“The Worker-driven Social Responsibility model has now taken root on three continents..." OP/ED: “An astonishing journey from Lesotho to Immokalee and back”… Representatives from women’s organizations and unions based in Lesotho gather for a photo with representatives of the CIW, the Fair Food Standards Council, Workers Rights Consortium and the Solidarity Center in Immokalee to commemorate a two-day exchange in November of last year to study the Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model and the CIW’s Fair Food Program. The visitors returned to Lesotho to negotiate a groundbreaking WSR agreement – announced in August – to fight sexual harassment and gender-based violence in the garment industry there. "The Worker-driven Social Responsibility model has now taken root on three continents — Asia, Africa and North America, supported by allies but driven by workers themselves building a global movement"; Cathy Albisa, Executive Director of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI), celebrates worker-to-worker collaboration behind newest front in expansion of the Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model in powerful Op/Ed… Two months ago, we shared the news on this site of an inspiring breakthrough for workers fighting sexual harassment and assault at work in Lesotho’s massive garment industry. A coalition of women’s rights organizations and unions there announced a landmark agreement struck with Lesotho’s largest garment factory and several multinational apparel brands, including Levi Strauss & Co. and the Children’s Place. The agreement was based broadly on the Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model, harnessing the brand’s purchasing power to protect apparel factory workers from gender-based violence on the job. Specifically, the agreement was modeled on the CIW’s Fair Food Program (FFP) and its uniquely successful mechanisms for investigating worker complaints and enforcing compliance with workers’ fundamental human rights. At the time we wrote of the agreement: Members of the CIW Worker-to-Worker Education Team demonstrate the use of Popular Education techniques employed in the Fair Food Program for conveying the right to work free of sexual harassment to workers on FFP farms during last year’s visit to Immokalee by a delegation of representatives from the women’s organizations and unions that signed last week’s groundbreaking agreement. Worker education is a critical element in any WSR agreement, as workers must have a clear understanding of their rights in order to play their role as the front line monitors of those rights that ensures compliance with human rights standards and, ultimately, prevention of longstanding abuses. … Clearly, the extraordinary news out of Lesotho this week would not have been possible without an extraordinary struggle, and an equally extraordinary collaboration among a wide range of worker and human rights organizations in support of that struggle. It is news that we are proud to be a part of, and we look forward to continuing to contribute to the implementation and development of a program that will bring long-overdue justice to more than 10,000 workers in southern Africa. It is truly remarkable to contemplate the broader meaning of this moment, and perhaps sometime soon we will take a deeper dive into the significance of this latest front in the global expansion of the WSR model. But for now, just consider this: Some of the poorest, least powerful workers in this country – farmworkers divided by language, nationality and ethnicity, immigrant workers in a country itself deeply divided about their presence and contribution here – managed somehow over the course of two decades of struggle to forge a new form of worker power, a new paradigm for protecting vulnerable workers’ fundamental human rights at the bottom of global supply chains. Worker-driven Social Responsibility, that new paradigm, emerged fully formed for the first time in Immokalee, a dusty, dirt-poor, crossroads town at the top of the Everglades that just a few years ago was dubbed “ground zero for modern-day slavery” by federal prosecutors. A more unlikely birthplace for, in WRC’s words, “one of the most inspiring labor rights success stories of this decade” – or as it was put in a different moment in the pages of the Washington Post, “one of the great human rights success stories of our day” – would be hard to imagine. Yet today, that battle to end forced labor, sexual assault, violence against workers and so many more abuses in Florida’s fields has not only spread up the East Coast, into new crops and new industries, and is continuing to build out across this country, but it is now inspiring workers from across oceans to marshal the same forces and build the same structures to monitor and enforce their own rights in vastly different industries… Well, this week Cathy Albisa, Executive Director of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI), beat us to the punch in taking that “deeper dive into the significance” of the exciting news from Lesotho! In an op/ed published this week in the online news digest Medium, Cathy took readers behind the headlines to the remarkable backstory of collaboration between farmworkers in the US South and factory workers in Southern Africa that led to new hope for an end to longstanding and widespread abuse for over ten thousand garment workers... Check out highlights of the op/ed on the groundbreaking Lesotho victory at the CIW website! Coalition of Immokalee Workers (239) 657 8311 | [email protected] | www.ciw-online.org Connect with us ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ A copy of the CIW's official registration and financial information may be obtained from the Florida Division of Consumer Services by calling toll-free 1-800-HELP-FLA (435-7352). Registration does not imply endorsement, approval, or recommendation by the state. 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