Greg Asbed, CIW, on Worker-driven Social Responsibility: “This new paradigm for human rights protection has established an unparalleled track record of success for more than a decade and has proven, in the process, that protecting workers’ fundamental human rights in corporate supply chains is not only possible, it’s good for business, too.”

“There are no shortcuts in WSR. No amount of buzzwords or claims to the latest trend in social responsibility can make up for the lack of real enforcement power and the ability not just to protect workers when they lodge a complaint but actually to investigate that complaint thoroughly and implement a meaningful corrective action plan to remediate it. That is the stuff of real worker-driven social responsibility.”

Worker-driven Social Responsibility, a groundbreaking paradigm to guarantee the essential human rights of workers, took root first in the tomato fields of Florida in 2001, but is now extending its reach to worker communities around the globe, including the fishing sector of Scotland.

To help facilitate the process of adapting WSR to protect fishers, Greg Asbed, a co-founder of the CIW, penned an op-ed in Seafood Source, a leading fishing industry trade publication. In the piece, Asbed affirms the urgency forging a genuine WSR program for fishing — an industry marked by systemic human rights violations not unlike those that were typical in the tomato fields of Florida before the launch of the FFP.  In outlining the factors that have established WSR as the most effective human rights enforcement approach in corporate supply chains today, Asbed also warns against the false promises of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, which, as he writes “have demonstrated time and time again that their model is simply not fit for the purpose of human rights enforcement.” 

Check out an excerpt from the op-ed below. You can read the whole thing by clicking "read more," and of course, stay tuned for more exciting news about the global development of WSR!

Op-ed: From farmworkers to fishermen: Lessons from US produce on protecting human rights on the high seas

In 2003, while speaking to a reporter from The New Yorker magazine, a U.S. Justice Department official called the agricultural industry in and around the farmworker community of Immokalee, Florida, “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” The distinction was well-earned, with six separate forced labor operations uncovered in the area and successfully prosecuted by federal officials in the six years leading up to that interview.

In 2008, following a visit to Immokalee, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) agreed, telling the editor of The Nation, “[W]hen we talk about the race to the bottom here in the United States, I would say that Immokalee, Florida, is the bottom. I think those are workers who are more ruthlessly exploited and treated with more contempt than any group of workers I’ve ever seen and I suspect exist in the U.S.”

In 2014, however, Susan Marquis, dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School at the time, told a reporter for the New York Times, “But now, the tomato fields in Immokalee are probably the best working environment in American agriculture. In the past three years, they’ve gone from being the worst to the best.”

What happened in the interim? 

In 2010, following nearly two decades of organizing their fellow workers and consumers across the country, farmworkers from Immokalee launched the Fair Food Program (FFP), a groundbreaking initiative that joins farmworkers, farm owners, and the billion-dollar brands that buy the fruits and vegetables they produce in a partnership that harnesses the brands’ purchasing power to enforce farmworkers’ rights in the fields...

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

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