CIW farmworker staff members provide an on-the-clock, worker-to-worker education session on an FFP Farm
La Jornada: “Both the administrators and the CIW explain that, in the end, the agreement not only directly benefited the workers but also improved the company’s business and reputation.”
Lucas Benitez, CIW co-founder, on Worker-driven Social Responsibility: “How beautiful it is that we can say: here’s the formula for this medicine and you can adapt it to your reality…”
Since its inception 15 years ago, the Fair Food Program has ushered in a new day for farmworkers across the US by guaranteeing them essential human rights protections against wage theft, harassment, retaliation, and modern-day slavery. And now, the Presidential Medal-winning FFP has become a beacon of hope, visible across the world to all those seeking to guarantee their dignity in global supply chains.
In recent years, the CIW has hosted several delegations of workers and human rights advocates from around the world who come to the organization’s headquarters in Immokalee in hopes of learning more about the Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model at the heart of the Fair Food Program, and about how they can adapt the WSR model to the far flung industries where they work to monitor and enforce their own basic human rights. Fishers, garment workers, construction workers, and farmworkers have all made the long journey to Immokalee to learn about the model from its principal architects, and just two weeks ago, the CIW hosted a delegation of banana workers from Ecuador looking to WSR to help solve the deeply entrenched issues in their own industry. Ecuador is the largest exporter of bananas in the world — indeed the industry is so important to the country’s economy that the current president is himself is a banana farmer.
Two journalists with the popular Mexican news outlet La Jornada also happened to be visiting the CIW during the Ecuadorian workers’ visit to Immokalee. Together, both the workers and journalists attended a worker-to-worker education session on a FFP farm, met with representatives of a participating grower, and participated in a series of discussions with CIW staff members and human rights investigators with the Fair Food Standards Council, the third-party body that monitors the implementation of the FFP. The journalists trip to Immokalee resulted in an excellent three-part feature series.
We’re excited to share excerpts from each of the three articles below, which all delve into the history of the CIW, the organization’s tireless efforts to expand the FFP’s reach, and the promising future of WSR.
Enjoy, and stay tuned for more exciting news regarding the global adoption of WSR soon!
US farmworkers export labor justice
Immokalee – From a place in the southeastern United States, farmworkers are driving an unprecedented transformation in agriculture, creating a worker-led and worker-managed model that reshapes labor relations, even liberating thousands from conditions akin to slavery.
Next to a huge parking lot, where farmworkers wait to get on the buses of the companies that hire them for the tomato harvest, are the offices of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers with its meeting rooms, a type of low-priced food cooperative, archives, posters, puppets and recognition of the fight they have fought for more than three decades, and Radio Conciencia, known as La Tuya, which transmits the voice of the organization.
Before the sun rises, staff members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) gather here. With them are a delegation from a union of Ecuadorian banana workers who are visiting to evaluate how to adopt WSR in their own country, as well as representatives from various NGOs that work on labor issues in Argentina, Spain and Mexico. A couple of vans go out to one of the tomato fields of the Pacific Tomato Growers company, the second largest in Florida.
Inside a room on the property, about 40 farmworkers with temporary work visas (H-2A) are waiting for a training session. Lucas Benitez, Lupe Gonzalo, and some of the leaders of the CIW start the session with questions about where the famrmrowkers come from — Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Tabasco, they answer — and it turns out that they are all Mexicans on this occasion. The workers in this region of Florida are mainly Mexicans, Guatemalans, and Haitians.
The CIW staff members explain what the Fair Food Program is, the model developed by the CIW based on an agreement between workers, growers, and large companies that condition their sourcing on farm compliance with working conditions and mechanisms to resolve disputes and complaints. This model is now being applied in several states and even in other countries (Benitez has just returned from South Africa, where this model is being adopted). But everything revolves around mutual respect, Benitez and Gonzalo repeat, and that each worker exercises their rights established by the agreements.
Though there are legally-binding agreements with corporate buyers, their implementation depends on you, Benitez emphasizes. Gonzalo points out that this also covers the issue of sexual harassment and harassment by administrators and supervisors, but also among the workers themselves, and that under the agreement, there is zero tolerance; they now have the right to complain without fear…
“…We discovered we had a lot in common,” says Miguel, part of PTG’s management staff, “and now this relationship has lasted 14 years.” Both the administrators and the CIW explain that, in the end, the agreement not only directly benefited the workers but also improved the company’s business and reputation. It became a place where farmworkers wanted to work—those arriving with temporary work visas are recruited in Mexico—and clear standards were established to create a dignified workplace…
Consciousness + commitment = change:
The formula of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
An on-the-clock, worker-to-worker education session trains farmworkers on the FFP’s protections, including its heat stress standards
Immokalee – Farmworkers in this country are among the most exploited and mistreated laborers, but from this corner of Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has developed a model that has transformed the lives of tens of thousands of immigrant workers in over 20 states, securing better wages, improved working conditions, and respect for basic human rights.
Through its Fair Food Program, the CIW has successfully negotiated agreements with… many national fast-food chains and supermarkets, including Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Chipotle, Walmart, and Whole Foods, among others—an unprecedented achievement. The coalition has also played a key role in freeing more than 2,000 farmworkers from conditions of modern-day slavery in Florida…
The CIW was founded in 1993 as a small group of farmworkers who met weekly in the basement of a church in Immokalee. Over time, they gained support in their mission to build a worker-led human rights movement. “The coalition’s first meetings were like a United Nations gathering,” recalls Lucas Benitez, CIW co-founder, in an interview with La Jornada. “Back then, we had attendees who only spoke Indigenous languages, Haitians, and those of us who spoke Spanish…”
In Immokalee, we don’t organize; we encourage defending rights
…Lucas Benitez emphasizes: “We are not organizers. I don’t even have my own life organized, so how could I organize someone else? We are animators… we are animating the workers to do the work of defending their own rights. We are giving them the tools. We’re not telling them: ‘This is how you should be organized, this is how things should be.’ No, this (the rights under the Fair Food Program) is what there is, use it. You’re opening the door for them to make the change too. That’s within them…”
“…Thirty, 33 years ago, if someone had told me that we were going to be in South Africa training workers, that I would be in the middle of the sea, in southern Chile, at the end of the world, where people who raise salmon live, I would have said: you’re crazy, we have so much to do here, how are we going to go out,” Benitez says.
Here is the formula, adapt it to your reality
Benitez continues: “As I always say, this vaccine we developed here has expanded to other places, and other groups have seen how effective it is, so they want it… that’s the most beautiful part. Simply and straightforwardly, we don’t have to be there 100 percent, like in the textile industry in South Africa or Lesotho… How beautiful it is that we can say: here’s the formula for this medicine and you can adapt it to your reality…” He mentions that work is being done on implementing the program with fishermen in Scotland.
“It’s something we didn’t expect, but it’s very satisfying to see that this is benefiting many more workers and that it comes from a community as poor as ours, from a community as completely poor as you can see,” he adds…
