IMMOKALEE, Florida -- In the hour before sunrise, a hue of jet black sky fades into royal blue and casts deep shadows across the dusty, but eerily busy streets of Immokalee.

Inside a locked cinder-block office, six men sleep on air mattresses.
 
They are hungry. Tired. Restless. Angry.

They are men who don't look like they're starting the 14th day of a hunger strike.

But they are. Fourteen days of nothing more than water and Gatorade, all for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

In the parking lot beside the office where the six men rest, dozens of buses pull between slender yellow stripes painted on asphalt outside the Pantry Shelf - a small-town grocery where Coca-Cola is sold by the half-liter in glass bottles.

A crowd of men - and a few women - gather under the remaining stars in workday clothes of dirty T-shirts, thin cotton button downs - mostly unbuttoned to expose an undershirt - tattered blue jeans and baseball caps soiled around the brim by hours of sweat.

Most are immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico and Cuba. Some are from Haiti.

The crowd stands divided in small packs of threes, fours and fives with bagged lunches in hand - lunches like the beef burritos with a heaping side of rice served from the Pantry Shelf deli or a local "tortillaria."

They wait for a signal from bus drivers to load up and often stay for just the right bus. Each bus has its own colors. White. Red. Yellow. Blue. Stripes of one color painted over another. But the workers aren't looking for art. They look for the buses that lead to the best wages, the ones that offer the best pickings in a life where an income comes in change, one bushel at a time.

Some will choose to pick green peppers. Some will opt for a ride to squash fields.

And others decide to make their living among the rows of tomatoes.

That's where the six hungry men want to be - out among the ripening vines.

They want to be on the streets with their compadres. They want to be waking with the nearly 1,500 pickers to a day of work - a day that will bring money to support their families.

But they choose to remain inside their cinder-block shelter. They refuse the work because they say the wages are too low.

The coalition has tried for months to open a dialogue with the top 10 tomato growers in Immokalee - a town that is not simply dominated by the agriculture industry but essentially exists because of it.

So far only one has listened. Gargiulo Inc. met with the group but didn't necessarily meet the demands.

A spokesman for the company said the coalition does not represent its workers.

"We agreed to listen to them and we did," Jerry O'Dell said. The official company policy is one of silence to the public.

The coalition claims the company agreed to a pay raise but O'Dell says no agreements were made in the discussions.

Workers for Gargiulo did receive a pay hike recently. They now are paid 45 cents for a full hamper, about 32 pounds of tomatoes, picked from all fields. The bottom rate for picking fresh fields among the Immokalee tomato growers is 40 cents. Fields that have been picked over once often pay 45 cents for a basket while twice-picked fields sometimes fetch 50 cents a basket.

The baskets, of course, take longer and longer to fill with each picking.

Domingo Jacinto, Pedro Lopez, Antonio Ramos, Abundio Rios, Roberto Acevedo and Hector Vasquez believe they should be paid, along with all the other tomato pickers, 60 cents a basket.

Even past their current hunger pangs, diarrhea and dizzy spells, the group is worried about the future.

"If you complain at the wages, they won't take you," Ramos said, using an interpreter. "They take the people who sit in silence."

Lucas Benitez, a staff member of the coalition, said the growers refuse to talk about wages because the town is so poor.

"It's true (that) the whole community can't go a week without wages but they're behind us - they support us," he said. "From the people, for the people. We're all united."

The growers named by the coalition as the target of the strike won't talk about their positions.

A grower with a smaller tomato operation that pays the same wages as the larger ones said he sees the strike as pointless.

Oscar Yzaguire is a co-owner of a business that harvests tomatoes from 200 acres in Immokalee from November to April and watermelons during the spring and summer.

"I have never in my life asked for a raise," Yzaguire explained while standing in morning sunshine amid hundreds of rows of green, twisted tomato vines. Workers squatting nearby picked green tomatoes, which would ripen and reach supermarkets across the nation within six days.

"I've always figured the guy I'm working for is fair and if I go and shine the boss will boost me up," he said.

It's not just pie-in-the-sky thinking from a man in power.

Yzaguire starts his mornings as early as all of his pickers. He's the lone grower milling between the rows of buses, hoping the workers will fill his white bus heading to Everglades Farms.

He grew up in Immokalee as the middle of seven children with a hard-working mother and a father he calls abusive. His father, Yzaguire said, routinely spent his tomato-picking money on long nights of drinking alcohol.

At 8 or 9, Yzaguire went into the fields for the first time. In high school, he began to pick for a regular income.

He impressed his bosses and became a crew leader, never picking after graduation. A few acres under his command swelled to 10 acres. Ten acres swelled to 100, then by 23 Yzaguire looked after 1,000 acres for a large company.

Using his father as an example of what not to be, Yzaguire convinced his mother he would work hard if she co-signed a loan for $50,000 and used her small house and lot as collateral.

He bought one-third of a farming business, had a good year and eventually became what he is today - a successful man the coalition says doesn't care about his community. They say he hasn't offered any help.

"(They) act like the farmers make a lot of money," Yzaguire said. "Well, if they're making so much money, why are (farms) going out of business?"

On a drive through town in his Ford pickup, Yzaguire points to closed packing plants and empty fields as evidence of hard times. Sure, he says, "I've gone from making $42 (a day) to a million or two (a year)" but the grower takes the good times with the bad and risks having unsalable crops that have already been picked and paid for.

When a governor's adviser visited Immokalee this week, Yzaguire told him many of the people with the lowest wages are simply abusing "the system." Yzaguire has a long list of ways his pickers have used government programs and cash-only pickers called "pin hookers" to maintain a lifestyle that isn't always reported accurately in modern presentations of farm workers.

"There are plenty of poor people here, I'm not saying there aren't, but there are a lot of people who have learned you can come to Immokalee and use the system to get cheap housing, get handouts and get jobs that don't collect taxes," he said. "Not everybody deserves sympathy."

But behind weather-beaten faces, the six men back at the coalition headquarters don't want to listen to another grower's story. They believe in what they are fighting for and they say "the growers know we're right."

But until someone brings the two groups together for serious talks, the men vow they will eat nothing.

No burritos, no bread. No peppers, no squash. Nothing.