CIW’s Lucas Benitez: “I arrived ready to go into the field and to perform that labor, but what I was not prepared for was facing constant violations of my human rights in the process.”
“We, as workers, were able to create real consequences where before there existed none.”
To mark the 75th anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, CIW co-founder Lucas Benitez gave a powerful speech hosted by the Institute for Human Rights and Business at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice last month in New York. The speech shed light on the dawn of a human rights revolution underway in low-wage industries across the world thanks to the emergence of the idea of Worker-driven Social Responsibility in the tomato fields of Florida nearly two decades ago, and to the expansion of the WSR model to now five continents and multiple industries today. In his speech, Lucas shared his personal story of coming to the US to work in the fields only to witness horrific abuse, and provided insight into how he and his fellow farmworkers in the agricultural community of Immokalee were able to bring about a much-needed paradigm shift in the protection of human rights in corporate supply chains that has now gone global.
Since the beginning of modern, industrial-scale agriculture in the United States, farm labor has been among the most dangerous, lowest-paid jobs in the country, and farmworkers among the least protected workers. The women and men who harvest our food face countless risks when they head into the fields every morning to put food on our tables: extreme heat and humidity from dawn to dusk, exposure to deadly pesticides, the life-and-death risk of lightning strikes, even bus and truck accidents in travel to and from the fields. And they do so for pay that renders their hopes of escaping poverty a distant dream.
As Lucas explained, that’s why it was so critical that farmworkers themselves, with their hard-earned expertise, needed to be the architects of the solution to the myriad dangers and abuses faced by farmworkers from Florida to California.
And the fact that on fields across the country, beyond the groundbreaking protections of the Fair Food Program, hundreds of thousands of farmworkers continue to experience that same exploitation and abuse today is the reason why the CIW is organizing a three-day long celebration of the human rights of farmworkers and the urgent need to expand the Fair Food Program from March 8-10 in Palm Beach, FL. If you’re interested in attending or volunteering for that festival, click here to register!
You can find a partial transcript of Lucas’ speech on our website, but we encourage you to take the time to watch the whole discussion on human rights and agriculture, linked here, moderated by Julia Batho, the deputy CEO of the Institute for Human Rights and Business, and including panelists Marcela Manubens, the CEO Roxbury Global, and Jason Judd, the Executive Director of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell University.
Enjoy!
