Eric Liu - Youre More Powerful than You Think: A Citizens Guide to Making Change Happen

Picture a ripe, red tomato. Perhaps theres one in your kitchen. If its nearby, hold it. Feel its heft. Consider its origins.

Theres a fair chance it was picked in Florida, home to a $600-million tomato industry; and if so, a fair chance it was picked in Immokalee, in the sweltering southwest of the state, where much of the industry is concentrated; and if so, a fair chance it was picked by someone who not that many years ago was, in essence, a slave.

Immokalee isnt a place most Americans have seen. But most Americans have eaten the fruits of its vast harvest. And because the picking of tomatoes cant be mechanized, that harvest has always been by hand. By the hands of migrant workers, mainly from Mexico and South America, who were abused physically and verbally and sexually, who were entrapped in debt peonage, paid by the bucket and not the punishing hours in the field, yet whose meager wages were routinely stolen by their overseers, and who were pistol-whipped and chained in locked containers if they complained.

These workers were the very definition of powerlessness. They had no recourse. No advocates. No fluency in the language of their own domination. They were socially dead to the rest of the United States.

And yet, starting in 1993, they came alive. A few of them began to meet secretly in a local church. They resolved, together, to act. First they organized communitywide work stoppages, then hunger strikes, then mass marches hundreds of miles long. They became the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The press took notice. The workers fought for better pay, and after five years, they finally got a raise from the growers. They fought for such small dignities as shaded rest areas. They earned the currencies that people crave once they achieve subsistence: respect and recognition. They were seen.

And they didnt stop there. Once they escaped invisibility, they were determined to undo the bigger system of involuntary servitude. They worked with prosecutors to build cases against their traffickers and captors. Those investigations and convictions freed over 1,200 farmworkers from captivity and forced labor.

They didnt stop there, either. They realized that the machinery of their exploitation was powered by supermarket and fast-food chains that buy produce in mass quantities and create pressure to drive costs down. So in 2001, they organized the first-ever farmworker boycott of a fast-food company, against Taco Bell; four years later Taco Bells parent company agreed to raise wages and reform its supply chain. With this victory came more allies, more assistance from more experts of all kinds.

And they didnt stop there. They pressured McDonalds and Burger King to agree to the same terms. They organized the Fair Food Program, through which these restaurant and retail chains would buy only from growers who paid a fair wage and abided by a code of conduct stricter than federal law. The buyers agreed to contribute some of the same pittance they once squeezed from the workersa penny per bucketto a common fund for worker health, safety, and education. Wal-Mart, with its market-moving scale, joined in 2014. Over $10 million has been paid into the fund in its first seasons. The pickers of Immokalee fought for a fair chance, and theyre still fighting.

So if you sometimes wonder whether you have enough clout to make change happenhow you could ever be seen or heard, or have your demands answeredthen just think of them. If people who started where they started could learn power and transform their lives together, cant anyone? If they did it, shouldnt everyone?

Now think about where you work and live and ask yourself: Who runs this place?

Its not that simple a question. There are certain public offices you can identify: mayor or city manager, council members or commissioners. Widen the lens. What businesses dominate the local economy? Who in those businesses has a real say in the towns affairs? Now wider still. Where are the arenas where deals are made, and to whom are they open? Who are the fixers and the enforcers? Are there groups or blocs or interests that always seem to get their way? Who really runs this place?

Once you have a sense of an answer, ask another question: How could it be different?

This brings us to what I call the Pottersville flip. In Frank Capras classic film Its a Wonderful Life, George Bailey gets to see what life would be like if hed never been born. In this counterfactual world, his hometown of Bedford Fallsan idyll of trust and mutual aid and democratic pridebecomes Pottersville, a race-to-the-bottom grid of slums, trashy bars, and pawnshops all owned by the richest man in town, Mr. Potter.

Many American towns in the three generations since Its a Wonderful Life have become a lot more like Pottersville than Bedford Falls, in the sense that wealth and clout have consolidated into the hands of one or a few. But wherever your town might fall on the Bedford Fallsto-Pottersville spectrum, imagine flipping places.