Awareness, Analysis and Action: A Rights Holder Perspective on Building the Fair Food Movement and the Way Forward for Worker-Driven Social Responsibility

I. Introduction

There is growing recognition of the need for a more ‘socially just’ implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) that embraces bottom-up, rights holder-driven approaches. ¹ An initiative is underway to articulate a set of community principles to supplement the three-pillar ‘respect, protect, remedy’ framework of the UNGPs, with a fourth pillar that underscores the importance of rights holder agency to the effective implementation of human rights protections. ² With regard to access to remedy, the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights has emphasized that ‘rights holders should be central to the entire remedy process’, ³ and others have made similar observations, encouraging a ‘co-design’ process. ⁴

Over the last ten years, a rights holder-led organization in a small, rural town in the southern United States (US) has fought and forged agreements with multinational corporations, transformed working conditions in an industry, and pioneered the worker-driven social responsibility (WSR) model. These are the achievements of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), which derives its name from the Immokalee farming community in Florida that has served as its base since the early 1990s. In 2011, after hard-fought campaigns to secure commitments from major fast-food, food service and grocery franchises, the CIW launched the Fair Food Program, a partnership among workers, farmers and food retailers, widely recognized for its success in creating enforceable human rights protections and access to remedy for a portion of the highly marginalized migrant workforce that powers most of the US agriculture industry. ⁵ The success of the Fair Food Program is built on worker leadership as its ‘foundational precept’ and is powered by numerous collaborations between farmworkers and a wide cast of non-farmworker allies – human rights investigators, community organizers, faith leaders, students, lawyers, and more. ⁶

This piece explores how rights holder leadership took shape within the CIW and how it drives the Fair Food Program in practice. It offers a first-hand perspective of a farmworker leader within CIW who has seen the Fair Food Program grow – from idea, to reality, to a decade-long track record of improving working conditions in the fields – and aims to inform and encourage more rights holder-driven approaches to ensuring business respect for human rights. This account begins in Section II with a description of the role that human rights discourse and symbolism played within the CIW as a basis for the rights holder analysis, action and outreach that led to the creation of the Fair Food Program. Section III provides a brief overview of the Fair Food Program and the worker-driven social responsibility model that it launched. Section IV explains how rights holder expertise is often overlooked or ignored, but is crucial to the Fair Food Program and movements in general. Section V concludes by considering the role rights holder agency has played in the growth of the WSR model and posits that a greater emphasis on rights holder leadership, rather than boardroom-based approaches, will go further towards ensuring human rights protections that meaningfully improve workers’ lives.

Analysing Rights, Inspiring Action

The CIW began in the early 1990s as organizers worked with a small group of farmworkers who wanted to address the power imbalances that were driving poor wages and working conditions in the Florida tomato industry. These farmworkers from Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala and other Latin American countries brought with them their own experiences of organizing and popular education, which informed this work. It is a worker-led organization, which, in addition to overseeing the Fair Food Program, supports farmworkers in Florida through a community radio station, a store with affordable groceries and other staples, and regular community meetings and events.

During the May to November planting and harvest season, the CIW holds weekly in-person meetings in Immokalee, which are open to all farmworkers. The popular education in these meetings emphasizes the importance of participatory dialogue, critical analysis, and group decision-making. ⁷ It is a deliberately political form of education, rooted in people’s everyday ways of knowing, which recognizes the humanity and dignity of all participants by meeting them where they are. ⁸

In the early 2000s, in the lead-up to what would eventually become the Fair Food movement, these popular education sessions focused on the dissonance between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the Declaration) and workers’ lived experiences. When workers unpacked the words in the Declaration, we reflected on the fact that if those words were true, we would, for example, be paid more, would have the ability to have our families with us, and would not be subjected to violence and harassment in the fields. It was highly effective, because the experience of every person that participated in those meetings was the opposite. Although the meetings were organic, they always landed in the same place: transgressions were happening and we needed to change that. In this way, the Declaration led to a dream that we could be treated as human beings. From there, we created our own vision of what that would look like for us as farmworkers. That vision gave us the power to fight to have our human rights respected and our dignity upheld in the ways that mattered most and were the most relevant to us.

This human rights framework formed the basis from which the CIW built the Fair Food movement. The CIW’s campaign highlighted the value of every human being that is part of food production in the fields. For example, the CIW made a video that showed photos of hundreds of workers’ hands after working a day of harvesting. We shared these photos with allies, and included the inscription, “With these hands I demand the future that miserable wages have stolen from me.” We did not have much to give because our community was absolutely poor, but we wanted to leave people with this image and a promise that if they stood with us, we could change the conditions that forced us to travel and organize and fight. Through thousands of similar interactions, where we recounted our experiences as workers and asserted our dignity, the CIW created a national ally network and eventually succeeded in securing commitments from multinational companies to join the Fair Food Program. ⁹

II. The Fair Food Program and Worker-Driven Social Responsibility

In the Fair Food Program, workers play the central role at every stage of the multi-faceted initiative, from defining the rights that make up the Program’s Code of Conduct to identifying rights violations and managing solutions. Key features of the Fair Food Program include: (1) a code of conduct drafted by workers themselves; (2) worker-to-worker education on worker rights under the code of conduct; (3) a 24-hour, multi-lingual complaint hotline backed by investigators with the power to address allegations of violations of the code; (4) annual audits that include interviews with a minimum of 50 percent of workers; (5) a retailer-paid premium that is passed on to workers as a bonus on top of their wages and, most importantly, (6) legally binding agreements with retail buyers that create market consequences for supplier violations. The end result is that workers trust and use the complaint system, and become the central actors in protecting their own rights.

The Program has secured dramatic, measurable improvements in working conditions and has proven highly effective in preventing the modern-day slavery, sexual violence and harassment among participating farms. ¹⁰ The Program is also the first demonstration of the WSR model, which combines worker-led design and implementation backed by legally binding agreements between a worker organization and the retail brands that are major buyers from the suppliers where the workers are employed. ¹¹ The model has emerged as a new gold standard, offering an alternative to the shortcomings of traditional, top-down corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its reliance on social auditing. ¹²

III. Recognizing Rights Holder Expertise

Worker expertise underlies key components of the Fair Food Program. First, workers define the code of conduct, because, apart from the perpetrators, only workers know the full range of abuses that exist in their workplaces. Second, we educate other workers on that code of conduct, on-site, in the presence of managers. This process acknowledges that workers best know how to communicate with our peers in the fields and that the ability to do so without fear of reprisal goes a long way to building trust in the Program. Third, our lived experiences of long hours in the fields and limited knowledge of English led us to create a grievance mechanism that uses a 24‑hour hotline staffed by multilingual investigators as the most accessible way to report violations. The entire design stems from our experience that the power to report violations without fear is essential to ensuring that changes are implemented on the ground.

The deep roots that workers in the CIW have in Immokalee also mean that we know when new problems arise in the fields, and the worker protections and legally binding agreements built into the WSR model mean we have the power to address them. Since the Fair Food Program’s inception, workers have contributed to several major revisions to the code of conduct. These include developing a safe, extortion-free, recruitment channel for farmworkers in the US guest-worker program, provisions to eliminate a shadowy class of sub-contractors long responsible for some of the worst abuses in the fields, and safety protocols for the use of field trucks in the presence of harvesting crews.

More recently, we have created provisions to protect workers from extreme heat, and implemented mandatory COVID-19 safety protocols during the pandemic – both informed by workers’ experiences in the fields. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) invited us to a town hall meeting to discuss these new provisions, and we called on them to take more aggressive measures against heat illness. Whilst OSHA has still not issued a mandatory heat stress regulation, ¹³ even during a summer of record heat, the Fair Food Program’s heat stress protections are mandatory and backed by the power that workers have to enforce their own rights through complaints to the hotline. Likewise, while OSHA’s COVID-19 safety protocols were struck down by the US Supreme Court, ¹⁴ even in the context of a global health crisis, workers in the Fair Food Program were able to protect themselves. That is the power of the Fair Food Program and WSR.

Outside of the Fair Food Program, farmworkers are not generally granted access to spaces where we are recognized as experts; we had to fight for that. While that is changing now, for the most part society does not think of farmworkers as authorities – even about our own experiences – without outside validation from someone or something that is recognized as a measure that others can accept. This needs to change.

One simple place to start a shift to more bottom-up approaches like WSR would be to acknowledge rights holder expertise and to leverage workers’ unique position in the workplace to identify and fix problems that outside ‘experts’ may never even see, much less know how best to address. At a minimum, this entails the need to enter into conversations with rights holders without preconceived ideas, to stop and remove yourself and your thoughts for a moment and to listen without judgement. Simply listen. What’s going on? What needs to change?

Too often, when the person speaking did not go to school, speaks an indigenous language, or is from Chiapas or Haiti, their experiences are not taken into account the same as when a CEO is speaking, whose words get taken as the truth. This is not due to a lack of analysis and communication on the part of communities that are organizing to end their suffering. Their ideas might come in different forms, or different languages, and may not sound sophisticated, but the ideas are rooted in invaluable experience and they are critical. The problem is an unwillingness to listen and tune into them.

More work needs to be done on bringing rights holders into conversations and valuing their contributions. That is going to be beneficial all the way around because it incorporates the experiences from the ground and connects that with people who will be able to use that to push for real change in their own spheres. In that scenario, everyone has a place. Everyone can be a proponent of change with their own tools using their own language in their own settings. But that first understanding is key if movements are going to be successful.

IV. Looking Ahead: The Importance of Rights Holder Agency

Communities like Immokalee and other communities that are fighting injustice are made up of human beings that are dealing with those conditions as their reality. In this way, rights holders are different from other activists because we are not organizing based on a theory – but to address our immediate needs. Similarly, WSR is dramatically different from top-down corporate social responsibility, which has embraced the language of human rights, but does not have the same urgency to address problems on the ground. From a worker perspective, the typical CSR approach to human rights compliance is inexplicable because there is no accessible way for workers to communicate that they are suffering, no binding commitment by the company to do anything, and no measurable improvements on the ground that they can see.

In contrast, the CIW’s experience has led other workers that are suffering from similar problems to reach out to us as mentors and advisors. Those human connections have contributed to the creation of the Milk With Dignity Program, and the expansion of the WSR model beyond agriculture to pilot programs in the apparel, construction and film production industries. We are building on the proof that corporations can do things differently. These new initiatives are different from the Fair Food Program, but they start from the same idea that, when you incorporate the voices of rights holders, everything changes.

This realignment is needed on a much broader scale. We know WSR works, we have the evidence to prove it. As rights holders, we need the resources, the participation and collaboration of the larger business and human rights community – and the authority of the United Nations in particular – to help translate WSR into reality in more workplaces, and ensure workers’ human rights are protected on the ground, instead of just on paper.