Joe Flamm, Top Chef champion and Fair Food Chef: “Together, we can make a change…”

“Visiting Immokalee and meeting the Coalition behind the scenes was truly remarkable. Walking through the fields and hearing the stories of the workers was awe inspiring and something I am an advocate for. The Fair Food Program truly represents a win for the workers and growers, and is a program I will support through my personal network. Together, we can make a change.” Chef Joe Flamm, winner of the Top Chef competition and chef with Fair Food Program partner Compass Group

Dear friends,

The history of Fair Food is marked by many stunning milestones, but truth be told, one sticks out above them all in our memory. 

In November, 2010, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange – representing over 90% of Florida tomato growers, employing over 30,000 farmworkers – signed a Fair Food Agreement with the CIW.  It was a moment 17 years in the making.  It was also when the real work got started.

We were faced with the most important question of CIW’s history:  How do you turn a hard-won public campaign into a practical, farm-based program to produce tangible, on-the-ground change for tens of thousands of workers?

Our answer, now 7 years into the Fair Food Program’s implementation:  Through the honesty, patience, and hard work of true partnership.

The Program’s unprecedented collaboration among buyers, growers, farmworkers, and human rights monitors has already brought about extraordinary change for workers in seven states – and we’re on the verge of arriving to the Program’s 8th state, Texas.  We need your help to make it happen.

The Fair Food Program is unique because farmworkers are not only at the table, but seated at the head of the table, driving the process from start to finish.  With a code of conduct and enforcement mechanisms designed from the start by the workers’ unique experience, and propelled forward day by day by informed, mobilized workers monitoring their own rights in the fields, the Fair Food Program is unrivaled among social responsibility programs today in the critical role workers play in ensuring its success.  But, there are many other players around the table without whom the day-to-day work, and success, of the Program simply would not be possible. 

Critical among those partners are the buyer partners, the retailers who have committed their market power to enforcing the fundamental human rights of workers at the bottom of their supply chains.

For some buyers, being a Fair Food Program partner goes beyond paying the penny-per-pound premium and agreeing to purchase only from certified farms.  To those buyers, their participation in the FFP is a way to honor and live up to the values of the company.  Compass Group – who joined the Program in 2009 – is a leading example of this deeper commitment.  Just a few months ago, Compass Group organized multiple delegations of chefs from their vast network to visit Immokalee for an immersion experience in the Fair Food Program.  Among them was Top Chef winner, Joe Flamm, who reflected on what it meant for him to visit the tomato fields of Immokalee:

“Visiting Immokalee and meeting the Coalition behind the scenes was truly remarkable.  Walking through the fields and hearing the stories of the workers was awe inspiring and something I am an advocate for.  The Fair Food Program truly represents a win for the workers and growers, and is a program I will support through my personal network.  Together, we can make a change.”

Which brings us to our next important set of partners:  The men and women who manage farms and human resources for Participating Growers, and who work closely with the CIW staff and the Fair Food Standards Council to facilitate education sessions, audits, and complaint resolutions.  Indeed, many growers have come to see their hard work and investments as not only in the service of improving the safety and wellbeing of harvesters, but as a tangible benefit to the company as a whole.  In the most recent Fair Food Program Annual Report, a farm manager reflected on the evolution of his own relationship with the Fair Food Program:

In January 2015, a farm manager recalled how the Fair Food Program seemed like a burden at first, but that he has come to recognize the value of the changes it has brought. “I remember flipping through the Code of Conduct and asking: Shade? Time clocks? A Health and Safety Committee? But all of those things have made us a better company and created a better work environment for our employees.”

He described how company crewleaders had told him about groups of workers who left the company to try working at a nearby tomato farm outside of the Program, only to quickly return and complain that the other company did not do a good job keeping track of workers’ hours or pay, that there were no bathrooms or shade, and that supervisors were verbally abusive.

He said, “It makes us feel good to see how our investment has paid off.”

Finally, to ensure that farmworkers’ rights are enforced, farmworkers, growers and buyers alike rely on the exhaustive, meticulous work of the Human Rights Monitors at the Fair Food Standards Council.  Whether it is spending days on end out in the fields, interviewing literally hundreds of workers and grower staff; or answering phone calls on the complaint hotline from workers at midnight; or tracking the distribution of the penny-per-pound into workers’ paychecks, the work of the Fair Food Standards Council’s tireless monitors translates farmworkers’ voices, growers’ investments, and buyers’ commitments into tangible change in the lives of workers.

Real change, and strong programs like the FFP, are nothing without the hardworking women and men – farmworkers, together with buyers, growers, and human rights monitors – who diligently ensure that the seeds of change are nurtured and cared for every single day.  You can make their work possible by becoming a Fair Food Sustainer.

And don’t forget!  If you become a Sustainer TODAY, your donation will be matched!  Sign up now, and double your impact.