Nearly ten years ago, a little known experiment in human rights protection — the CIW’s Fair Food Program, with its groundbreaking mix of worker-driven, market-backed mechanisms for monitoring and enforcing farm labor rights — was taking root in Florida’s tomato fields. And today, at the dawn of a new decade, it is the unprecedented success of that experiment that provides perhaps the greatest hope for progress for low-wage workers in the years ahead, whether they labor in the fields or in factories, here in the US or abroad.
Within just a few years of its launch in 2011, news of the Fair Food Program’s unique new approach and stunning results spread quickly. Workers around the globe learned that a new model was taking shape with the ability to disrupt systems that have produced abuse and exploitation for centuries. Over the ensuing decade, workers and their organizations – largely through the efforts of the Worker-driven Social Responsibility Network, including CIW, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) – took up the novel approach, worked together to adapt it to new industries and new workplaces, and together forged a truly groundbreaking new paradigm for protecting human rights in corporate supply chains: Worker-driven Social Responsibility, or WSR. Today, the WSR model has taken root on three continents and in multiple industries.
This year marked the two-year anniversary of a landmark agreement between Migrant Justice, a human rights organization based in Vermont’s farmworker community, and Ben & Jerry’s, the iconic ice cream brand. The agreement established the Milk with Dignity Program, the product of years of hard work by Migrant Justice, organizing with workers on farms spread out across the state of Vermont and with consumers throughout the Northeast.
The Milk with Dignity Program was also the product of an exciting partnership between Migrant Justice and the CIW, resulting in the first replication of the CIW’s pioneering Fair Food Program and a significant expansion of the broader WSR model.
