2019 University of Michigan Advisory Committee report: “The Fair Food Program is the most comprehensive social responsibility program in the U.S.,” and the best thing that the University of Michigan could do in order to improve labor standards would be to “become a signatory to the Fair Food Program.”
Nola De Graaf, a current student at the University of Michigan: “The best part of this program is that it is an organization that amplifies the voices of workers, not attempting to speak over them but rather making them the forefront of the organization, something that is unfortunately not often done. I also love that there is a very set goal; joining the Fair Food Program. With this alliance between workers and students, it’s attainable and real, something that can make lasting, permanent change.”
A new initiative calling on universities to join the Fair Food Program is rapidly gaining momentum across the country.
Just last week, we shared an update from Yale University, where students are leading a movement urging the storied Ivy League university to become the first to join the Fair Food Program as a Participating Buyer. Now, following a multi-day campus visit from the CIW, that momentum is carrying over to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where hundreds of students are joining the growing campus-based campaign, leveraging their demand for fresh fruits and vegetables to expand the FFP to new fields where workers remain in desperate need of the program’s life-saving human rights protections.
For decades, the CIW has confronted the egregious human rights abuses that have plagued the agricultural industry, demanding modern, humane business practices that ensure the farmworkers who put food on our tables are treated with dignity and respect. To achieve that goal, the CIW partnered with consumers, growers, and buyers to forge the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program — a groundbreaking model that has not only remedied abuses in participating fields, but actually prevented modern-day slavery, sexual violence, wage theft, retaliation, and more. Yet since the program’s launch in 2010, there has been a troubling rise in human rights violations on fields beyond the reach of the FFP’s industry-leading protections, including documented cases of modern-day slavery.
The need to dramatically expand the FFP’s reach is therefore more urgent than ever, and the new Fair Food University initiative aims to do just that. Over the course of the visit to Ann Arbor, more than 200 students took part in classroom presentations, luncheons, film screenings, panel discussions, and organizing meetings — trekking through growing mounds of snow and icy sidewalks to hear from the CIW and student allies.
