Some characters breaking import even with UTF-8

Hi, node import's pretty much working beautifully for me — it's importing French punctuation without any issues.

I am experiencing a strange problem, though:

I have a csv that's UTF-8. One of the columns is from a CCK checkbox field called "Number of employees" that allows the following values:

<10
10-50
50-300
>300

I always get the following error when trying to import the csv:
"Can not import this node. Check following errors:
* is not an allowed value for Number of employees."

I've looked at the csv and confirmed that the fields have legal values.

Wondering if there is something about the <, >, and - characters that might be tripping up the module?

Here's my stack:
Drupal 5.17
PHP 5.2.9
MySQL 5.1.33
CCK 5.10

Thanks!