Theme of 11th annual forum: “Rights Holders at the Centre: Strengthening Accountability to Advance Business Respect for People and Planet for the Next Decade” 

UN gathering, Fair Food Program panel, underscore growing consensus among human rights experts and business community alike that audit-based CSR model has failed, Worker-driven Social Responsibility is future of human rights protection in corporate supply chains;

FFP Participating Buyer Compass Group: “What the Coalition has created is a gold standard for the protection of human rights in our supply chain. Like many companies, we use several platforms and systems to gain insight and assurances in our supply chain, but the Coalition and the Fair Food Program has developed a unique approach to connecting companies with workers and to enforcing human rights protections”;

CIW: “The current audit system is not just inadequate, it’s actually been part of the problem for the past 30 years, and it needs to be replaced.”

Almost a decade ago, in 2013, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Fair Food Standards Council were invited to speak at the 2nd annual UN Forum on Business and Human Rights about the then-fledgling Fair Food Program and its breakthrough mechanisms for protecting farmworkers against longstanding human rights abuses in food industry supply chains.  Having launched only two years earlier, the Fair Food Program was still largely unknown in the human rights community at the global level.  But on the ground in Florida it had already produced unprecedented gains for farmworkers under its protections, and those advances caught the attention of the United Nations’ Business and Human Rights Working Group, which had sent a delegation from Geneva to Immokalee earlier in the year to talk with workers about changes under the FFP and see the program in operation firsthand.  Based on what that delegation found, the Working Group invited the CIW and FFSC to share their extraordinary new model with the international community at that year’s forum in December.  

At the 2013 forum, the CIW’s Greg Asbed spoke on a panel entitled, “Responsible Supply Chain Management in Alignment with the UN Guiding Principles.”  Asbed began his presentation by inviting the audience of business and human rights experts to participate in a “thought experiment” on a new model of social responsibility:

In honor of the fact that we are only 100 miles from the town of Berne, Switzerland, the town where Albert Einstein lived when he conducted the famous thought experiments that forever upended the way we think of space and time, I would like to begin by inviting you to join me in a thought experiment on social change, by thinking about this question:

What if workers – the rights holders themselves – designed their own social responsibility program?  What would that program look like?… 

Following a discussion of the Fair Food Program’s unique mix of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, and a comparison of those tools to the superficial audits that make up the entirety of the traditional CSR model, Asbed concluded:

… In closing, the conclusion is simple.  If the goal of the social responsibility program is to protect the public perception of a brand, then by all means the brand-holder should design the program because the brand-holder knows best how to protect its own image. 

But if the goal of the program is to protect human rights, then the humans whose rights are at stake must themselves take the lead role in designing the program.  And when such programs do exist – as is the case of the Fair Food Program in Florida agriculture — corporations connected to that supply chain must be held accountable to those standards.  (read more)

The CIW’s presentation in 2013 asked forum-goers to imagine a new model of supply chain responsibility, one that centered workers themselves in the protection of their own human rights. 

The CIW’s presentation last month in Geneva would take place on the same stage, but against a radically different backdrop.

2022: From New Model to New Consensus

Fast forward nine years to the 11th UN Forum on Business and Human Rights.  Again, the CIW is invited, only this time to discuss the FFP’s track record of unprecedented success, more than a decade of measurable progress against longstanding human rights violations — from sexual assault to modern-day slavery — that no longer occur on farms under the program’s protections but continue to plague workplaces beyond the reach of those protections, factories and fields at the bottom of corporate supply chains around the globe.  Meanwhile, over the course of that same decade, the traditional, audit-based Corporate Social Responsibility Program logged failure after failure, from deadly factory fires and collapses to serial slavery scandals, on land and at sea.  And during that same time, study after study concluded that the audit-led CSR experiment was never truly equipped to identify, investigate, and remedy human rights violations in the first place, and as such was not fit for purpose and had run its course. 

Coalition of Immokalee Workers
110 S 2nd St
Immokalee, FL 34142
United States

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