As the calendar flips from 2023 to 2024, the CIW turns 31 years old.
Thirty years ago, in 1993, farmworkers from Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti began to hold weekly community meetings at the local Catholic church in Immokalee in an effort to address the abuses that had plagued Southwest Florida’s fields for generations. We drew upon social movement experiences in Haiti, Mexico, and Guatemala, in developing our strategy and through work stoppages, hunger strikes, and marches. We won modest wage increases for Florida tomato pickers, while assisting in the prosecution of some of the country’s earliest cases of multi-state, multi-worker modern-day slavery — helping to liberate thousands of workers held against their will and putting dozens of farm bosses behind bars for their crimes.
But we quickly realized that unfortunately, no matter how many farm bosses we sent to prison with our efforts, there were always many more ready to try their luck at reaping the spoils of holding their fellow human beings in bondage in a world where law enforcement resources dedicated to ending farm labor abuse are woefully inadequate. In order to truly abolish modern-day slavery in the fields, we would have to take the profit out of slavery — prevent forced labor altogether by remaking the agricultural industry whereby workers are empowered to identify abuse without fear of retaliation, and where abusers know that if they violate their workers’ rights they will get caught, and there will be consequences backed by the market. The scope of our thinking turned from local to national.
With that realization, we turned a new page in our organizing, and launched the first-ever farmworker boycott of a major fast food company Taco Bell – calling on the fast-food giant to take responsibility for human rights abuses in the fields where its produce is grown and picked, working hand-in-hand with many of you. In 2005, Taco Bell (Yum! Brands) signed the first-ever Fair Food Agreement.
This was just the beginning of the Campaign for Fair Food, and since then, farmworkers have partnered with people of faith, students and young people, and communities all over the country to win respect for workers from some of the largest corporations in the world — leading 14 fast-food, food-service, and grocer companies to sign Fair Food Agreements with CIW.
In 2010, the CIW signed a groundbreaking agreement with the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange to extend the CIW’s Fair Food principles – including a strict code of conduct, a cooperative complaint resolution system, a participatory health and safety program, and a worker-to-worker education process – to over 90% of the Florida tomato industry. And with that, the Fair Food Program was born.
Now, in 2023, we celebrate the Fair Food Program’s power of prevention — the prevention of forced labor, sexual assault, physical abuses, wage theft, and much more — not just in tomatoes, and not just in Florida, but in a multitude of new crops, 10 new states. We have even expanded to new countries with pilot farms in Chile and South Africa and more planned in Mexico. As I look back at the last 30 years, I am amazed by how much progress we have made — together.
Thirty years from now, my hope is that the CIW’s work through the Fair Food Program will have touched everyone on the planet in some way — consumers, buyers, growers, sponsors, sustainers. And, I am optimistic.
Thank you for advocating on our behalf around the world. As the CIW turns 31 years old, we hope you will consider making a gift to the Fair Food Program. With your support, we can continue growing the Fair Food Program so that 30 years from now, no worker has to face a beating from his crewleader just for asking for a drink of water; no worker has to fear the hands of her farm boss or the offer of a ride in his truck; no worker has to live under 24/7 surveillance, trapped by armed guards behind a barbed-wire fence. With your support, and the groundbreaking protections of the Fair Food Program, all farmworkers can labor in an environment of dignity and respect.
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With gratitude,
Lucas Benitez
Co-founder
Coalition of Immokalee Workers