It’s mid-afternoon and instead of being out picking tomatoes in the fields, Wilbur Estrada Sanchez and his co-workers are sitting in their trailer reading the paper or napping.

The problem: The tomatoes on the vines aren’t quite ready for picking. Sanchez and his co-workers only got in two hours of work Thursday morning before the field managers at Grainger Farms called it quits for the day.

”What we want is more hours,” said Sanchez, who paid $1,300 to come from his home in Mexico to Immokalee for the tomato picking season. “We invest a lot of money to come here and when we work few hours we’re not making ends meet.”

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an activist organization, has been crusading for improvements in wages and working conditions of migrant workers like Sanchez. But that’s not the workers’ biggest concern during this recent visit.

Sanchez has no complaints about his working conditions, but he has been in Immokalee for over two months and has yet to work anything close to a 40-hour week. A good week is between 25 and 30 hours, while many are even less.

It’s part of the challenge of harvesting tomatoes. The tomatoes have to be picked at precisely the right time — not too ripe and not too green. That often leaves the workers waiting around, especially right now just as the season is getting started and tomatoes are ripening.

The growers say Sanchez and his co-workers will get more hours any day now, as soon as the season gets into full swing.

”We need these people,” said Reggie Brown, executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, an agricultural cooperative representing more than 90 percent of the growers in the state. “If we don’t treat workers well, we will not have any workers. We don’t get tomatoes harvested without workers.”

Brown and his members have gone on the offensive, fighting back against the charges leveled against them by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. While there have been a select number of incidents of abuse, the tomato growers feel that their industry has been unfairly accused of abusing workers.

”We finally said enough,” Brown said. “We’re not going to be accused of things we don’t do. This is certainly not a labor force held in servitude.”

All tomato harvesters are guaranteed at least minimum wage, although the average worker earns $12.46 per hour, Brown said. But the high wages are only for the efficient pickers, who earn an average of between 45 and 50 cents per bucket picked.

In an effort to get their story out, the growers teamed up with Burger King last week and brought media up to see another side of what’s happening in Immokalee.

Burger King is under pressure from the CIW to pay a penny more per pound for its tomatoes. The organization has urged supporters to come to Miami for a March on Burger King on Nov. 30. The protesters are scheduled to march from downtown Miami to Burger King’s Blue Lagoon headquarters followed by a rally.

The goal is to get Burger King to follow the lead of Taco Bell and McDonald’s who have agreed to pay the additional penny per pound for their tomatoes.

Burger King says it has no intention of signing on, even though the company has been urged to just agree so the protests will stop and then figure out the details of how to implement the program. Burger King estimates that the additional penny per pound would cost the company about $250,000 a year, but it’s not about the money, company executives said.

”We just can’t figure out how to do this legally,” said Steve Grover, vice president of food safety, quality assurance and regulatory affairs for Burger King. “How do we pay workers and not have that worker be our employee? I don’t think we want to be in a position of paying workers we have no control over.

”I have a problem ethically with agreeing to something I know can’t be implemented,” Grover said. “If we as a company agree to something, we ought to have a good intention of carrying it out.”

The legal questions surrounding the issue is why Brown says his growers will no longer be participating in any penny per pound deals. While two growers did participate in the Taco Bell deal, that will not continue and no growers have reached any agreements with McDonald’s, Brown said.

The growers sent all the fast-food chains letters in May saying they felt the agreements were in violation of federal anti-trust laws.

”They can do whatever they like, but we’re not going to be involved,” Brown said. “We have serious legal issues with a third party dictating the terms of our workers employment.”

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers say they’ve had to go to the restaurant chains because they couldn’t get the growers to negotiate with them.

”It’s not that we wouldn’t like to sit down with the growers, but they’ve never come to the table,” said Julia Perkins, a spokeswoman for the CIW. “We just hope that this pushback by the growers doesn’t take away what we’ve won. The more buyers that want to participate, the less the growers will have to say about it.”

Right now, without the growers’ participation, there remains questions about what will happen to these agreements.

McDonald’s issued a statement to The Miami Herald on Friday saying it remains ”committed” to “address wages and working conditions for farm workers who pick Florida tomatoes for our U.S. restaurants.”

”With discussions ongoing between the CIW, McDonald’s and our Florida produce suppliers, it would be inappropriate and premature to discuss the details of these conversations,” McDonald’s statement said.

Taco Bell spokesman Rob Poetsch said Friday the company is “still committed to our relationship with CIW and the penny per pound.”

But at least one state official thinks what the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is doing is wrong and offers no help for the migrant workers.

”These kind of attempts at corporate extortion need to be eliminated,” said State Rep. Juan Zapata, R-Miami, who joined Burger King and the growers on Thursday’s tour. “The CIW has gone on this path of trying to hold corporate America hostage and it in no way benefits the migrant workers.”

Burger King believes it can have more of an impact on the lives of migrant workers by supporting the work of social service agencies targeting this population.

It’s why Burger King executives on Thursday donated $25,000 from the Have It Your Way Foundation to the Redlands Christian Migrant Association, a group that provides child care and education for migrant and low-income families. That donation can be leveraged for matching grant funds, which together will pay for a year’s worth of preschool for 100 kids.

”We do care about the farmworkers and we do care about their community,” Grover said. “We found an organization we could trust and that we could help.”

For the growers their strategy lies in trying to prove their case in the court of public opinion by establishing a nonprofit organization called SAFE, Socially Accountable Farm Employers. Since the voluntary, third-party auditing program started two years ago, nine out of the 12 major tomato farms in the state have earned SAFE certification.

Andre Raghu, global managing director with the third-part auditor Intertek, said the audits have found no ”slave labor.” The main issues have been related to improvements in occupational safety and operational procedures.

”We would be naive to believe there is perfection, but we’ve seen a lot of good intentions and good will,” Raghu said. “Our intention is not to seek out things that are bad. It’s to seek out opportunities to improve things for the workers. We really want to rehabilitate and change the views about how to do business in a constructive way.”