Speech by CIW’s Lucas Benitez at United Nations on Occasion of First World Social Justice Day

I first want to thank Mrs. Robinson and the other organizers for holding this event. It is a tremendous honor to be invited to address an audience such as this in a setting as inspiring as the United Nations.

I come here today representing the CIW, a community-based labor organization rooted in the town of Immokalee, Florida. Immokalee is a labor reserve, similar in its demographics and socio-economic character (90% young, single immigrant males doing stoop labor for poverty-level wages in the agricultural industry) to the labor reserves of Brazil and South Africa. I come here representing some of the worst-paid, least-protected, most marginalized workers in the US today.

Federal prosecutors bestowed my community with the title “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” With seven major slavery prosecutions in Florida’s fields over the past decade alone, cases that have liberated a total of well over 1,000 workers and put more than 15 farm bosses behind bars, the Florida agricultural industry stands without peer in the field of forced labor.

But, as US Senator Bernie Sanders said at the conclusion of his fact-finding visit to Immokalee last year, “The extreme is slavery, the norm is a disaster.” And it is that disaster — sub-poverty wages, no right to overtime pay, no right to organize, and systemic labor rights violations, etc. — that makes slavery possible. Slavery can not exist in a vacuum. Rather, as is the case for farmworkers in Florida, it takes a population already beaten down by poverty and endless humiliation to both: 1) embolden a boss to step over the line from everyday exploitation into slavery and, 2) sufficiently disempower thousands of men and women so that they accept without protest that most vile violation of their rights as human beings.

It was these conditions that prompted us to organize 15 years ago with three simple demands: a fair wage, an end to labor rights abuses, and a voice in the industry in exchange for the backbreaking and dangerous work that we do, without which there would be no industry.

Our struggle was born in community-wide strikes targeting major Florida growers and protests demanding action from state politicians. But since the year 2000, we have focused our efforts on what we call the “Campaign for Fair Food.” Our campaign calls on the largest corporate buyers of Florida produce — companies like McDonald’s and WalMart — to demand more humane labor standards from their suppliers, and to help make those higher standards possible by paying a reasonable price premium to be passed on to workers in the form of higher wages. It is similar to the well-known “Fair Trade” movement, though different for its focus on plantation-scale producers, the leadership role of workers in its promotion, and its target — the US agricultural industry.

The Campaign for Fair Food came about through two key realizations. First, following several marginally successful strikes, our search for how to move forward forced us to to look beyond the farm gate for answers. Once we made that conceptual leap, we found powerful forces further up the supply chain that actually had a hand in shaping conditions on the farm itself — through the downward pressure they were able to exert on farm prices. Specifically, we found that the major corporate buyers of Florida produce proudly touted their ability to demand ever lower prices by combining the buying power of tens of thousands of stores or restaurants into purchasing coops. It didn’t take long before we realized that same process could be reversed — if sufficiently motivated, those companies could direct that same overwhelming purchasing power to buy only from growers willing to improve farm labor conditions and, at the same time, use a fraction of their vast economic resources to help willing growers raise farm labor wages.

Second, we realized that we would grow old pitting our meager ability to mobilize public opinion against the food industry’s almost infinite lobbying influence in a battle to recruit political leaders to our cause. Do we think the government should take strong and unequivocal measures to end modern-day slavery, enforce existing labor law, and grant farmworkers the same rights other US workers enjoy? Of course we do. We’d love nothing more than to see a significantly beefed up Department of Labor, new laws that made growers strictly liable for the slavery committed by their labor contractors, and an end to the exclusion of farmworkers from the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act.

However, no politician ever won office on the promise to triple the Department of Labor’s budget, and farm labor justice has never been a plank of any successful politician’s platform. Given the urgent need for change in our community, we did not have the luxury to spend resources on what was clearly a losing battle to change long-established political priorities.

On the basis of those two insights — that the food industry itself provided perhaps the shortest route to significantly improving farmworkers’ lives, while the government could offer only limited support for change — we have developed a hybrid market/state approach to cleaning up human rights violations in the food industry, one driven by market forces and nudged in the proper direction by the intervention of the state.

The Campaign for Fair Food has had remarkable success in its short existence, winning agreements with the world’s four largest restaurant companies as well as the world’s largest organic grocery chain, but there is still much to be done achieve the systemic change that is its goal. There is a field, however, where the food industry has made far greater strides against a significant industry problem – and that is the field of food safety. A brief look at the industry’s experience in that field — in the fight against food-borne illness — can perhaps be instructive as to how we can best proceed in combining market and state forces in the fight against farm labor exploitation and slavery.

There is a positive chain reaction that occurs when word of a salmonella or e-coli outbreak hits the news. First, public health officials identify the problem and the news media give the outbreak generous coverage. Next, consumers drastically cut back consumption of the tainted product, prompting the major brands that buy and sell the product to immediately and without remorse suspend purchases from the guilty supplier (often, only the possibility of guilt is sufficient to affect a supplier’s sales). Over time, the major brands develop tougher and tougher food safety standards and demand that their suppliers implement the new codes or lose their business. The message to the produce industry is clear: Get caught as the source of a food safety outbreak and face an almost certain total loss of business; fail to meet the buyers’ higher food safety codes and slowly lose contracts with long-standing clients on your way to being frozen out of an evolving market that has left you behind. The only answer for any produce supplier looking to stay in business is to step up to the higher standards.

While food-borne illness outbreaks continue today, over time the government has grown more effective in identifying them, codes have grown more stringent, and the worst actors have been identified and improved or driven from the industry. The fight against food-borne illness is advancing.

What would it take for us to achieve this same result in the case of the fight against food-borne injustice? When government officials identify an “outbreak” of slavery in our food system (in this case, successfully prosecute yet another slavery operation) we run into the first break in the chain — the media coverage of slavery is at best anemic, at worst non-existent. Still, thanks to the efforts of tens of thousands of already aware consumers across the country, there is some pressure exerted on the major brands that buy the product picked by slave labor. In the case of the Campaign for Fair Food, that pressure has resulted in the agreements I mentioned earlier. But those agreements are with only a small percentage of the overall market, and as a result, the produce suppliers implicated in the slavery operation receive a mixed message from their clients, some cutting off purchases, some expressing concern, and some showing no concern at all. Produce suppliers learn that it might be good, but is by no means mandatory, to address the problem, and slavery persists.

This suggests two possible roles for increased state intervention in the fight against slavery that, combined with stronger private action, could do for slavery what has been done for salmonella. First, the bully pulpit occupied by leaders from the local to the federal levels can — and must — be employed in efforts to eliminate farm labor exploitation. From local representatives and state governors to the US Congress and the White House, much can be done (public statements, hearings, investigations, etc.) to help ramp up the media attention and consumer awareness that are so crucial to the success of a market-led approach. And second, by conditioning state support to the food industry (tax incentives, financial assistance, continued anti-trust exemptions, etc.) on its ability to demonstrate that it respects the basic right to decent work, the state can encourage the major produce purchasers and producers to adopt an unequivocal position of zero tolerance for slavery.

With this sort of practical and political support from elected leaders, consumers and the corporations that purchase produce will be able to demand a new product from the US agricultural industry — not just good, cheap, and safe food, but fair food, food that respects human rights and doesn’t exploit human beings.

Food is at the very heart of any society. The workers who plant, pick, and pack food throughout the US — and around the world — have suffered generations of poverty and degradation. On this day, the very first World Social Justice Day, let us recognize the fundamental dignity of farm labor and the men and women who put the food on our tables.

Thank you.