The Promise of the Worker-driven Social Responsibility Paradigm
The promise of the Worker-driven Social Responsibility Paradigm to protect workers in the age of climate change
-Written by Ty Joplin, Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program
“I worked here ten years ago, and it was a very abusive environment. We were rushed to work harder all the time, and we were yelled at and disrespected. We felt beaten down, nervous around our supervisors, and worked almost like slaves. We had no one to complain to about this abuse, so nothing ever changed… I heard from friends that continued to work at [the farm] that things had changed, and I came back to work… The environment here is so much better; we have everything we need, from gloves to bathrooms to water and shade, and if we have a complaint… Workers here are now treated with respect, like human beings.”
– Farmworker on a FFP farm
How farmworkers forged a new human rights paradigm through the Fair Food Program (FFP)
Since the earliest days of industrial-scale agriculture in this country, exploitation and abuse have haunted America’s farm fields. From chattel slavery to sharecropping to the continued existence of large scale forced labor operations in the fields today, the history of labor-intensive agriculture in this country cannot be written without telling the story of the harsh and widespread exploitation of farmworkers.
To quote Senator Bernie Sanders, following a visit to the farmworker community of Immokalee in 2008, “[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.” Indeed, while his quotation was specific to Immokalee, he might as well have been speaking about all the roughly two million farmworkers doing dangerous, backbreaking work for poverty wages in fields across the country when he concluded, “The norm is a disaster, and the extreme is slavery.”
The dangers of agricultural work go far beyond the complications of working long hours under an ever-warmer sun or performing rapid and repetitive tasks with heavy buckets of produce. Farmworkers often contend with exposure to heat stress, lightning, pesticides, field truck accidents and unsafe transport, not to mention recruitment fees and other illegal charges leading to debt peonage, abusive and violent labor contractors, sexual harassment and assault, as well as sub-standard, overcrowded housing.
It was to fight back against these conditions that farmworkers first began organizing as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in 1993. Meeting weekly in the back room of a church in the dusty crossroads town, farmworkers discussed the daily violations of their basic human rights and developed an analysis that sought to identify the root causes of that abuse, as well as a strategy, driven by their analysis, to ensure their dignity.
Corporations sign legally binding agreements to preferentially purchase farms that comply with the Fair Food Program’s worker-drafted Code of Conduct, which includes rigorous heat stress protections in addition to prohibitions on wage theft, harassment, discrimination, forced labor, and retaliation. The FFP also mandates corporations pay a Fair Food Premium directly to workers, which is shown as a separate line-item on their paychecks.
Through years of this constant practice of community action and reflection, workers with the CIW located those root causes at the top of the food supply chain, where retail food giants leverage their immense purchasing power to squeeze growers on prices at the farm gate, and in turn create an unrelenting downward pressure on wages and working conditions for farmworkers in the fields. After successive national pressure campaigns, the CIW signed legally binding agreements with 14 of the world’s largest food corporations, including McDonalds, Walmart, and Whole Foods to protect farmworkers down their supply chain.
The Fair Food Program’s transformative power stems from these legally binding commitments from corporate buyers to preferentially source from growers who comply with a worker-drafted Code of Conduct, which includes a prohibition on retaliation for workers speaking up. The FFP Farms’ compliance is monitored through a combination of a 24/7 complaint mechanism and deep-dive audits, all driven by workers informed of their rights though regular worker-to-worker education sessions on the farm and on the clock. As such, the Fair Food Program has given farmworkers a real voice and provided enforceable mechanisms to ensure their voice is heard. Within just a few short years of its launch, the FFP transformed the fields once dubbed “ground zero for modern-day slavery” by federal prosecutors into what one labor expert called “the best workplace environment in American agriculture” on the front page of the New York Times. The FFP now protects tens of thousands of farmworkers across 23 states and 3 countries including Chile and South Africa.
The “Nation’s Strongest Workplace Heat Rules” are found in the Fair Food Program
The risks posed by ever-rising temperatures have become increasingly dangerous – and even deadly — for outdoor workers. According to the National Institute of Health, farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat-related issues than workers in other industries. State attempts to legislate stronger heat protections for workers have stalled or even been rolled back, as in the case of Florida’s recent prohibition against the passage of measures by local jurisdictions to protect workers from heat exposure. And, though significant progress has been made, the very lengthy process to create a federal OSHA heat rule continues with a final heat rule possibly years away. To fill the void, the Fair Food Program and its participating growers came together to create and implement life-saving measures.
The Fair Food Program’s heat stress protocols include mandatory rest breaks every 2 hours, as well as the mandatory provision of water, electrolytes, shade, and training. Workers with symptoms of heat stress are able to stop working and seek medical treatment if requested without fear of retaliation.
In August of 2021, following weeks of research and discussion, the Fair Food Program did what it has done repeatedly in the face of serious risks to workers – analyze the problem, identify its roots causes and respond with new, enforceable standards that save lives and protect health. In this case, those standards were designed to protect workers from the growing threat of rising temperatures and the results of accelerating climate change.
The Fair Food Program always had best-in-class guarantees of access to shade, clean water and elective rest breaks. But in response to this growing threat – and in consultation with the Fair Food Standards Council (the third-party monitor that enforces the Fair Food Program Code of Conduct on Participating Farms), and Participating Growers on the FFP’s Working Group (the collaborative body that provides essential feedback on emerging issues necessary to develop practical policies designed to remedy those issues) – the FFP studied the latest science, considered the logistical challenges of the agricultural workplace, and set forth enforceable standards requiring a comprehensive plan for heat stress prevention from each farm, mandatory rest breaks every two hours; comprehensive, trilingual training for workers and supervisors alike on the symptoms of heat stress and what to do when workers display or complain of those symptoms; a buddy system for workers on Fair Food farms and emergency response protocols, on all Fair Food Program farms, specifically:
From April 15 – November 15
- Mandatory Cool-Down Rest Breaks: All crews engaged in harvesting must take rest breaks of no less than 10 minutes every 2 hours
- Increased Monitoring: Crew leaders and HR staff must review with crews the plan’s heat stress prevention measures, actively scan employees for symptoms of heat stress, and identify and closely monitor new employees during their first three weeks on the job as they acclimate to the working in the heat.
Effective year-round
- Education and Training (trilingual): Employees and supervisors will be trained on the requirements of the plan, on the signs and symptoms of heat illness, and on the responses to symptoms of heat illness, as required by the plan.
- Responding to Heat Stress Symptoms: Any employee who reports or is identified by a supervisor as showing signs or symptoms of heat illness must be immediately relieved from duty to hydrate and rest in shade, as well as have the right to receive medical care if requested (including being taken to a clinic or emergency room), with the particular response always to be in keeping with the OSHA standards for appropriate first aid to be given for particular symptoms.
Additionally, in response to emerging scientific studies, the protocols were updated in time for the 2024 spring and summer harvests to include the mandatory provision of life-saving electrolytes to workers. This is another critically important measure to address the risk of long-term damage to workers’ kidneys and other major organs, caused by dehydration.
After visiting a farm and witnessing these protections in action, a reporting team from The Washington Post published a feature piece on our heat stress protocols, heralding them as “The nation’s strongest workplace heat rules” on the front page of one of the country’s most widely-read papers.
The Fair Food Program as a model to protect all vulnerable workers
Key to the Fair Food Program’s success is its scalability and replicability. Beyond its ability to protect farmworkers harvesting crops of all types across the U.S., the FFP has become a blueprint for workers around the globe to respond to urgent human rights crises within their respective industries. Indeed, the launch of the FFP in 2010 marked the birth of a new paradigm in supply chain risk prevention, called Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR).
Since the FFP’s launch in 2010, the WSR model has been adapted to a wide range of industries on multiple continents, from the garment factories of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Lesotho, to the iconic dairy farms of Vermont. And at every stop it has demonstrated its extraordinary power to protect and improve workers’ lives through partnerships that, despite initial industry fears and resistance, have proven to be sustainable and beneficial for all, workers, producers, and buyers alike. Key to WSR’s success is that it can be used by workers to address the most pressing human rights issues in their workplace, from fire safety, gender-based violence, modern slavery, systemic wage theft and retaliation to heat stress.
As a result, WSR is rapidly becoming the world’s most respected model for protecting vulnerable workers’ fundamental human rights at the bottom of corporate supply chains.
There are currently efforts underway by the CIW and other worker organizations to bring WSR programs to construction workers in Minnesota, fishers in the UK, and farmworkers in Spain and India — with many more efforts in their initial stages but which have not been publicly announced.
It is clear that in industries across the world, climate change is rapidly exacerbating pre-existing workplace issues, and introducing new and unprecedented challenges.
Fortunately, WSR is rising to this critical moment, and it is clear that its adoption is key to protecting vulnerable workers around the globe. In order for it to expand:
- Word must spread to workers and worker organizations that there is a new, proven tool for them;
- Corporations at the top of the supply chain must incorporate binding and enduring commitments to WSR into their best businesses and sustainability practices by signing and implementing agreements;
- Governments must recognize WSR as an essential compliment to federal and state heat rules to guarantee worker wellbeing, and include it as a means to fulfill Human Rights Due Diligence laws, as well as offer support in the establishment and expansion of WSR programs; and
- Every day consumers must take action to support workers seeking to implement real human rights protections in the industries that produce our food, clothing, electronics, and other essential goods.
As a nimble, proven model, WSR is already transforming the lives of workers across the globe. The only question now is how far and fast it can grow to empower those whose lives have been treated as disposable for generations.
Guest content from Heat Stress Network members does not necessarily reflect the views of Public Citizen.
