In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers helped launch the modern anti-trafficking movement with a series of shocking forced labor prosecutions in Florida's fields. Over the course of those two decades, 15 farm bosses landed behind bars, and over 1,500 workers were liberated by those groundbreaking investigations. In 2003, forced labor was so common that, when dozens of farmworkers and their allies held a 10-day hunger strike outside Taco Bell’s corporate headquarters in Irvine, California, to demand that the fast-food giant take responsibility for human rights abuses in the fields, the hunger strikers asked this simple question: “Can Taco Bell guarantee that the tomatoes in its chalupas were not picked by slaves?”
In 2005, Taco Bell, and its parent corporation Yum Brands became the first fast-food company to sign a "Fair Food" agreement with the CIW, laying the groundwork for a program that would ultimately emerge as the new gold standard for social responsibility in the food industry. But the Fair Food Program wouldn't get off the ground for another 6 years, and in the meantime the abuses continued, prompting federal prosecutors to dub Florida "ground zero for modern-day slavery."
By the end of the aughts, following yet another major slavery prosecution discovered just blocks from the CIW's office in Immokalee, the Fair Food Program was launched, signaling a new era for farmworkers, growers, and buyers alike in Florida's massive tomato industry.
And by the time the Fair Food Program was officially launched in 2011, nearly every major fast-food company in the country – Taco Bell and Yum! Brands, McDonald's, Subway, and Burger King – had signed a Fair Food Agreement with the CIW, with Chipotle bringing up the rear in 2012. Every major fast-food company in the country, except one: Wendy's.
Since the launch of the Fair Food Program, the CIW and its national network of consumer allies have been calling on Wendy's to join the program that has become, over the past decade, the undisputed leader in protecting human rights in corporate supply chains, winning countless accolades from human rights observers from the United Nations to the White House, including a Presidential Medal in 2015 for its "extraordinary efforts in combatting modern-day slavery." But Wendy's, behind the leadership of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz – the Chairman of Wendy's Board of Directors and CEO of Trian Partners, the hedge fund that is Wendy's largest single shareholder – has refused.
In the years since the the Fair Food Program was implemented on over 90% of Florida's tomato fields, the Program has grown to operate in seven new states and multiple new crops, and in the process of expanding the FFP has effectively eradicated slavery for tens of thousands of workers under its groundbreaking protections. But against that backdrop of unprecedented progress for farmworkers on FFP participating farms, modern-day slavery has been making a comeback in recent years on farms beyond the Program's reach, both here in the U.S. and in Mexico (where Wendy's shifted its purchases in 2015 after its longtime Florida tomato suppliers joined the Fair Food Program and still continues to source tomatoes).
Today, forced labor in the fields is not only on the rise again, it has become truly big business...
