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John, during week two of the Fair Food Program Sustainer Drive, we take a look under the hood of the FFP to see how all the moving parts—including the CIW’s consumer allies and Sustainers like you—work together to set the “new gold standard” [[link removed]] for enforcing fundamental human rights in global supply chains.
On FFP farms across the country, tens of thousands of workers are protected from modern-day slavery and other longstanding farm labor abuses through several interlocking mechanisms designed to monitor and enforce the Program’s standards in real time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These mechanisms include: worker-to-worker education on the rights established by the FFP’s code of conduct; a complaint investigation and resolution process where workers can report violations free from the fear of retaliation; regular and comprehensive farm audits; and swift, market-enforced consequences for violations of workers’ human rights. Over the years, the FFP’s groundbreaking protections have been lauded by countless top-tier media outlets including the New York Times [[link removed]] , the Washington Post [[link removed]] , CNN [[link removed]] , the Financial Times [[link removed]] , Vox [[link removed]] , and Axios [[link removed]] , as well as by many major, global institutions including the United Nations [[link removed]] and the World Economic Forum [[link removed]] .
That’s saying a lot for a program conceived, designed, built and run by workers in one of the poorest, least powerful communities in the United States. Let’s take a step back to consider how we got here.
More than two decades ago, farmworkers in Immokalee were nearly ten years into the process of building a formidable community-led movement against widespread forced labor, sexual violence, and grinding poverty in Florida’s fields, when they paused—frustrated by the growers’ stubborn refusal to speak directly to the organization they founded to give voice to their grievances—and looked beyond the farm gate at the food industry as a whole for a new source of leverage, any sort of leverage, to budge the farm owners. It was from that higher perspective they realized for the first time that the market power of the big buyers of the tomatoes they picked—the billion-dollar food brands at the top of the supply chain that dictate the price of produce and, in many ways, the wages and working conditions of farmworkers at the bottom—might just be the leverage they needed. And to reach those buyers, to harness that purchasing power and test their hypothesis, farmworkers knew they needed to make common cause with the ultimate power brokers at the very top of the trillion-dollar food industry: everyday consumers.
And that is how the Fair Food Program was conceived.
Since 2001, a tireless but ever-growing army of dedicated consumer allies from Florida to California joined forces with farmworkers here in Immokalee, working as one to educate and mobilize hundreds of thousands of consumers in communities across the country to take action in support of the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food. If you received this message in your email today, you can count yourself among that number.
Together, we have won groundbreaking agreements with major food retailers, agreements that legally commit those buyers to condition their purchases on their suppliers’ compliance with the human rights standards of the Fair Food Code of Conduct. That means one simple, but very powerful thing: if a zero-tolerance violation, such as forced labor, is found on an FFP farm, that grower is automatically barred [[link removed]]
from selling its produce to Fair Food Participating Buyers. That, right there, is the leverage those workers were searching for 25 years ago in Immokalee—the unique market incentive that has effectively eliminated labor abuses on FFP farms since 2010, including modern slavery and other forms of extreme abuse. And best of all, this pioneering market-based enforcement model has resulted in a win-win-win scenario for farmworkers, growers, and buyers alike, all of whom enjoy the benefits of a more modern, more humane agricultural industry.
That is how farmworkers in Immokalee, a long-forgotten farming community sitting atop the Everglades in rural Florida, managed to harness the market power of some of the largest corporations this world has ever known to enforce their own human rights in the fields.
And it was the power of everyday consumers—people like you, people who took to the streets, shoulder-to-shoulder with farmworkers, to demand a new kind of food, Fair Food— that made it possible to convince the fast-food giants and grocery store chains to sign those binding agreements. This is the power of our consumer allies and Fair Food Program Sustainers. [[link removed]]
Today, 25 years since the launch of the Campaign for Fair Food, and 15 years since the inception of the Fair Food Program itself, FFP Sustainers continue to play a crucial role in the protection of farmworkers’ rights in the fields. Yes, just as they did back in the early 2000s, your generous contributions today continue to help underwrite the ongoing organizing necessary to bring new corporations into the Fair Food Program. But that’s not all. The FFP Sustainer Program also supports the day-to-day operation of the pioneering program we all fought so hard to build! The groundbreaking mix of monitoring and enforcement tools that makes the FFP so effective—the CIW’s Worker-to-Worker Education team traveling to farms big and small across the country to train the program’s tens of thousands of frontline worker monitors; the FFSC’s growing team of Human Rights Investigators conducting farm audits and operating the program’s confidential complaint hotline; the FFP’s tireless Staff all working to expand the program’s invaluable protections to more and more workers every day—every single moving part of the FFP keeps moving, 24/7, thanks to your support.
Indeed, that humming motor at the heart of the Fair Food Program would grind to a stop without your generous contributions. But with your help, we will continue to grow the only farmworker human rights program in the country today proven to make real, measurable change in workers’ lives, the only program built by and for farmworkers themselves, the only program capable of not just responding to abuse, but preventing it, bringing about a world without victims for more and more workers in fields across this country every day.
BECOME A SUSTAINER TODAY! [[link removed]]
Other ways you can support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers today:
* Browse our merch store [[link removed]] and wear your Fair Food gear while you're out and about.
* Do you have a friend, neighbor, or colleague interested in learning more about the Fair Food Program? Invite them to join our email list [[link removed]] to learn more about our groundbreaking approach.
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Coalition of Immokalee Workers
110 S 2nd St
Immokalee, FL 34142
United States
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