Mary Beth Gallagher, Domini Impact Investments: “We will continue to encourage Kroger to join the Fair Food Program, because we think it will deliver meaningful human rights outcomes.”
Gerardo Reyes Chavez, CIW, to Kroger shareholders: “The stakes of a just transition for Kroger are nothing less than life or death for the farmworkers who put food on all our tables.”
When farmworkers from Immokalee first asked grocery giant Kroger — well over a decade ago — to sign an agreement with them to guarantee their essential rights in the fields where Kroger bought its tomatoes, Kroger refused. At the time, the Fair Food Program was still just a concept, a novel theory of change based on a simple, but potentially revolutionary, proposition: Major buyers of Florida’s tomatoes had the market power to demand that their Florida suppliers — the growers who employed thousands of Immokalee workers — respect their workers’ fundamental human rights, and in so doing, radically change farmworkers’ lives for the better.
As it happens, even without Kroger’s support, the CIW was able to secure Fair Food agreements with enough major buyers to launch the Fair Food Program a few years later, testing their theory of change in one of the toughest laboratories this country had to offer, the Florida tomato industry, also known at the time as “ground zero for modern-day slavery” by federal prosecutors. And the experiment was nothing short of a spectacular success, transforming “ground zero” into what one labor expert called just three years later “the best workplace environment in American agriculture” on the front page of the New York Times.
And today, the Fair Food Program — nothing more than a seed of an idea when the CIW first approached Kroger well over a decade ago — is not only firmly rooted in Florida agriculture, but its branches extend to 22 other states and dozens of crops, protecting tens of thousands of farmworkers. The FFP has evolved to include the country’s strongest workplace heat rules, and now serves as a blueprint for workers across the globe to replicate in their own industries as a proven tool to protect their own human rights and dignity in workplaces ranging from textile factories to fishing vessels.
And yet, despite all the progress made since that first refusal years ago, Kroger still stands stubbornly on the wrong side of history and refuses to join the Fair Food Program.
In the last fifteen years, most of Kroger’s major competitors — including Walmart, Stop & Shop, Giant, Fresh Market, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s — have joined the Fair Food Program and committed to protecting farmworkers in their supply chains. Meanwhile, Kroger has been publicly connected to three separate forced labor rings in just the last four years alone, and has yet to even publicly acknowledge their role in them, much less join the program called “an international benchmark in the fight against modern-day slavery” by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Trafficking.
Echoing the call from farmworkers and their consumer allies, a group of Kroger shareholders introduced a resolution at the grocery giant’s most recent annual shareholder meeting encouraging Kroger to finally join the Fair Food Program. Their resolution reflected a newfound urgency for new and stronger protections in corporate supply chains for vulnerable workers: Accelerating climate change exposes farmworkers and other outdoor workers to ever-more dangerous heat in the workplace, making the expansion of the FFP to the fields where Kroger buys its produce a matter of life and death for thousands of farmworkers currently toiling in Kroger’s supply chain.
Their resolution was covered in an excellent report by Civil Eats’ Grey Moran, who also profiled the groundbreaking partnership between growers and workers at the heart of the FFP in a piece for Civil Eats back in March of this year. Check out the piece in full below, or read it on Civil Eats’ website by clicking here.
