CIW’s Lucas Benitez: “I arrived ready to go into the field and to perform that labor, but what I was not prepared for was facing constant violations of my human rights in the process.”
“We, as workers, were able to create real consequences where before there existed none.”
To mark the 75th anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, CIW co-founder Lucas Benitez gave a powerful speech at the Institute for Human Rights and Business last month in New York. The speech shed light on the dawn of a human rights revolution underway in low-wage industries across the world thanks to the emergence of the idea of Worker-driven Social Responsibility in the tomato fields of Florida nearly two decades ago, and to the expansion of the WSR model to now five continents and multiple industries today. In his speech, Lucas shared his personal story of coming to the US to work in the fields only to witness horrific abuse, and provided insight into how he and his fellow farmworkers in the agricultural community of Immokalee were able to bring about a much-needed paradigm shift in the protection of human rights in corporate supply chains that has now gone global.
Since the beginning of modern, industrial-scale agriculture in the United States, farm labor has been among the most dangerous, lowest-paid jobs in the country, and farmworkers among the least protected workers. The women and men who harvest our food face countless risks when they head into the fields every morning to put food on our tables: extreme heat and humidity from dawn to dusk, exposure to deadly pesticides, the life-and-death risk of lightning strikes, even bus and truck accidents in travel to and from the fields. And they do so for pay that renders their hopes of escaping poverty a distant dream.
As Lucas explained, that’s why it was s0 critical that farmworkers themselves, with their hard-earned expertise, needed to be the architects of the solution to the myriad dangers and abuses faced by farmworkers from Florida to California.
And the fact that on fields across the country, beyond the groundbreaking protections of the Fair Food Program, hundreds of thousands of farmworkers continue to experience that same exploitation and abuse today is the reason why the CIW is organizing a three-day long celebration of the human rights of farmworkers and the urgent need to expand the Fair Food Program from March 8-10 in Palm Beach, FL. If you’re interested in attending or volunteering for that festival, click here to register!
Below you can find a partial transcript of Lucas’ speech, but we encourage you to take the time to watch the whole discussion on human rights and agriculture, linked here, moderated by Julia Batho, the deputy CEO of the Institute for Human Rights and Business, and including panelists Marcela Manubens, the CEO Roxbury Global, and Jason Judd, the Executive DIrector of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell University.
Enjoy!
“Immokalee is a small town here in the United States in the deep south. It is a small town that is perhaps largely forgotten in the United States, but it is one that feeds the country. It is formed mostly by farmworkers–those of us who work in the fields. But it is also the home and the place where the new model of WSR [Worker-driven Social Responsibility] was born. This concept of social responsibility directed by workers themselves, or Worker-driven Social Responsibility. It essentially represents a new paradigm in this broad movement for social responsibility in corporate supply chains.
When I arrived from Mexico in the early 90s to work in the fields, I arrived ready for hard work. I arrived ready to go into the field and to perform that labor, but what I was not prepared for was facing constant violations of my human rights in the process. I realized that in fact human rights were not universally respected things: wage theft, forced labor, sexual assault, and physical violence: that was the norm. And that is what drove us, 30 years ago in 1993, to begin organizing as farmworkers to respond to those abuses: to fundamentally respond and defend our human rights, because in those days bosses would violate your human rights without a single consequence.
After many years of work stoppages, strikes, and even a 30-day hunger strike by six of our members, we were able to see the beginnings of measurable change. And we realized that if we wanted to see real and lasting change, we needed to be doing things a little differently. We needed to create a new form of power and to access the kind of power that wouldn’t simply bring us to the table, but would keep us at the table. Most importantly, [we realized] that whatever changes we are able to achieve were not only sustainable but durable.
Benitez with John Esformes, CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers DBA Sunripe Certified Brands
We not only wanted to establish our human rights, we wanted to enforce them. We began to reflect as a group, and we arrived at a new analysis of the agricultural industry. We realized that the power that allowed us to be beaten, that allowed our wages to be stolen, and that put us in poverty–it didn’t originate in the field. That power originated with the large corporate buyers at the top of the supply chain; whether you’re a farmworker, factory worker, working in textiles, or working in the mines.
So, in our case as farmworkers, we’re talking about companies like McDonald’s, Burger King, Walmart: that is the hand at work in the market. It’s from those buyers that pressure comes for farmers not only to produce but to provide a product that is cheap… and that’s really the point of origin for a lot of the abuse that we face.
We began organizing not only with farmworkers but also with people just like all of you in the room here, and people who are online – consumers – to start asking not just for food but for fair food, so that these companies would sign legal legally binding agreements directly with us as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in order to establish and enforce and ensure human rights for all of the women and men in their supply chain. Essentially to predicate their purchasing on the enforcement of human rights in their supply chain…”
Watch the whole panel, including Lucas’s speech in its entirety, here
