The first decade of the Fair Food Program has been a steady climb of progress punctuated by spectacular moments of victory, and a growing recognition of the effectiveness of the new worker-driven movement for human rights.
In just ten years, the Fair Food Program has grown to include fourteen major buyers, covering tens of thousands of workers harvesting multiple crops on dozens of farms across eight states. Over that same decade, as the FFP itself expanded, the Program’s success inspired workers in many more industries — and even on two different continents — to adapt its unique model to their own workplaces, from dairy and construction workers here in the US to apparel workers in Bangladesh and Lesotho. Most recently, the FFP launched the new Fair Food Sponsor Program to engage coops and independent grocers, small restaurants, and chefs as official partners. Along the way, the Program has been recognized with prestigious human rights awards and studies in multiple academic analyses.
Of course, the origin story of the Fair Food Program is one of worker struggle and sacrifice. Two decades of marches, hunger strikes, rallies, vigils, petitions, sermons, and teach-ins led by workers and allies laid the moral foundation for what would be called “one of the most important social impact stories of the past century.” Yet, despite the growing mountain of evidence proving that only Worker-driven Social Responsibility has the essential ingredients necessary to actually enforce fundamental human rights in global supply chains, there are still many large retailers and chains that haven’t come to the table.
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In 2012 — the same year that Chipotle and Trader Joe’s signed Fair Food agreements — 100 workers from Immokalee and their allies fasted for a week in front of Publix headquarters in Lakeland calling on Florida’s largest grocery chain to join the FFP. The next year started with a 15-day, 200-mile march and ended with the FFP’s receipt of the prestigious Freedom From Want medal by the Roosevelt Institute. A Presidential Medal from the Obama White House, dozens of articles and academic reports documenting the impact of the Fair Food Program, and even an award-winning documentary sharing the FFP’s unique story with millions of viewers across the globe were to follow over the coming years, but Publix and Wendy’s refusal to join the FFP meant — and still means to this day — that workers in their supply chains are denied access to the Program’s best-in-class human rights protections.
Even with ten years of unprecedented, documented success behind us, hundreds of thousands of farmworkers in this country continue to face abuses ranging from sexual assault to modern-day slavery in fields that remain beyond the reach of the Fair Food Program. That outrageous reality cannot be allowed to stand.
And so the struggle to expand the FFP continues into the next decade, and we need your help to break down the walls of resistance.