Greg Asbed, CIW, on Worker-driven Social Responsibility: “This new paradigm for human rights protection has established an unparalleled track record of success for more than a decade and has proven, in the process, that protecting workers’ fundamental human rights in corporate supply chains is not only possible, it’s good for business, too.”

“There are no shortcuts in WSR. No amount of buzzwords or claims to the latest trend in social responsibility can make up for the lack of real enforcement power and the ability not just to protect workers when they lodge a complaint but actually to investigate that complaint thoroughly and implement a meaningful corrective action plan to remediate it. That is the stuff of real worker-driven social responsibility.”

Worker-driven Social Responsibility, a groundbreaking paradigm to guarantee the essential human rights of workers, took root first in the tomato fields of Florida in 2001, but is now extending its reach to worker communities around the globe, including the fishing sector of Scotland.

To help facilitate the process of adapting WSR to protect fishers, Greg Asbed, a co-founder of the CIW, penned an op-ed in Seafood Source, a leading fishing industry trade publication. In the piece, Asbed affirms the urgency forging a genuine WSR program for fishing — an industry marked by systemic human rights violations not unlike those that were typical in the tomato fields of Florida before the launch of the FFP.  In outlining the factors that have established WSR as the most effective human rights enforcement approach in corporate supply chains today, Asbed also warns against the false promises of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, which, as he writes “have demonstrated time and time again that their model is simply not fit for the purpose of human rights enforcement.” 

Check out the op-ed in full below, and of course, stay tuned for more exciting news about the global development of WSR!

Op-ed: From farmworkers to fishermen: Lessons from US produce on protecting human rights on the high seas

In 2003, while speaking to a reporter from The New Yorker magazine, a U.S. Justice Department official called the agricultural industry in and around the farmworker community of Immokalee, Florida, “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” The distinction was well-earned, with six separate forced labor operations uncovered in the area and successfully prosecuted by federal officials in the six years leading up to that interview.

In 2008, following a visit to Immokalee, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) agreed, telling the editor of The Nation, “[W]hen we talk about the race to the bottom here in the United States, I would say that Immokalee, Florida, is the bottom. I think those are workers who are more ruthlessly exploited and treated with more contempt than any group of workers I’ve ever seen and I suspect exist in the U.S.”

In 2014, however, Susan Marquis, dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School at the time, told a reporter for the New York Times, “But now, the tomato fields in Immokalee are probably the best working environment in American agriculture. In the past three years, they’ve gone from being the worst to the best.”

What happened in the interim? 

In 2010, following nearly two decades of organizing their fellow workers and consumers across the country, farmworkers from Immokalee launched the Fair Food Program (FFP), a groundbreaking initiative that joins farmworkers, farm owners, and the billion-dollar brands that buy the fruits and vegetables they produce in a partnership that harnesses the brands’ purchasing power to enforce farmworkers’ rights in the fields.

Backed by the brands’ commitment to buy from suppliers who comply with the FFP’s code of conduct, the program empowers workers to serve as frontline monitors of their own rights without fear of retaliation for lodging a complaint or raising issues during audits with the FFP’s dedicated investigators. With workers mobilized to identify bad practices and bad actors in the workplace, the FFP has eradicated longstanding labor violations from sexual harassment to modern-day slavery.

This unique model of human rights enforcement – dubbed worker-driven social responsibility (WSR) by the farmworker organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), that invented it – fundamentally transformed Florida’s notorious tomato industry in the space of just a few years. But, it didn’t stop there. The FFP has also since scaled to operate in nearly half the United States today, and the WSR model has been successfully replicated in industries and geographies ranging from the textile sweatshops of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Lesotho to the dairy farms of Vermont, tackling deeply entrenched abuses from gender-based violence to wage theft and forced labor. 

The WSR model is based on two essential pillars that guarantee workers a real voice in the workplace.

One is legally binding agreements between workers’ organizations and participating buyers – including such well-known brands as McDonald’s, Walmart, and Whole Foods – that require the brands to condition their purchases on compliance with human rights and create market consequences for human rights violations.

The other is worker leadership, generated through multiple, overlapping mechanisms – from worker-to-worker rights education in the workplace to a protected, 24/7 complaint investigation and resolution process.

This new paradigm for human rights protection has established an unparalleled track record of success for more than a decade and has proven, in the process, that protecting workers’ fundamental human rights in corporate supply chains is not only possible, it’s good for business, too.

I am a co-founder of the CIW and the FFP, and today, my work focuses on helping worker organizations around the globe looking to adapt the WSR model to the industries where they work and where they face the same outrageous human rights violations workers faced in Immokalee before the launch of the Fair Food Program.

One of those organizations today is the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), the global trade union that represents fishers around the world. Together with the U.K.-based human rights organization FLEX (Focus on Labor Exploitation) and Jess Sparks, a leading expert on human rights in the fishing industry based at Tufts University in the U.S., the ITF is spearheading the development of the Fair Seafood Program, which will soon become the first-ever WSR program in the global fishing industry. ITF and its partners are working with the Scottish White Fish Producers Association (SWFPA) and the SEA Alliance in the development of the new program, with plans to launch a pilot in the northeast of Scotland in the coming months.

When that pilot is launched, it won’t be a minute too soon. Not unlike Immokalee before the launch of the FFP, the U.K. fishing industry is dealing with its own longstanding human rights issues. A recent BBC Scotland documentary “laid bare a catalogue of alleged abuse of foreign crew on the scalloping vessels owned by Annan-based TN Trawlers, over nearly a decade,” with allegations ranging from wage theft and dangerous working conditions to possible human trafficking.

To its credit, the SWFPA has taken some measures to address the issues that came to light in the documentary, but as employer associations in any industry know all too well, it only takes one scandal to taint an entire industry. Additionally, while self-regulation may look like a step in the right direction, it will ultimately have only a limited impact and cannot fix an industry’s reputation. Only a trusted third party can do that, and the WSR model, by empowering workers themselves to root out wrongdoers and long-festering abuses, has become the undisputed gold standard for doing just that, making it a win-win-win for workers, employers, and buyers alike in every industry it has taken root. 

The road ahead for the WSR model is not, however, without its own challenges. Like any new paradigm, the greatest impediment to its expansion is the old paradigm struggling to hold its ground.

In the case of the Fair Food Program, for-profit auditing agencies and well-known certification schemes like Fair Trade still occupy the vast majority of space in the world of social responsibility today. Though increasing scrutiny of the social audit model and the emerging focus on human rights due diligence are exposing those traditional social responsibility schemes for their lack of demonstrable impact and inability to protect workers from ongoing harm and retaliation, they continue to push their outdated model. Their efforts to remain relevant are all too often rewarded by short-sighted buyers satisfied with the appearance of social responsibility over the actual substance of human rights enforcement. 

The same holds true for the fishing sector. Examples of unsuccessful, industry-aligned audit schemes litter the landscape in the U.K. fishing industry over the past decades – from Human Rights at Sea (HRAS) and its Fishermen’s Welfare Alliance to the recent efforts of many fishery improvement projects (FIPs) to retool their traditional environmental protection model to meet the demands of brands looking for meaningful human rights impacts. Yet, the uninterrupted drumbeat of troubling labor news coming from the fishing industry only underscores the failure of those efforts and the shortcomings of the old corporate social responsibility (CSR) paradigm.

Lacking WSR’s legally binding agreements to harness the purchasing power of the brands to drive compliance and the worker leadership to ensure that the brands’ purchases are laser-focused on workers’ real human rights concerns, traditional CSR programs have demonstrated time and time again that their model is simply not fit for the purpose of human rights enforcement. HRAS’s latest initiative in Northern Ireland – to “review internal processes for the safety, security, and well-being of deck crew” – looks to be just the latest version of lightly retooled CSR that will ultimately fail to empower workers to identify abuses and root out those whose actions continue to tarnish the industry, vessel owners, and buyers alike.

There are no shortcuts in WSR. No amount of buzzwords or claims to the latest trend in social responsibility can make up for the lack of real enforcement power and the ability not just to protect workers when they lodge a complaint but actually to investigate that complaint thoroughly and implement a meaningful corrective action plan to remediate it. That is the stuff of real worker-driven social responsibility. For employers looking to level the playing field and eliminate the worst actors dragging the industry down with their practices – or for brands that have finally come to the realization that the only way to truly mitigate reputational risk for their companies is by ending human rights risks for workers in their supply chains – nothing short of the real thing will do.

In the months ahead, fishers with the ITF, vessel owners with the SWFPA, and brands with the SEA Alliance will take the first steps toward that real thing with the launch of the Fair Seafood Program pilot. Here’s wishing them calm seas and steady tailwinds.