Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Farmworkers and allies march through Palm Beach in 2023, celebrating the Fair Food Program and calling attention to extreme human rights abuse that continues to occur outside the FFP, including modern-day slavery and sexual violence. The center-piece of the march was a papier-mâché globe depicting the world of protections inside the FFP, and the dark and opaque world of violence and abuse beyond the reach of the FFP. Lawsuit alleges extreme abuse, yet again, on fields beyond the Fair Food Program’s Presidential Medal-winning protections;  How much longer will Fair Food Program holdouts Kroger and Publix continue to turn a blind eye, refuse to join only social responsibility program proven to end abuse?

For over a decade, Kroger and Publix, two of the largest grocery chains in the United States, have refused to join the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program, insisting — year after year, trafficking case after trafficking case — that their current vendor codes of conduct and occasional audits are sufficient to prevent the risk of extreme human rights abuses in their respective supply chains. 

Meanwhile, just weeks ago, farmworkers in North Carolina filed a class action lawsuit against their employer, alleging a series of extraordinary human rights violations, including wage theft, threats, confiscation of passports, predatory recruitment fees, and the failure to provide bathrooms, drinking water, or care when workers suffered debilitating heat stress. The lawsuit was filed under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1581 et seq. (TVPRA), and the North Carolina Human Trafficking Law, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-43.18 et seq.

Following the publication of the lawsuit, and using publicly available information, the CIW has found that Kroger and Publix buy produce from the company where the plaintiffs in the lawsuit say that they worked, Jackson Farming Company.

We will share those details below. First, however, we wanted to provide some context to understand just how unconscionable the grocery giants’ ongoing refusal is — especially given the leadership of companies like Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Giant, Stop & Shop, and Fresh Market, all Fair Food Program Participating grocers that have put the power of their purchasing orders behind the protection of workers in their supply chains for years.

A brief history of two Fair Food Program holdouts

This case marks the fourth time in five years that Kroger has been linked to allegations of labor trafficking and extreme abuse in the fields. In 2021, an investigation from the LA Times revealed Kroger to be buying tomatoes from a Mexican farm subject to a Withhold Release Order (WRO) from the U.S. Government due to indications of forced labor, and in early 2023, the Department of Labor publicly outed Kroger as a buyer of watermelons harvested by modern-day slaves. Shortly thereafter, Kroger was linked to Maria Patricio, one of the lead defendants convicted in the “Blooming Onion” human trafficking ring. The CIW uncovered the ring, the largest modern-day slavery operation in US history, and the connection to Kroger was laid out in an investigative report in the journal The Lever.

As the London-based Business and Human Rights Resource Centre put it after the Blooming Onion case was connected to Kroger in 2024:

… The question before Kroger — its executive leadership, its board of directors, and its shareholders — is simple: Is having a case of modern-day slavery almost annually over the last 4 years an acceptable level of risk for Kroger, as long as the produce continues to arrive on shelves at the right time, in the right quality, and at the right price?  

If the answer to that question is yes, then Kroger needs to break its silence and own the outrageous failure of its social responsibility approach so consumers can know the company’s true thinking when it comes to the human rights of the men and women who pick its produce.

But if not, then Kroger needs to join the Fair Food Program — the universally-recognized gold standard for preventing forced labor and protecting fundamental human rights in corporate supply chains today — without further delay…

As for Publix, its refusal to join the FFP in the face of nearly annual modern-day slavery prosecutions in Florida’s fields goes even further back. In December of 2010 — shortly after the Fair Food Program was launched at an historic press conference announcing the new partnership between the CIW and the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange — Publix spokesperson Dwaine Stevens told The Bulletin, an Alabama newspaper, when asked if Publix had any intention of joining the promising new initiative:

“We don’t have any plans to sit down with the CIW,” Publix’s Media and Community Relations Manager Dwaine Stevens said, also citing that the company sells around 36,000 products in the stores and it cannot get involved with each product’s labor issues. “If there are some atrocities going on, it’s not our business. Maybe it’s something the government should get involved with.”

That statement — “If there are some atrocities going on, it’s not our business” — didn’t sit well with the growing consumer movement supporting the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food at the time. Rabbi Bruce Diamond penned a powerful call to action for people of all faiths in the Fort Myers News Press in light of Publix’s cruel indifference, accompanied by a guest editorial cartoon drawn by Casey N. Kindle, a Southwest Florida Fair Food activist:

Publix’s stone wall starting to crumble

Jon Esformes, operating partner of the family-owned Pacific Tomato Growers — one of the largest growers in the nation — quoted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous dictum, “In a free society, few are guilty, but all are responsible,” when he announced an agreement with the 4,000-member Coalition of Immokalee Workers to implement a penny-a-pound raise for the workers and to improve their working conditions. (“Tomato grower, harvesters strike historic accord,” Oct. 14)…

… [Stevens’ statement is] a far cry from the idea that “in a free society, few are guilty, but all are responsible,” and the principle of fairness to working people that is shared by all the world’s great religions…

For sure, a coalition of subsistence workers taking on America’s largest privately owned supermarket chain seems a daunting if not impossible battle.

But men and women of faith know that when are you on the side of the angels, nothing is impossible!

Today, 15 years later, the Fair Food Program has built an unrivaled track record — not only remedying abuses from sexual harassment to forced labor, but preventing them altogether. In light of that success, the continued refusal of retail giants like Kroger and Publix to use their purchasing power to protect farmworkers in their own supply chains is simply unacceptable.

Details of the class action lawsuit Screenshot from the initial complaint, with highlights

The working conditions at the Jackson Farming Company farm as described in the court documents are both deeply troubling and all too common outside the protections of the Fair Food Program. Below is an excerpt from the class action lawsuit, which was filed on April 17:

“Plaintiff and his co-workers worked at Jackson’s Farming Company of Autryville pursuant to temporary foreign worker visas, called H-2A visas. First-time employees were charged an illegal recruitment fee to be put on the list to work for Defendants Alvino Avilez and Avilez & Sons Harvesting, LLC (“Avilez Defendants”), and all employees were charged fees throughout their travel to the U.S. Once the employees arrived in North Carolina, the Avilez Defendants confiscated their passports and Social Security cards with the explicit goal of keeping them from leaving their employment. Rodriguez Luna and his co-workers also experienced a number of wage violations while working in North Carolina. 

Rodríguez Luna and his co-workers were not timely reimbursed for the costs of their visas, travel to and from North Carolina, or associated costs, as required by the H-2A visa program. Defendants did not pay workers at the promised H-2A wage rate, and they created false payroll records purporting to show that the workers were properly paid. The Avilez Defendants also deducted money from the workers’ pay for their Social Security cards. When Plaintiff Rodríguez Luna suffered a work-related injury, Defendants sent him back to Mexico and did not give him his final paycheck.”

Farmworkers with the class action lawsuit further allege that the farm labor contractor being sued also threatened workers if they tried to leave before their contract ended.

The lawsuit is filed on behalf of all farmworkers who were brought to the U.S. by one or more of the Avilez Defendants to perform agricultural work at Jackson Farming Company under H-2A contracts, who performed work during the ten-year period immediately preceding the date on which this action was filed. This could mean well over 100 farmworkers were subjected to comparable conditions to those alleged in the initial complaint, since the Avilez defendants have handled the H-2A petitions for Rodney Jackson, President of Jackson Farming Company, since 2019, with each petition requesting dozens of seasonal workers to harvest a variety of crops.

The farm itself is no stranger to allegations of abuse. Its founding President, Brent Jackson, weathered multiple lawsuits from farmworkers, including one from 2003 where a farmworker suffered a heat stroke so severe that it left him in a permanent “vegetative state.” In the present day, 22 years later, conditions do not appear to have significantly improved on the farm. According to the newest complaint, one farmworker “fell ill while working due to the heat. Because of this he was sent back to Mexico. Other workers who were impacted by the heat were sent to rest in a bus in the field that lacked air conditioning. Those workers were not paid for the rest of the day.” 

Kroger and Publix linked to Jackson Farming Company 

Kroger, through its regional subsidiary Harris Teeter, has itself stated that customers looking to buy produce from Jackson Farming Company can find it on their shelves today. Harris Teeter’s own website indicates they source sweet potatoes, cantaloupe, strawberries, broccoli, and melon for Jackson Farming Company. Meanwhile, the plaintiff in the civil suit alleges he was made to harvest melons, sweet potatoes, and broccoli on both his 2024 and 2025 H-2A contracts. 

Further, a North Carolina Department of Agriculture post from 2020 profiles Jackson Farming Company and states that consumers can find their crops in Harris Teeter and Publix. Because the civil suit’s time span includes those farmworkers with Jackson Farming Company during the 2020 harvest season up until 2025, there is a risk that crops harvested under conditions of extreme abuse have, for at least half a decade, been bought by both Kroger and Publix, and sold to unsuspecting customers.

At the same time, Brent Jackson — founding president of the company and a North Carolina state senator — sponsored legislation that would have weakened workers’ ability to sue for retaliation.

By contrast, farms participating in the Fair Food Program operate under what The New York Times has described as the country’s “best workplace-monitoring program,” where strong anti-retaliation protections are rigorously enforced and workers themselves serve as frontline monitors of their own rights.

Additionally, on the website for Publix, customers can currently buy George Foods-branded petite microwavable sweet potatoes. George Foods is one of the brands of sweet potatoes marketed by Jackson Farming Company. 

There is only one human rights enforcement program in agriculture that is proven to end forced labor, coercion, and retaliation, and that mandates rigorous heat stress protections: the Fair Food Program. 

In light of these apparent connections to the class action lawsuit out of North Carolina’s fields, the question before Kroger and Publix is simple: How many more farmworkers in their supply chains must be subject to outrageous farm labor abuse before they join the Fair Food Program, the only human rights program proven to prevent it? 

A farmworker takes a break to drink water. Fair Food Program farms comply with mandatory heat stress protections that include the provision of water, electrolytes, rest breaks, training, and the ability to stop work and seek medical treatment without fear of retaliation. The Washington Post called the FFP’s standards “America’s strongest workplace heat rules” in a 2024 front page report. Dr. Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba, lead author on study of the FFP: “We do show that mothers are getting healthier… Their health, in terms of gestational diabetes and hypertension, [is] improving.” Jon Esformes, CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers and first grower to join the FFP: “At the end of the day, when someone shows up to do a job, they want to go to the job, do their job, earn their money, know that they’re safe and go home.”

A few weeks ago, we shared some remarkable news from the Fair Food Program with you: a multi-state, peer-reviewed public health study found that mothers working on Fair Food Program farms gave birth to healthier infants than their counterparts on non-FFP farms — a powerful reminder that when workers are protected, entire families thrive.

This landmark research — published by Duke University Press in the widely respected journal Demography — is the first to demonstrate that a Worker-driven Social Responsibility program can generate population-level public health gains by guaranteeing fundamental human rights on the job. Its findings suggest that the protections embedded in the Fair Food Program — and similar worker-driven models — can reach far beyond the workplace, functioning as targeted public health interventions in communities long exposed to extreme labor exploitation. 

Today, we are proud to share a feature-length article that takes a deeper look at this study, tracing how the Fair Food Program’s worker-drafted human rights standards, backed by multi-layered monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, translate into something profoundly human: healthier families and stronger communities. The feature comes courtesy of The Packer, the nation’s leading produce industry news outlet, which has for years documented the evolution and expansion of the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program.

Written by The Packer’s Produce Editor Christina Herrick, the article brings forward new insights from the study’s lead author, who explains that beyond the reduction in low-birth-weight births, the program is also linked to decreases in diabetes and hypertension. These conditions, long prevalent among farmworkers, are closely tied to birth outcomes but also carry serious, lifelong consequences of their own — underscoring how the same protections that support healthier pregnancies are improving overall health in farmworker communities. The story also features reflections from Laura Safer Espinoza, Executive Director of the Fair Food Standards Council, and Jon Esformes, CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers and the first grower to join the FFP back in 2010. At a glance, the piece offers a deeper understanding of the FFP’s win/win impact, showing how its protections safeguard workers’ health while helping participating growers recruit and retain employees by becoming employers of choice.

We’re excited to share the article in full with you below. If you’d like to read the article on The Packer’s website, click here.

New Research Links Better Pay and Safer Conditions to Healthier Babies A peer-reviewed study finds that infants born to farmworkers on Fair Food Program farms are 10% less likely to be born at a low birth weight.

A peer-reviewed study published in the journal Demography has found a direct link between participation in the Fair Food Program and improved birth outcomes for farmworkers. Infants born to farmworker mothers on Fair Food Program-certified farms were 10% less likely to be born at a low birth weight.

Low birth weight, the Fair Food Program notes, is closely linked to perinatal mortality, cognitive development, chronic disease risk and more.

Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says low birth weight is a good marker to track, as it’s a sensitive indicator of the “health spillover” for both mothers and infants.

“We do show that mothers are getting healthier,” he says. “Their health, in terms of gestational diabetes and hypertension, [is] improving.”

Quantifying the Health Spillover

Birth weight, which has already been measured and validated through public health research, would also be a way to quantify how the Fair Food Program influenced maternal and infant health outcomes.

“It’s not just the income; it’s all of these other things that go along with that,” Rubalcaba says, noting that improved working conditions create a positive health spillover that extends beyond the individual.

“When you’re healthy, you don’t have to worry about your child being malnourished,” he says. “When you don’t have to worry about the things that we take for granted on a day-to-day basis, you’re able to focus on the things that make you productive.”

Rubalcaba says this spillover effect continues beyond just a nuclear family and into communities.

“The community is thriving as a result of the efforts, at least, in my opinion, in my survey of the data, and the fact that we were able to see a result in publicly available data, in the birth records data, was pretty remarkable,” he says.

Moving Beyond the Paycheck

While the data is remarkable, the three drivers of these health outcomes — safer conditions, higher wages and reduced stress — manifest in personal ways for the workers.

Wage premiums and stricter enforcement against wage theft for farms in the Fair Food Program raised worker incomes by 24%. Legal protections against sexual harassment, forced labor and verbal abuse helped decrease maternal stress levels. The program’s focus on safety standards also helped to reduce physical strain and environmental hazards.

Workers clock in with a timekeeping system–a mandatory feature on Fair Food Program farms that ensures workers are paid for each minute they work

Laura Safer Espinoza, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice and executive director of the Fair Food Standards Council, says the study’s outcome highlights the strong correlation between improvements in overall working environments and increased birth rates.

Safer Espinoza says more than $50 million has been distributed to workers on Fair Food Program farms. What’s more remarkable, she says, is that retailers and brands have pledged to support this program.

“They have agreed to commit their market power and put those purchasing practices to work to incentivize good practices at the bottom of the food supply chain,” she says.

More Than Just Better Pay

Safer Espinoza points to other successes within the program that speak to the broader themes of family. These include requiring workers to be paid at call time, which she says resulted in later starts.

“For the first time, workers who were called to the field at a later time were able to eat breakfast with their children. They were able to walk their children to school,” she says.

As researchers surveyed workers in Immokalee, Fla., about the benefits of the Fair Food Program, it wasn’t only better pay; it was more family time, says Safer Espinoza.

“Families reported that their children were healthier and happier, and parents were delighted to be able to have that precious time with their children in the morning,” she says. “And that’s simply because the law was being enforced.”

Safer Espinoza says this study shows tangible benefits when women working on Fair Food Program farms earn more through increased pay or the elimination of wage theft. She says eliminating sexual harassment and verbal abuse reduces stress and tension, too.

“When mothers can work and expectant mothers can work in an environment where it is safer, where they are treated with more respect, where they don’t have to be fearful and stressed every day, this is the proof that it makes a huge difference,” she says.

And she says the study’s results aren’t necessarily an expected outcome that she and the Fair Food Standards Council members thought would happen on participating farms. She says the survey’s results show a greater impact on the Fair Food Program. 

“We were not necessarily thinking, ‘This will increase birth rate and be transformational across generations in the way that it obviously is and has been proven to be,” she says. “It will make a huge difference for the children who are born to workers on Fair Food Program farms. They’ll be healthier and have better futures, and that’s something that I don’t think was necessarily contemplated when we set out, but it is a very beautiful result of this collaboration.”

A New Standard for Growers Lucas Benitez with John Esformes, CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers DBA Sunripe Certified Brands as the CIW and Pacific agree to join forces to launch Fair Food Program in 2010

Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands and the first grower to join the Fair Food Program, says he’s proud of how his company has become an employer of choice thanks to the positive culture created on his family’s farm. He says a couple of years ago, when he was on a panel about labor shortage with then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, he had to say that he had no trouble recruiting and retaining workers as an employer of choice.

“That spoke to over a decade of bridge building and creating what we call a safe and fair work environment where everybody understands their rights, everybody feels safe and making complaints, everybody feels like the company is open to evolution, and that’s been the history of the relationship with the coalition,” he says.

And that’s truly what workers want, Esformes says.

“At the end of the day, when someone shows up to do a job, they want to go to the job, do their job, earn their money, know that they’re safe and go home,” he says.

And this study, Esformes says, helps highlight the intangible benefits from creating this type of workplace culture quantitatively.

“People tend to be evidence-based and need that evidence to convince them to keep doing something,” he says. “We didn’t need that for ourselves. For us, we knew what was happening. But in the meantime, it’s good for the general population to have a greater understanding of the efficacy of this type of program and its impact on the community.”

 

Sen. Cory Booker, Yale Law: “As a proud alumnus of Yale Law School (Class of 1997) and a longtime advocate for a healthier and more equitable food system, I write to urge Yale Hospitality to join the Fair Food Program (FFP).” “The Fair Food Program is widely recognized as one of the most effective human rights initiatives in U.S. agriculture… Yale has long been a leader in both scholarship and social responsibility. Joining the Fair Food Program would extend that leadership into the University’s food system, demonstrating that Yale is committed to protecting farmworkers and supporting responsible growers… “

As students at Yale University continue calling on their administration to join the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program, Senator Cory Booker — a proud alumnus of Yale Law School and a longtime champion of the Fair Food Program — wrote to his alma mater urging the university to demonstrate real leadership toward by protecting the farmworkers who harvest the food served in campus dining halls as a Participating Buyer in the FFP.

The letter, which was made public by Yale Daily News, explained that Yale is in a unique position to extend the same leadership it demonstrates in scholarship and social responsibility into the “University’s food system, demonstrating that Yale is committed to protecting farmworkers and supporting responsible growers.” Though directed specifically at Yale University, Senator Booker’s letter also speaks to the many benefits the FFP can bring to any university interested in joining. The program’s transformative impact on farm labor conditions has created a rare — and documented — win-win-win scenario that benefits workers, growers, and buyers alike.

But despite the extraordinary letter, a petition with hundreds of student signatures and counting, and a rally outside Yale Hospitality’s offices attended by over 75 students and two of the CIW’s co-founders, the administration still refuses to join the FFP. Instead, Hospitality administrators continue to insist on taking only piecemeal, voluntary steps toward addressing farm labor conditions in the university’s supply chain, even while recognizing the FFP as a proven human rights leader in agriculture and promising to increase tomato purchases from FFP farms to over 90% by next school year.

Undeterred, students are now reaching out to Yale’s wide alumni network, as well as university faculty, to seek their support for the campaign. The fast-growing campaign has even become a key issue in the 2026 Yale College Council elections. John Robert Walker and Michelle Jimenez, one of four slates of candidates running for YCC President and Vice President next school year, made the Fair Food University campaign a central plank in their platform, as reported in last Friday’s Yale Daily News:

John Robert Walker ’28 and Michelle Jimenez ’28

John Robert Walker ’28 says he is “fighting for Yale to respect” both workers in New Haven and the broader student body population.

Walker wrote in his candidate statement that he aims to raise the student minimum wage to $22 per hour, protect contracted faculty and staff, and ensure Yale joins the Fair Food Program, which ensures humane wages and safe working conditions for farmworkers…

If you are a Yale alum interested in supporting the Yale Student/Farmworker Alliance effort, make sure to reach out to organize@sfalliance.org.

Below is the full report from Yale Daily News on Senator Booker’s letter, which includes statements from both students and university representatives. Stay tuned for more updates on the Fair Food University front!

In letter, Cory Booker urges Yale to make farmworkers’ rights pledge Sen. Cory Booker, a Yale Law School alumnus, wrote a letter last month to Yale Hospitality, throwing his weight behind a student campaign for the University to join the Fair Food Program.

Sen. Cory Booker LAW ’97 wrote a letter to Yale Hospitality last month, urging the University to join a farmworkers’ rights initiative.

Booker’s one-page letter, dated March 26, added to the Yale Student/Farmworker Alliance’s campaign for Yale Hospitality to participate in the Fair Food Program. Student organizers have hosted screenings and petitions, and recently marched to Yale Hospitality’s offices in an effort to pressure the University to join the program.

“As a proud alumnus of Yale Law School (Class of 1997) and a longtime advocate for a healthier and more equitable food system, I write to urge Yale Hospitality to join the Fair Food Program (FFP),” Booker wrote, later adding that “Yale has long been a leader in both scholarship and social responsibility.”

Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who ran for president in the 2020 Democratic primary and is seen as a potential 2028 contender, is a member of the Senate’s Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. In the letter to Yale’s assistant vice president for Hospitality, Jodi Smith Westwater, Booker referred to his personal experience with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the group that created the Fair Food Program.

Student/Farmworker Alliance member John Robert Walker ’28 shared Booker’s letter with the News. Booker’s office confirmed that the senator wrote the letter but did not respond to the News’ emailed inquiry about what prompted him to do so.

Alexa Gotthardt, a Yale Hospitality spokesperson, wrote in a statement on April 7 that the University has “received the letter and a response is forthcoming,” but did not respond to the News’ questions about whether Yale Hospitality has reconsidered its position. 

Gotthardt referred the News to a previous statement in which she wrote that Yale “is not currently positioned to become a formal signatory to the FFP, given its role further downstream in the supply chain,” but that the University is “aligned with the program’s goals.”

Yale University students,alongside CIW co-founder Lucas Benitez (second from the right), call on the historic Ivy League school to join the Fair Food Program

The protest last March was organized by the Student/Farmworker Alliance. Walker, who has since announced his candidacy for Yale College Council president, wrote in an email to the News that the alliance had contacted Booker, who then agreed to write the letter.

“Despite Senator Booker’s letter urging Yale to join the FFP, an official resolution from the Yale College Council, a petition signed by hundreds of students, and no clear reason for not joining the program, Yale Hospitality has refused to take any good-faith steps toward joining the FFP,” Walker wrote. According to the alliance, its petition had 300 signatories by the end of March.

According to the Fair Food Program’s website, buyers that participate in it — including companies such as McDonald’s and Walmart — must agree to buy produce from farms that guarantee certain worker protections and abide by a code of conduct. Buyers also agree to pay a premium of one cent per pound picked, which goes to farmworker wages.

Yale Hospitality has said that it hopes to source more produce from program-affiliated suppliers. According to Gotthardt, more than 64 percent of Yale Hospitality’s tomato purchases through suppliers are sourced from growers affiliated with the Fair Food Program, and the University hopes to increase its percentage of tomatoes from program-approved growers to 90 percent.

Booker’s letter discussed his experience with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

“The FFP was created by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), who I had the pleasure of meeting while participating in the Food Inc. 2 documentary, which highlights the systemic abuses farmworkers face,” Booker wrote. “I learned from the CIW about the extreme poverty, sexual harassment, and labor trafficking faced by many farmworkers, and the power of market-driven accountability to create real change.”

Booker wrote that joining the program would set “an example for students, alumni and peer institutions about the power of ethical purchasing decisions and institutional leadership in ending longstanding abuses and transforming labor conditions for farmworkers for generations to come.”

According to Walker, the group is in the process of contacting more alumni to support the group’s campaign.

“We’ll contact dozens more prominent alumni in the weeks ahead, and we expect many will follow Senator Booker’s example and call on Hospitality to support the human rights of the farmworkers who grow our food by joining the FFP.” Walker wrote.

Booker graduated from Yale Law School in 1997. The Law School’s dining hall was independently operated prior to 2011 and stopped accepting undergraduate swipes in 2009. According to its website, Yale Hospitality now operates Café Law, which serves “coffee, sandwiches, salad, or soup for lunch, and plenty of snacks.”

Before you go, we want to share some exciting news about another longtime ally of Fair Food: Jeanne Findlater, a pioneering force in television news at a time when there were virtually no women in leadership positions anywhere in journalism, has been inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame!

Now 97, Findlater has lived an extraordinarily storied life, helping to break barriers in journalism and opening doors for generations of women who followed in her footsteps. You can read more about her remarkable career in this profile from the Naples Daily News.

After retiring to Naples, Findlater brought that same sense of courage and conviction to the work of the CIW and Campaign for Fair Food, becoming a familiar face at campaign actions and standing shoulder to shoulder with farmworkers and consumer allies on street corners, holding signs and demanding dignity for farmworkers everywhere.

Her lifelong commitment to speaking truth to power — first as a trailblazing journalist and later as an ally of the farmworker movement — has made her a true friend of the CIW and the Fair Food Program.

From everyone at the CIW and FFP, congratulations to Jeanne Findlater on her well-earned induction into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame!

The CIW’s Nely Rodriguez (left) leads an on-the-clock, worker-to-worker education session as part of the Fair Food Program Christian Science Monitor on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers: “In many ways, the coalition was built to change a culture of privilege: no singular leader, no hierarchy of moral authority, no person whose reputation placed them beyond accountability. Instead, workers educated workers. Women organized women. And power was explicitly collective and deliberately decentralized.” Nely Rodriguez, CIW: “And that’s what impressed me and what inspired us to continue,” Ms. Rodríguez says. “Precisely because it’s an organization run by farmworkers and formed by farmworkers. Precisely because of the bad conditions the workers faced – and more than anything, the problem of harassment against women.”

As anyone familiar with farm labor and the history of farmworker organizing knows all too well, the recent revelations of Cesar Chavez’s crimes of sexual violence have shocked and devastated millions across the country. For decades, many drew inspiration from his leadership in winning economic and civil rights for a generation of farmworkers through the United Farm Workers (UFW).

But this news has not only shattered the image of a man long regarded as a hero, it has also forced a long-overdue reckoning with sexual violence itself, and with the unchecked power that enables it. Whether in a social movement like the UFW or in any workplace — from the fields to corporate boardrooms — abuse and exploitation take root when power goes unchallenged, and persist unless countered by structures strong enough to hold abusers accountable.

One such reflection appeared in a thoughtful article published last week in the Christian Science Monitor, titled “Cesar Chavez allegations force a reckoning: Role model or something less?“, which spends the first half of its reporting on the aftermath of the news of Chavez’s abuse and its impact on those who held him in high esteem for so long. But the reporter dedicates the second half of the piece to the subject of the article’s subtitle — “A different coalition achieves labor gains” — and it is that second half that we would like to share with you today, as it takes as its focus the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the CIW’s approach to organizing and its leadership model, and the principal product of three decades of CIW history: the Fair Food Program, a comprehensive human rights protection program that redresses the core power imbalance that has driven farm labor abuse for generations. 

We have excerpted the second half of the Christian Science Monitor article here below in its entirety, as it is a rare report that takes seriously the considerations of how a movement is organized internally and how the decisions that shape that internal structure can be reflected in the impact of the movement in the world in which it organizes. If you’d like to read the full article, click here.

Cesar Chavez allegations force a reckoning: Role model, or something less? A different coalition achieves labor gains

 … Nely Rodríguez knows the costs of silence – and of having to endure the privileges often taken by men with power.

But as a farmworker and activist with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, she has in many ways experienced a very different model of institutional leadership and a very different organizing strategy for protecting workers.

She arrived in Florida 20 years ago after working in the fields of Michigan, where she picked asparagus, squash, and pumpkins. In many ways, conditions were better on those northern farms, Ms. Rodríguez says, but she had family in Florida and, well, the cold.

But when she arrived in the early 2000s, she entered one of the most brutal agricultural labor markets in the United States. For the vast majority of workers, conditions were grinding and largely invisible: poverty wages, rampant wage theft, no toilets in the fields, no shade, no clean water. There were even criminal rings that profited from forced labor. One U.S. attorney who prosecuted members of these rings called these fields “ground zero for modern-day slavery.”

Women were especially vulnerable. Sexual harassment and assault by supervisors was routine, largely unreported, experts say, and widely accepted as the price of the work. “It was like our daily bread,” Ms. Rodríguez says in Spanish. When someone needed to go to the bathroom, for example, a supervisor would drive them to a facility too far away to walk.

A farmworker speaks with a human rights investigator with the Fair Food Standards Council as part of the FFP

“That’s the experience I can tell you about personally, that bosses take advantage of you, make comments like, ‘If you go out with me, I’ll put you to work on something else,’” she says, describing harassment rather than abuse. One boss had a gun in his truck. “But you’re already there in a situation. You need to work. You have to support your family. In my case, I had children.”

Then, during the offseason, Ms. Rodríguez started attending Wednesday night meetings at the Immokalee coalition. She realized she was not the only one being harassed.

In many ways, the coalition was built to change a culture of privilege: no singular leader, no hierarchy of moral authority, no person whose reputation placed them beyond accountability. Instead, workers educated workers. Women organized women. And power was explicitly collective and deliberately decentralized.

“And that’s what impressed me and what inspired us to continue,” Ms. Rodríguez says. “Precisely because it’s an organization run by farmworkers and formed by farmworkers. Precisely because of the bad conditions the workers faced – and more than anything, the problem of harassment against women.”

Working with federal prosecutors, the coalition helped liberate more than 1,200 workers from forced labor operations across the Southeast, organizers say. It then helped pioneer the landmark Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.

In 2011, the group launched the Fair Food Program – a legally binding partnership between farmworkers, growers, and major corporate buyers that has fundamentally transformed conditions in the fields.

Organized workers went directly to corporations rather than lawmakers, getting them to sign legally enforceable agreements. These include a penny-per-pound wage premium passed directly to workers’ paychecks, mandatory worker education sessions that organizers conduct on farms and on the clock, and immediate exclusion of growers who violate workplace rules – rules workers themselves have written.

Fourteen major corporations have signed on to the Immokalee program, including Walmart, McDonald’s, Subway, Burger King, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s. The Harvard Business Review has called it one of the 15 most important social-impact stories of the past century.

In many ways, Mr. Chavez’s influence never penetrated these areas in Florida’s deep south, and the Immokalee coalition evolved with different aims and a different understanding of leadership models. Ms. Rodríguez acknowledges his historical place without sentimentality. He was a leader who fought for wages and justice, she says. But he was never central to what the coalition in Immokalee was building.

Check back later this week for more news from the Fair Food Program, including exciting developments in the Fair Food University Campaign from Yale University!