The promise of Worker-driven Social Responsibility: “[The CIW’s] visionary leadership and unceasing support played a key role in the launch of Milk with Dignity, a worker-driven social responsibility program that is transforming the dairy industry, just as the Fair Food Program has transformed the tomato industry, to ensure respect and dignity for workers.”
In August of 2017, we woke up to a stunning, and quite unexpected, article that had just come out in the Harvard Business Review. There – on a list that also included car seats, Sesame Street, and the cure for polio – was the Fair Food Program, hailed as one of the 15 “most important social-impact success stories” of the past century.
We were floored.
The article set out to find movements, programs, and inventions that had created “disruptive, catalytic, systemic change” – transforming the world as we know it. It became clear that the Harvard Business Review had chosen the FFP not simply because it had radically changed the lives of farmworkers, but because workers in Immokalee had designed a revolutionary new model that can empower workers in countless other industries around the globe to achieve the same dignity, respect, and safety advances achieved under the Fair Food Program.
It is that same hope and belief in the FFP’s boundless potential that has brought us some very welcome news this week: A dedicated Fair Food Sustainer has pledged up to $5,000 in matching donations for this week’s Sustainer Drive!
Since the Fair Food Program first dawned in Florida and achieved unprecedented human rights protections for farmworkers, news of the FFP’s success spread. Workers around the globe quickly learned that here is a new model, pioneered by workers themselves and proven to work, that has the ability to disrupt systems that have produced abuse and exploitation for centuries. And, that model can be adapted to new environments. And, it has a name: the Worker-driven Social Responsibility, or WSR, model.
In 2015, dairy workers from Vermont with Migrant Justice came knocking. The workers who make our milk, cheese, and ice cream possible, they said, were suffering from longstanding dangerous working conditions and abusive environments – and were in need of a durable, transformative solution. Those first calls marked the beginning of a deep, collaborative relationship between Immokalee and Burlington – one that gave birth to the Milk with Dignity Campaign in 2015, and in 2017, a groundbreaking agreement between Migrant Justice and Ben and Jerry’s, which led to the creation of the Milk with Dignity Program.
With the support of grassroots donors, farmworkers from the CIW have been able to travel to dairy farms in Vermont, bring dairy workers and allies to observe education sessions and audits in Florida, and dedicate countless hours to calls and meetings to assist, advise, and support the exciting new Milk with Dignity movement.
You can ask the dairy workers themselves. In the words of Migrant Justice:
“The CIW’s collaboration with Migrant Justice has been essential to securing human rights for hundreds of dairy workers in Vermont and New York. Their visionary leadership and unceasing support played a key role in the launch of Milk with Dignity, a worker-driven social responsibility program that is transforming the dairy industry, just as the Fair Food Program has transformed the tomato industry, to ensure respect and dignity for workers.”
And the story of WSR and its potential to change the world does not end in Vermont. Since the inaugural partnership with Migrant Justice, farmworkers in Immokalee have been able to connect with and provide the same tireless support to workers in many other industries.
For example, with the financial help of Fair Food Sustainers, we have brought delegations of Arkansas poultry workers who are fighting to end decades of abuse and unsafe working conditions in their workplaces to Immokalee to travel the same path as the dairy workers from Vermont:
“For poultry workers, it wasn’t until we began doing exchange work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers that poultry workers saw a huge opportunity to implement a new, transformative model into the poultry industry. Since early 2018, CIW has been supporting us by providing deep education about the Fair Food Program through exchanges in Florida and Arkansas with workers and organizers. The Coalition has been a key partner in strategizing on how to adapt the WSR model to the poultry supply chain, which has the potential to address longstanding abuses faced by low-wage, predominantly female workers in otherwise isolated poultry processing plants.”
And we have traveled to cities like Minneapolis and Los Angeles to support the campaigns of construction workers and janitors to end abuses that range from slavery and wage theft to sexual harassment and assault. Here’s what workers from the Twin Cities had to say about the CIW and the WSR model:
“The movement of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has seeded grassroots movements around the country, including the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha, or CTUL, in the Twin Cities. And they have not stopped at inspiring new organizing – the CIW has deeply invested in supporting CTUL and many other organizations in building a model for long-term, systemic change through the Worker-driven Social Responsibility Network.”