Facing abusive crewleaders and a pervasive climate of fear in the early 1990s, farmworkers in the dusty crossroads town of Immokalee decided they had had enough. They stood up for their rights, organizing strikes and marches and even a month-long hunger strike to press their demands for change, but they didn’t stop there. They brought the farmworker community together in an ongoing process of reflection and analysis—a process that continues to this day in Immokalee—seeking to get to the roots of their abuse and exploitation. Through years of this combination of community action and reflection, workers with the CIW finally got to the bottom of their problem at the top of the country’s trillion-dollar food industry, where retail food giants leverage their immense purchasing power to squeeze growers on prices at the farm gate, and that squeeze is translated into an unrelenting downward pressure on wages and working conditions for farmworkers in the fields.
Or, 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!”
That analysis, and the resultant decades-long efforts of workers and their consumer allies to reverse the impact of the buyers’ massive market power on farmworkers’ lives, gave birth to the Fair Food Program and, with it, the broader Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model; a novel way for workers to harness the purchasing power of those massive food corporations to empower themselves as the frontline monitor of their own rights in the fields.
With legally binding commitments from corporate buyers to preferentially source from growers who comply with a worker-drafted Code of Conduct— their compliance monitored through a combination of a 24/7 complaint mechanism and deep-dive audits, all driven by workers informed of their rights though regular worker-to-worker education sessions on the farm and on the clock—the Fair Food Program gave farmworkers a real voice on the job for the first time in the centuries-long history of the Florida agricultural industry, and provided enforceable mechanisms to ensure their voice was heard. Within just a few short years of its launch, the FFP transformed the fields once dubbed “ground zero for modern-day slavery” by federal prosecutors into what one labor expert called “the best workplace environment in American agriculture” on the front page of the New York Times.
The FFP’s success quickly drew attention from workers around the globe who saw a potential solution to their own exploitation in the program’s unique underlying structure, driving the rapid replication and expansion of the WSR model to industries across the world. Since the FFP’s launch in 2011, the WSR model has spread to a wide range of industries on multiple continents, from the garment factories of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Lesotho, to the iconic dairy farms of Vermont. And at every stop it has demonstrated its extraordinary power to protect and improve workers’ lives through partnerships that, despite initial industry fears and resistance, have proven to be sustainable and beneficial for all—workers, producers, and buyers alike. As a result, WSR is rapidly becoming the new paradigm for protecting vulnerable workers’ fundamental human rights a the bottom of corporate supply chains around the world.
But there is still so much more to be done.
Each new WSR program is the result of years of careful deliberation, planning, and execution. And at every step along the way, the CIW and FFSC are there shoulder-to-shoulder with those workers, helping distant communities think through the best way to design, construct, and launch their own initiatives, drawing on the hard-earned lessons from decades of experience with the Campaign for Fair Food and the FFP. For these collaborations to flower and bear fruit, the CIW and FFSC must both travel to those countries where the worker communities are located, to learn more about the industry and its dynamics were the adaptation is taking shape, and host delegations of representatives from those communities on visits to Immokalee, where they see the FFP in person and meet the worker-architects of the groundbreaking new model. The photo at the top of today’s email—the fourth and final email in our annual Summer Sustainer Drive—was taken following just such a visit to Immokalee by representatives from unions and women’s human rights organizations in Lesotho, where workers who had learned of the FFP’s unprecedented success had come together to fight longstanding sexual harassment and assault in the massive textile factories that hire thousands of men and women there.
The work of expanding the WSR model to help workers across the globe fight to defend their fundamental human rights takes real resources—money, time, and trained experts—that we can only even begin to share with the rest of the world thanks to your support. And here’s the good news: with only a few days remaining in our June Sustainer drive, we are THIS close to meeting our goal!
By becoming a Fair Food Sustainer today, you can help support this growing human rights revolution. Your donations help cover the costs associated with international travel and hosting delegations of workers and human rights experts seeking to adapt WSR, along with much, much more of what makes the FFP such a resounding success.
Together, we can help ensure millions of workers across the globe gain the much-needed power to defend their own rights.
