Recently, someone has gone to extensive effort to blanket our campus with chalkings and flyers declaring “Taco Bell tomato pickers are forced to carry the equivalent of two liberty bells (4000 lbs) of tomatos a day for only $50 – boycott Taco Bell!!!” While the image of an oppressed worker being crushed under the very symbol of our society is quite alarming, its actually rather misleading. If you bother to do the math, assuming the laborers work for about 12 hours a day, that works out to 55 lbs (one “bushel basket”) every ten minutes. Because tomatoes are fragile I doubt they even carry that many at once. This math portrays a very busy worker, but by no means one who is suffering under extraordinary and inhumane conditions as the misplaced chalking campaign implies. Moreover, they are not “forced” to do this, a boycott could not concievably help the laborers, and targetting a more tomato-intensive business, like Heinz Ketchup, would make more sense anyway. That someone would put so much effort into chalking on this after obviously little to no actual thought on the subject is disturbing, and I hate to see the student body being dragged into this intellectual bankruptcy.
I just regret I couldn't work "bicentinarian" in there.
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timeasmymeasure
letter
Date: 2005-02-09 08:13 pm (UTC)Here's the submitted version:
Recently, someone has gone to extensive effort to blanket our campus with chalkings and flyers declaring “Taco Bell tomato pickers are forced to carry the equivalent of two liberty bells (4000 lbs) of tomatos a day for only $50 – boycott Taco Bell!!!” While the image of an oppressed worker being crushed under the very symbol of our society is quite alarming, its actually rather misleading. If you bother to do the math, assuming the laborers work for about 12 hours a day, that works out to 55 lbs (one “bushel basket”) every ten minutes. Because tomatoes are fragile I doubt they even carry that many at once. This math portrays a very busy worker, but by no means one who is suffering under extraordinary and inhumane conditions as the misplaced chalking campaign implies. Moreover, they are not “forced” to do this, a boycott could not concievably help the laborers, and targetting a more tomato-intensive business, like Heinz Ketchup, would make more sense anyway. That someone would put so much effort into chalking on this after obviously little to no actual thought on the subject is disturbing, and I hate to see the student body being dragged into this intellectual bankruptcy.
I just regret I couldn't work "bicentinarian" in there.