CIW: “The promise of Worker-driven Social Responsibility – a model by which workers are able to define and enforce their own rights – is to modernize workers’ human rights by flipping market incentives and conditioning profits on respect for workers’ human rights.”

“Workers everywhere deserve safety, dignity, and a fair wage: with the emergence of WSR, they now have a novel tool to empower themselves to become the frontline monitors of their own rights, and to usher in a new day of real, measurable human rights enforcement in the global economy.”

Against a backdrop of cascading climate catastrophes; surging authoritarian governments riding a wave of radical right-wing extremism; and burgeoning multi-national corporations dominating the global economy, the future of human rights can appear at best uncertain, and at worst bleak. Fortunately, millions of supply chain workers around the globe have a powerful new tool, built to scale and adapt, to ensure their own rights and dignity in the workplace: Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR).  

Born of workers standing up for fair wages and working conditions in the tomato fields of Florida following generations of often brutal exploitation and abuse, WSR programs are now online on five continents, protecting workers in multiple industries, from textile workers in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Lesotho to farmworkers in the US, Chile, and South Africa, with new WSR initiatives underway — including fishers in the UK, construction workers in the US, and more — in the months and years to come.

In short, WSR is quickly emerging as the new paradigm for the protection of human rights in global supply chains in the 21st century.

In light of the WSR model’s extraordinary success, the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR) invited the CIW to author a blog post describing how the model works to protect the fundamental rights of supply chain workers, and the critical role for WSR in the fight for transparency, accountability, and true human rights due diligence in today’s global economy.

The post offers a concise summary of how farmworkers forged the Fair Food Program – the groundbreaking human rights program that became the blueprint for all subsequent WSR programs — and how the future of WSR, and of supply chain workers around the globe, shines brightly. We're sharing an excerpt below.

We hope you enjoy the post and its promising view on an often disheartening subject (you can also click here to find the post on ICAR’s website or read it in full on our site). 

Blog: How Worker-driven Social Responsibility is Ushering in a New Day of Human Rights in the Global Economy

By the Coalition of Immokalee Workers 

Two inter-linked phenomena have primarily defined the modern global economy: the concentration of enormous market power into a few corporations, and the increasing reliance on fragmented and opaque supply chains. These phenomena combine with the modern corporation’s incentive to maximize profit with minimal constraints that frequently leads to a race to the bottom for human rights protections, especially in agriculture and other low-wage industries. But within this context, workers have forged a scalable solution to systemic rights abuses in global supply chains: Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR).

The promise of Worker-driven Social Responsibility – a model by which workers are able to define and enforce their own rights – is to modernize workers’ human rights by flipping market incentives and conditioning profits on respect for workers’ human rights.

Nowhere better embodies the dangers of the global economy and the redeeming power of WSR than the small agricultural community of Immokalee in Florida. Immokalee was once dubbed “ground zerofor modern slavery” by federal prosecutors due to its long history of extreme exploitation of farmworkers that routinely rose to the level of slavery. Farmworkers, primarily from Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala, came together in 1993 to form the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to call for dignified working conditions and fair wages. The CIW led general strikes, marches, and other protests aimed at the local agricultural industry. While this yielded some positive change, it was not enough to remedy and prevent the basic abusive conditions on the ground, ranging from sexual harassment and wage theft to forced labor. Over time, the CIW’s analysis evolved to expand its focus from the local agricultural industry to the broader food industry of which it is a subset, and where responsibility for the poverty and abuse of farmworkers lies in part, and the power to address those human rights violations resides. That evolution of analysis is what ultimately led to the launch of the Campaign for Fair Food in 2001 focusing on the large corporate buyers of the produce harvested by farmworkers.

More simply put, in the words of the rallying cry that went up from Immokalee in 2001 when the CIW launched the boycott that started it all: “Taco Bell makes farmworkers poor!”

After a sustained, decade-long campaign to pressure major food retailers, including Taco Bell, Burger King, and Trader Joe’s among others, the CIW secured a series of legally binding agreements with these buyers to (1) buy first from growers that abide by a human rights-based and worker-written Code of Conduct, and (2) shift purchases away from growers who don’t respect farmworkers’ human rights. In 2011, with the committed purchasing power of buyers and incentives for growers to participate, the CIW launched the Fair Food Program. The Fair Food Program combined legally-enforceable agreements with corporate buyers, transparency and cooperation from growers, worker-led education on rights in the workplace, a sophisticated complaint investigation and resolution process, and auditing by an independent and worker-selected monitor to establish a fully-fledged human rights program and the first-ever iteration of WSR.

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

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