CIW’s unparalleled experience in combatting — and, most importantly, preventing — modern-day slavery in agriculture offers lessons for growers, buyers, and human rights activists alike in USDOL’s widely-watched virtual panel;

Miguel Rios, Regional Agricultural Enforcement Coordinator with the USDOL: “[The Fair Food Program] is something every grower and food retailer should be a part of. The program’s success is absolutely undeniable.”

Decades of CIW history have proven that modern-day slavery in agriculture isn’t actually anything new. But the recent wave of forced labor prosecutions in the sector has revealed a disturbing trend: the H2-A program, the federal visa program that ties farmworkers’ legal status to their employment and so offers unscrupulous growers and crewleaders ample power and opportunity to exploit their workers, has thrown fuel on this long-simmering fire.

The problem has become so alarming that the US Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division made it the sole focus of a January 31st roundtable on human trafficking, attracting more than 500 attendees who gathered to learn about the growing concern and what is being done to address it. With opening remarks from the EEOC and the DOL’s International Labor Affairs Bureau (ILAB), the panel featured several key leaders in the fight against human trafficking across the southeastern states, including the Fair Food Program’s own Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, Executive Director of the Fair Food Standards Council, who was invited to share lessons from the program’s unique, worker-driven, market-based approach to ending forced labor.

Read Panel Highlights

Last month’s panel was a remarkably smart, and frank, discussion of the challenges facing law enforcement in eradicating the growing problem of forced labor in the nation’s food industry, and a full-throated endorsement of the Fair Food Program as one of the most effective partners for state and federal law enforcement today — not to mention growers and retail food brands — in the fight to end modern-day slavery.

If you have the time, check out the panel in its entirety here.