Excellent new article in The Guardian highlights Wendy’s staunch failure to commit to the Fair Food Program even “as several cases of what has been called modern day slavery on farms show the need for corporations to end these abuses”…
Cruz Salucio, CIW: “Farmworkers across the country and outside of the Fair Food Program continue to be vulnerable to many abuses including heat stress, physical violence and health and safety risks. Without enforcement and monitoring, these abuses will continue to flourish.”
Eli Kasargod-Staub, Majority Action: “Wendy’s is very much an outlier among its peers in terms of how they engage in this really critical question of human rights risks in the agricultural supply chain, and that has really heightened shareholder concerns.”
For weeks now — following the epic 5-mile “March to End Modern Slavery in the Fields” in Palm Beach earlier this month, attended by over 800 farmworkers and consumer allies — Wendy’s has been pummeled in the press due to its unconscionable failure to join the award-winning Fair Food Program. And the headlines keep coming in!
Just yesterday, the esteemed British daily newspaper The Guardian published an excellent article by labor correspondent Michael Sainato titled “Why Wendy’s is the source of unrest among US farm workers” on the renewed urgency for Wendy’s to join the Fair Food Program to protect farmworkers in its supply chain against forced labor and other human rights abuses given the horrific rise in modern-day slavery cases in North American agriculture.
Despite having many opportunities to publicly answer CIW’s simple question of whether Wendy’s can guarantee there is no modern slavery in its supply chain, the fast-food chain has remained dead silent on the topic. And that very silence on an issue that should be of the highest priority for Wendy’s social responsibility team, or at the very least its PR department, is among the main reasons fueling a shareholder-led “Vote No” campaign to remove Wendy’s Board Chair Nelson Peltz and three other Wendy’s Board members with present or past connections with Peltz’s asset management firm Trian Partners, Wendy’s largest institutional shareholder.
Much more will be unfolding on the investor campaign front in the next two weeks as farmworkers travel to New York City for a major rally on May 12 to support shareholders’ “Vote No” initiative ahead of Wendy’s annual shareholder meeting, so stay tuned for updates. In the meantime, you can enjoy the Guardian article, which is well worth the read!
