Vox: “A binding contract is crucial to worker-driven social responsibility, a sharp contrast to those toothless corporate social responsibility initiatives.”
Lucas Benitez, farmworker and co-founder of the CIW: “With [worker-driven social responsibility], we’re no longer letting the foxes guard the henhouse. We as workers are protecting our own rights.”
As Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) programs come online across the world — from the farm fields of the US to the textile factories of Asia and the fishing fleets of the North Sea — the innovative model is winning increasing recognition as the new paradigm for protecting human rights in global supply chains. Born in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida, WSR programs now protect workers on five continents, and the model is expanding to new industries and new countries with each passing year.
The widely-read online journal Vox published a feature-length article this past week documenting the remarkable story of the WSR model’s emergence and growth since its inception with the launch of the Fair Food Program in 2010. Written for the outlet’s solutions-oriented vertical, Future Perfect, the piece contextualizes the urgent need for WSR in the 21st century against the backdrop of the ongoing human rights crisis in global supply chains and the 30-year long, documented failure of the top-down Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) model.
We’re excited to share a condensed version of the piece below, though you can — and truly should — read the piece in its entirety by clicking here.
As the Vox story illustrates, WSR programs are quickly becoming a crucial means for workers around the globe to protect and expand their own essential human rights at work, often working hand in hand with unions to attack stubborn labor abuses from a new direction, with a new and additional source of power — the power of the billion-dollar brands’ volume purchasing, harnessed by workers themselves through the binding legal agreements that undergird the WSR model. We hope you enjoy the excerpt below, and that you visit the Vox website to read the rest of the piece there.
The little-known but successful model for protecting
human and labor rights
How a worker-driven initiative is filling in the gaps left behind by corporate social responsibility programs.
by Sam Delgado Jul 5, 2024
Over the last century, people have started demanding more from the businesses where they shop. Whether it be a pair of jeans or the food on their plates, consumers want to know that what they’re buying isn’t just good quality but also ethically and sustainably made.
In the early 20th century, groups like the National Consumers League and the now-defunct League of Women Shoppers organized consumers to take advantage of their power in an effort to improve labor protections and the rights of workers in the United States. Today, ethically minded consumers are also motivated by climate change and animal rights, as the consequences of our overconsumption have become clearer…
In practice, corporate social responsibility can look like companies donating to charities every year, committing to net-zero emissions by a certain date, or focusing on labor practices. To prove they’re doing this work, companies will partner with nonprofits or hire third-party consultants to audit their supply chains, and then measure and report their progress in annual reports, press releases, and on their websites.
These practices are now nominally widespread in modern business. According to the EPA, roughly 80 percent of all Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies publish a report on their corporate social responsibility practices and progress.
But while corporate social responsibility sounds good on paper, the workers deep within these corporations’ supply chains — the ones that sew the clothes you wear and harvest the produce and ingredients for your food — say that they are not feeling the benefits of such programs.
Despite the profits they help companies rake in through their labor, many of these workers are still making pennies while stuck working in unsafe environments. In some cases, the conditions are so bad that they amount to exploitation that is clearly unethical and, in many cases, illegal, as many labor rights advocates and corporate watchdogs have argued. Some of what corporate responsibility programs claim they’re doing and have achieved, workers and advocates say, qualifies as greenwashing or “social washing” — using these strategies and initiatives to mislead the public and appear as if they have robust, effective environmental or labor practices.
To fill the gap between a commitment and reality, collectives of workers and labor advocates worldwide are organizing to create a solution that will not just address labor abuses when they happen but encourage the prevention of exploitation altogether. They come from a variety of industries, and they’re leaving the promises of corporate social responsibility behind and creating something new — and more importantly, effective — in its place: worker-driven social responsibility.
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Gwen Cameron, owner of Rancho Durazno: “[The Fair Food Program is] not the only social responsibility certification out there for farm workers, but one of the few with real teeth that holds farmers and buyers accountable.” Keep it Colorado: “Workers benefit from increased pay by the Fair Food premium, which buyers cover. Following an annual farm audit, workers receive the protections and benefits required by law. They also benefit from the work of a new health and safety committee as well as an anonymous 24- hour hotline.” Last week, we shared the exciting news that the Fair Food Program — […]
Fair Food Program set to expand to 27 more farms, 13 more states with support from United States Department of Agriculture USDA announcement marks latest instance of CIW/FFP innovations adopted as policy by the public sector USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack: “Improving working conditions and quality of life for farmworkers, both U.S. based workers and those that come to our country to work, is one key step in building a stronger, more resilient food supply chain.” Cruz Salucio, CIW, Fair Food Program: “We are very happy to join with the USDA today in launching this project and providing this incentive to […]
Gerardo Reyes Chavez, CIW: “To protect workers and give the program’s human rights standards real teeth, the FPP harnessed buyers ’massive market power to reward growers who respected their workers’ rights and to stop buying from farms where workers were mistreated.” Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands: “In 2010 when we partnered there were a lot of folks who said we were crazy. And maybe we were… I mean farmers and farmworkers coming together to ensure a fair and safe workplace. That’s nuts. Within a few months the evidence was clear that the program worked and the culture in […]
CIW: “The promise of Worker-driven Social Responsibility – a model by which workers are able to define and enforce their own rights – is to modernize workers’ human rights by flipping market incentives and conditioning profits on respect for workers’ human rights.” “Workers everywhere deserve safety, dignity, and a fair wage: with the emergence of WSR, they now have a novel tool to empower themselves to become the frontline monitors of their own rights, and to usher in a new day of real, measurable human rights enforcement in the global economy.” Against a backdrop of cascading climate catastrophes; surging authoritarian […]
Lucas Benitez, CIW: “It hurts to think about how their families have yet to learn about this, that their loved ones cannot come home to their country and hug their children, their spouses, their parents.” At 6:30 in the morning of Tuesday, May 14, an oncoming pick-up truck veered out of its lane on a two-lane stretch of State Road 40 near the central Florida town of Ocala and sideswiped a bus full of farmworkers heading to the fields to harvest watermelons. The collision caused the bus to swerve off the narrow road and lose control, careening first into […]
It has been nearly two months since the debut of Esperanza – a 15 foot animated farmworker puppet, who as her name reveals, embodies the hopes of farmworkers for dignity and freedom in the fields. Her first major public appearance came at the first-ever Farmworker Freedom Festival in Palm Beach, FL, which culminated in a powerful ceremony designed to bring the Fair Food Nation’s message of hope home to Wendy’s Board Chair Nelson Peltz. Farmworkers, their families and their allies gathered in a gorgeous park across the street from Peltz’s beachside mansion, where they shared, framed by giant banyan trees, the […]
Gerardo Reyes Chavez, farmworker and senior staff member of the CIW, speaking on a panel at the DC screening of “Food, Inc. 2:” “Workers in other parts of the US and the globe today want to replicate the protections we have created for workers in the fields in their own realities…. The time for Worker-driven Social Responsibility has come.” Senator Cory Booker on Mr. Chavez and the CIW:“Sincerely, I was floored and blown away by what this man has accomplished with others in organizing both here in the United States and across the world, giving people not just dignity and fair […]
Thea Lee, Department of Labor’s deputy undersecretary for international affairs on the original Department of Labor report: “We commissioned the report,” she said, “precisely because there are so many versions of inadequate worker voice or social audits or corporate-driven compliance programs. We really wanted to have a well-researched, well-articulated framework with clear examples that would be of real value to corporations, to government, to unions and to organizers who are trying to create something better for workers.” Lee on the CIW: “The Coalition was really able to make something out of nothing. They were able to leverage the power of the […]
Lupe Gonzalo, farmworker and CIW staff member: “Continuing to expand is quite urgent. It’s quite important because only this path of the Fair Food Program has made a difference for thousands of workers.” A few days ago, we announced a partnership with Spanish farmworkers to explore building the first-ever Worker-driven Social Responsibility program in the EU. Today we have another exciting piece of news to share: MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving has announced that the Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC) – the third-party monitoring organization responsible for enforcing the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program (FFP) – will receive a grant […]
US Dept of Labor Report: “The FFP has raised compensation, reduced health and safety risks, and eliminated forced labor, child labor, and gender-based violence for approximately 30,000 workers at 20 employers supplying 14 retail, fast-food, and food-service companies.” “When authentic worker voice exists, workers participate in collective efforts to… identify problems, propose solutions, negotiate agreements, and hold parties accountable – democracy in action, at work.” A newly released report from the US Department of Labor compiles countless case studies from around the world to conclude that enhancing workers’ voices promotes more robust communities, and safer, more equitable, more democratic workplaces. More tangibly, the […]