The term first came into use during the late 1970s due to an attempt by Burger King to generate increased market and mind-share by attacking the size of bigger rival McDonald's hamburgers.
T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, often referred to as T'ruah, is a nonprofit organization of rabbis who act on the Jewish imperative to respect and protect the human rights of all people in North America, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. Approximately 2,000 American and Canadian rabbis and cantors, very predominantly non-orthodox in denomination, are affiliated with T'ruah. T'ruah was founded as Rabbis for Human Rights-North America (RHR-NA) in 2002. On January 15, 2013, RHR-NA ended its formal affiliation with Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, and was renamed T'ruah. The name T’ruah is based on one of the sounds of the shofar acting as a call to take action.
The Fair Food Program (FFP) is a legally binding agreement between the Florida Tomato Growers and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). It aims to provide Florida’s tomato workers with better wages and working conditions. The program has a list of six elements in order to ensure social responsibility and to create a strong partnership between workers, growers and buyers. The Fair Foods Standards Council (FFSC) oversees the program and ensures that standards are upheld. Big companies, including Taco Bell and Walmart have pledged to pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes and buy only from growers who comply with the program.
The Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) is a national coalition of 31 worker-based organizations of workers in many sectors of the food chain, including agriculture, processing, selling, and serving. Its program areas include strategic campaigns, leadership development, policy and standards, and education and communications. FCWA members represent over 300,000 workers. The Alliance is based in Los Angeles, California, and was founded in 2009.
Food Chains is a 2014 American documentary film about agricultural labor in the United States directed by Sanjay Rawal. It was the Recipient of the 2015 James Beard Foundation Award for Special/Documentary.
Maryann Krieglstein, is an American academic social worker and human services professor emeritus at the College of DuPage. She previously served as the coordinator of sexual assault services for the YWCA of DuPage and the coordinator of the human services program at the College of DuPage. Her research on domestic violence and heterosexism in social work has been published in the American Journal of Community Psychology and the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment.
Susan L. Marquis is the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor at Princeton's School for Public and International Affairs. As a full-time faculty member, she is dividing her time between teaching and writing, with a focus on effecting positive change in our communities through governments, nonprofits, philanthropy, and the private sector. In the spring 2022 semester, she is leading the SPIA Policy Task Force on Defining and Claiming Workers' Human Rights: Worker-driven Social Responsibility.
Greg Asbed is an American activist, labor organizer, and human rights strategist. He is the co-founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a worker-based human rights organization based in Immokalee, Florida working to eradicate modern slavery in the Floridian agriculture industry. In 2017 Asbed was named a MacArthur Fellow for "transforming conditions for low-wage workers with a visionary model of worker-driven social responsibility."
Farmworkers in the United States have unique demographics, wages, working conditions, organizing, and environmental aspects. According to The National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health in Agricultural Safety, there are approximately 2,112,626 full-time workers were employed in production agriculture in the US in 2019 and approximately 1.4 to 2.1 million hired crop workers are employed annually on crop farms in the US. A study by the USDA found the average age of a farmworker to be 33. In 2017, the Department of Labor and Statistics found the median wage to be $23,730 a year, or $11.42 per hour.
