CIW staff member Gerardo Reyes Chavez to Wendy’s shareholders: “I also know first hand how necessary this Program really is. I first started working in the fields at age 11.”
“Inside the Fair Food Program, things are different. Workers have the right to make complaints, and are protected from retaliation when they do."
For the last decade, Wendy’s has had the opportunity to join its major competitors in being on the right side of history by joining the Fair Food Program, thus guaranteeing basic human rights for the farmworkers who make its profits possible.
Consumers across the nation, sympathetic to the plight of farmworkers in the nation’s food industry, have called on Wendy’s to join. Hundreds of thousands of consumers have signed petitions calling on Wendy’s to join the Program, and at 2021’s general stockholders’ meeting, shareholders issued a resounding 95% vote in favor of a resolution calling for the protection of workers in its food supply chain.
Just last month, the New York City Council passed a resolution calling on Wendy’s to join the Program. A delegation proceeded to deliver that resolution in-person to Trian Partners, an investment firm founded by Wendy’s chairman Nelson Peltz. This vote came after a 5-day, 50 mile march across Florida by farmworkers and allies who rallied in the hometown of Peltz, Palm Beach, to urge him to finally join.
And yet, at this year’s annual shareholder meeting on May 16, Wendy’s again failed to join the Fair Food Program – the same program that has, over a decade, delivered proven results for tens of thousands of farmworkers, preventing forced labor and winning a Presidential Medal for its unprecedented success in ensuring the basic dignity of farmworkers.
But before Wendy’s turned its back once again the gold standard for human rights in its supply chain, the company’s shareholders did have the opportunity to listen to a former farmworker and longtime CIW staff member Gerardo Reyes Chavez, who shared his story of toiling in the fields before helping to forge the Fair Food Program, which has transformed the fields on farms across the US and empowered tens of thousands of farmworkers to be frontline monitors of their own rights under its protections. We have included a full transcript of Gerardo Reyes’ speech to Wendy’s shareholders on our website so you too can read along as he lays out the parallel worlds that exist in agriculture today: the world of dignity and respect inside the bounds of the Fair Food Program, and the dark world that lurks just outside, a darkness which envelops hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, many of whom are essentially trapped in exploitative conditions on farms, and even some who are working in forced labor.
