Business and Human Rights Journal: “…WSR programs are better at enforcement than corporate-established initiatives, resulting in real-life improvements for workers.”
“The Fair Food Program’s recent expansion to several new states and crops suggests that more companies are seeing its value.”
“…the short time frames for complaint resolution in the Fair Food Program (51 per cent of cases resolved within 13 days) and the Milk with Dignity Program (6 days median time to resolution in 2019, down to 2 days in 2020) are far superior to other available remedial systems – such as litigation or complaints to regulatory agencies.”
In a time when consumers are more concerned than ever about fairer wages and working conditions for those who pick their food, build their homes, deliver their packages, and make their coffee, support for real, verifiable human rights protections is growing at an unprecedented rate. And academics, human rights experts and national food justice organizations are taking note!
In the days ahead, we will be publishing a series of posts on recent academic studies and policy announcements that acknowledge the key differences between the Fair Food Program — including its unique mix of monitoring and enforcement tools and unparalleled track record of measurable success — and the many other food certification programs that offer standards like those of the FFP but no realistic means to enforce those standards. Unlike those traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) initiatives are built to deliver on their promises of humane labor standards, constructed of multiple, overlapping mechanisms designed to not just remedy human rights violations in corporate supply chains, but actually to prevent them.
The emerging consensus among academics and human rights experts is clear: All certification programs are not created equal. And from that consensus, the experts conclude, derives the urgent need to expand worker-driven initiatives to enforce real human rights standards in corporate supply chains.
First up in our series, we take a look at a new academic study, published last month in the Business and Human Rights Journal, heralding the WSR model’s unique benefits compared to traditional, corporate-controlled social auditing or ‘worker-voice’ programs. Entitled, “The Overlooked Advantages of the Independent Monitoring and Complaint Investigation System in the Worker-driven Social Responsibility Model in US Agriculture,” the short article highlights a key set of characteristics shared by WSR programs — including the Fair Food Program and Milk with Dignity — that set them apart from the widely discredited Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) paradigm as the new gold standard in fighting exploitation, wage theft, sexual harassment, and inadequate health and safety protections in fields and other work sites.
