Mary Beth Gallagher, Domini Impact Investments: “We will continue to encourage Kroger to join the Fair Food Program, because we think it will deliver meaningful human rights outcomes.”

Gerardo Reyes Chavez, CIW, to Kroger shareholders: “The stakes of a just transition for Kroger are nothing less than life or death for the farmworkers who put food on all our tables.”

When farmworkers from Immokalee first asked grocery giant Kroger — well over a decade ago — to sign an agreement with them to guarantee their essential rights in the fields where Kroger bought its tomatoes, Kroger refused.  At the time, the Fair Food Program was still just a concept, a novel theory of change based on a simple, but potentially revolutionary, proposition: Major buyers of Florida’s tomatoes had the market power to demand that their Florida suppliers — the growers who employed thousands of Immokalee workers — respect their workers’ fundamental human rights, and in so doing, radically change farmworkers’ lives for the better.

As it happens, even without Kroger’s support, the CIW was able to secure Fair Food agreements with enough major buyers to launch the Fair Food Program a few years later, testing their theory of change in one of the toughest laboratories this country had to offer, the Florida tomato industry, also known at the time as “ground zero for modern-day slavery” by federal prosecutors.  And the experiment was nothing short of a spectacular success, transforming “ground zero” into what one labor expert called just three years later “the best workplace environment in American agriculture” on the front page of the New York Times.  

And today, the Fair Food Program — nothing more than a seed of an idea when the CIW first approached Kroger well over a decade ago —  is not only firmly rooted in Florida agriculture, but its branches extend to 22 other states and dozens of crops, protecting tens of thousands of farmworkers. The FFP has evolved to include the country’s strongest workplace heat rules, and now serves as a blueprint for workers across the globe to replicate in their own industries as a proven tool to protect their own human rights and dignity in workplaces ranging from textile factories to fishing vessels.

And yet, despite all the progress made since that first refusal years ago, Kroger still stands stubbornly on the wrong side of history and refuses to join the Fair Food Program.

In the last fifteen years, most of Kroger’s major competitors — including Walmart, Stop & Shop, Giant, Fresh Market, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s — have joined the Fair Food Program and committed to protecting farmworkers in their supply chains. Meanwhile, Kroger has been publicly connected to three separate forced labor rings in just the last four years alone, and has yet to even publicly acknowledge their role in them, much less join the program called “an international benchmark in the fight against modern-day slavery” by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Trafficking. 

Echoing the call from farmworkers and their consumer allies, a group of Kroger shareholders introduced a resolution at the grocery giant’s most recent annual shareholder meeting encouraging Kroger to finally join the Fair Food Program.  Their resolution reflected a newfound urgency for new and stronger protections in corporate supply chains for vulnerable workers: Accelerating climate change exposes farmworkers and other outdoor workers to ever-more dangerous heat in the workplace, making the expansion of the FFP to the fields where Kroger buys its produce a matter of life and death for thousands of farmworkers currently toiling in Kroger’s supply chain.

Their resolution was covered in an excellent report by Civil Eats’ Grey Moran, who also profiled the groundbreaking partnership between growers and workers at the heart of the FFP in a piece for Civil Eats back in March of this year. Check out the piece in full below, or read it on Civil Eats’ website by clicking here. 

Farmworkers Push Kroger’s Shareholders for Heat and Labor Protections

For years, U.S. farmworkers have been pressuring Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket, to come to the table to establish stronger labor protections on the farms supplying its fruits and vegetables. Specifically, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a worker rights organization in Florida, has repeatedly asked Kroger to join its Fair Food Program, which has implemented the strongest heat protections in the nation.

Farmworkers took this a step further at Kroger’s annual shareholder meeting in late June, directing their plea for stronger human rights to the major financiers whose dividends depend on the under-recognized labor of farmworkers. They called upon the company’s shareholders—whose top investors are Vanguard, BlackRock, and Berkshire Hathaway—to support a proposal that Kroger publish a “just transition” report examining “how the risks to workers are changing due to rising temperatures” in its agricultural supply chain.

In a speech at the meeting, Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a former farmworker and current organizer with CIW, painted a picture for shareholders of the stark reality faced by U.S. farmworkers laboring under record-breaking temperatures—with no mandatory right to shade, water, or breaks in most states. The proposal, introduced by Domini Impact Investments, one of Kroger’s shareholders, adds pressure to the company to address these growing risks.

“We must establish the gravity, indeed, the dire urgency of this resolution. The stakes of a just transition for Kroger are nothing less than life or death for the farmworkers who put food on all our tables,” Chavez said in his address to the shareholders. “Even just taking a break to drink water has been met with harassment and violence from a supervisor. I know this because it is the reality I myself have lived as a farmworker.”

Kroger did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, the Biden administration unveiled a heat protection rule, the first federal standard of its kind, which would require employers develop an emergency plan for heat illness and provide outdoor workers with shade, water, rest breaks, and training to manage and identify heat risks. But its pathway to implementation is murky. The rule likely won’t be finalized until the end of the year. Also, it may be halted under a Trump administration, and it will likely be challenged in court by industries already fighting it.

Currently, only four states—California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado—have mandated similar rules to protect farmworkers from extreme heat. In the meantime, the consequences are dire: Farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat stress compared to workers in other industries.

The investors supporting the proposal claim that Kroger’s existing policies are failing to protect workers from climate risks and other human rights abuses, pointing to the death of a worker at Kroger’s distribution center from heat stress in 2023. Investors also cited Kroger’s track record of supplying from multiple farms linked to modern-day slavery, including sourcing from a watermelon farm in Florida where workers—held against their will in a barbed-wire encampment—escaped by hiding in the trunk of a car.

“Kroger’s current supplier policies contain vague expectations and do not include binding obligations that effectively keep workers safe. For monitoring, Kroger relies on social audits or voluntary self-assessments, which have been widely critiqued and discredited for their failure to deliver human rights outcomes and remediate harms,” states the proposal.

Instead, the proposal encourages Kroger to join the CIW’s Fair Food Program, which it describes as “the only farmworker program with a demonstrated track record of success in protecting farmworkers in U.S. agriculture from climate-related risks.” (Previously, Domini Impact Investments filed a proposal asking Kroger to join the Fair Food Program as a pilot program, but it was determined to be against SEC rules.)

The Fair Food Program offers binding labor protections through a contract between farmworkers, farmers, and major food retailers, which is monitored by an independent council that operates a 24/7 trilingual complaint line. The program has been widely recognized for rooting out some of the most persistent abuses, including sexual assault and forced labor, that often plague corporate supply chains. The shareholder proposal asks Kroger to examine how its current policies compare to the Fair Food Program.

The investors’ proposal also took issue with the company’s “siloed approach” to environmental issues without considering workers. For instance, “Kroger’s recently released nature-based strategy, developed to reduce pesticides with the goal to protect pollinators and biodiversity, does not make any mention of farmworkers who apply pesticides,” shareholders noted in the proposal. It’s estimated that pesticide exposure unintentionally kills around 11,000 people per year, particularly farmers and farmworkers.

In the end, despite Chavez’s plea, just over 80 percent of shareholders voted against the proposal; while 460 million shareholders voted against the proposal, 98 million voted for it. Prior to the annual meeting, Kroger’s board of directors had advised its shareholders to vote against adopting the proposal, according to SEC filings.

“The company already provides robust annual reporting on sustainability and social impact topics and engages stakeholders to inform content,” stated Kroger’s board of directors, citing the company’s existing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy. “People are at the heart of Kroger’s purpose-driven approach and shared-value ESG strategy: Thriving Together. As outlined in our ESG report, we aim to advance positive impacts across three strategic pillars—people, planet, and systems.”

Mary Beth Gallagher, the director of engagement with Domino Impact Investments, the company behind the shareholder proposal, was still encouraged by the percentage of shareholders who voted in favor of adopting her proposal. “It signals that enough of their investor base sees this as a risk that they should be managing differently,” she told Civil Eats.

“We will continue to encourage Kroger to join the Fair Food Program, because we think it will deliver meaningful human rights outcomes,” Gallagher said. “It will protect against this risk, and it will strengthen its human rights programs and performance.”