“The American Bar Association Section of Labor and Employment Law has awarded the 2022 Frances Perkins Public Service Award to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) for its vital decades-long fight for the dignities of agricultural workers and its impact on harnessing legal and market forces to bring about change.”

ALSO… From the Oak Foundation: “The Fair Food Programme (FFP) has succeeded in implementing reforms in Florida and nine additional states, that have eradicated the most severe forms of exploitation in agriculture, and created a dignified working environment for workers. Today, farmworkers receive protection against forced labour, sexual abuse and harassment, violence, wage theft, and dangerous conditions. They are also given access to breaks, shade, and clean drinking water.”

As the international expansion of the Presidential-medal winning Fair Food Program continues to gather steam, we are pleased to share some more good news on the growing recognition of the FFP’s unique success: the American Bar Association (ABA) announced that it has selected the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to receive its 2022 Frances Perkins Public Service Award!  This exciting comes right on the heels of the announcement that the CIW’s own co-founder Lucas Benitez is set to be awarded the prestigious Wallenberg Medal.

We are including the full write-up of the ABA’s announcement below, but first we want to describe why this award is particularly important. As the nation’s foremost professional association for the legal field, the ABA’s Public Service Award is an acknowledgement that the Fair Food Program is a novel leap forward in guaranteeing the human rights of some of the countries most vulnerable and marginalized workers. And as the write-up outlines, the FFP not only transformed the tomato fields of Florida, but is aiding in the development of many other worker-driven social responsibility programs across the globe, from garment workers in South Asia to fishers in the United Kingdom. The ABA joins the United Nations, the White House, and the MacArthur Foundation, among many other human rights experts and legal observers, in recognizing the CIW as a proven leader in human rights enforcement within global supply chains. 

Here is an excerpt of the ABA announcing our receipt of the Frances Perkins Award. You can also read it on their website here.

Spotlight on Coalition of Immokalee Workers

The American Bar Association Section of Labor and Employment Law has awarded the 2022 Frances Perkins Public Service Award to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) for its vital decades-long fight for the dignities of agricultural workers and its impact on harnessing legal and market forces to bring about change.

The CIW is a groundbreaking worker-based human rights organization internationally recognized for its achievements in fighting forced labor, subpoverty wages, widespread sexual harassment, and abusive work conditions. The CIW pioneered the design and development of the Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) paradigm, an approach to protecting human rights that is worker-driven, enforcement-focused, and based on legally binding commitments that assign responsibility for improving working conditions to the global corporations at the top of those supply chains. The WSR model has become the “gold standard” of social responsibility programs, according to a decade-long study by the Institute for Multi-Stakeholder Initiative Integrity. The model has been successfully adopted to improve workers’ rights in multiple industries and on three continents, including fishers in the United Kingdom and garment workers in Pakistan.

Reflecting on CIW’s success, farmworker leader and organizer Gerardo Reyes stressed the importance of harnessing market forces to empower workers and create a dignified workplace. Reyes also highlighted the importance of legal counsel willing to partner with organizers as equals and be creative when applying the law to effect change. He noted the pivotal role of former CIW General Counsel Steve Hitov, a key architect of CIW’s WSR model, who “never lost sight of the human side of the equation” and challenged old notions of labor law. Mr. Hitov, who passed away in 2020 after a long and courageous battle with cancer, helped set the course for a 21st-century human rights revolution on farms throughout the South, and gave rise to a blueprint for the protection of workers’ rights, the WSR model, that the MacArthur Foundation called “a visionary strategy . . . with the potential to transform workplace environments across the global supply chain.” In accepting the 2022 Frances Perkins Award on behalf of CIW, Mr. Reyes called for others from the legal profession to follow in Mr. Hitov’s footsteps and join the urgently important work of building and supporting WSR programs to protect human rights.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers
110 S 2nd St
Immokalee, FL 34142
United States

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