Unlike corporate models, “worker-driven social responsibility” puts workers at the center of protecting their rights.
On May Day farm workers march to a Hannaford supermarket to protest the supermarket chain's refusal to purchase milk from dairy suppliers who have committed to a set of fair labor practices, on May 1, 2022, in Burlington, Vermont.If you consume products from capitalist markets today — and, of course, most of us do — you’ve surely seen your share of labels on name brand items promising that your purchase is “ethical”: fair trade coffee, sustainable clothing. The list goes on.
“There’s no way that you can make the kind of change that’s needed just through consumer choice,” said Canning. “All of that stuff exists in the realm of marketing. It does not exist in the tangible world of binding agreements.”In the 1990s and 2000s, another model for protecting workers’ rights was germinating in the tomato fields of Immokalee, Florida.
, they asked? It was not the field owners who hired farmworkers, but the corporate behemoths, the grocery and food service giants who dominated the retail purchasing of agricultural goods. Moreover, those corporations — the Taco Bells, the Trader Joes, the Walmarts — were susceptible to consumer pressure.
“That was the first time that, as a farmworker, in over a dozen years of working in the field, I heard about my rights,” Gonzalo recalled. “It was the first time I felt like I was being seen as a human being.” For Gómez, it was a revelation. “I realized that my situation wasn’t so unique,” she said. “Everybody was experiencing some form of labor abuse.” Moreover, it didn’t need to be this way. “The organizers of the assembly told us it doesn’t matter what country you came from: You have human rights,” she said.
Soon, the organization was putting these lessons into action. In dialogue with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Migrant Justice formed its signature WSR program,. The group’s first major breakthrough came in late 2017, when the Vermont-based ice cream giant, Ben & Jerry’s,“It starts with who’s driving the program. These corporate programs don’t provide the same protections for workers as WSR programs because they’re created to placate consumers,” says Gómez.
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