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The Brawl Over Fair Trade Coffee

Corporate sponsorship is undermining a wide network of democratic, farmer-owned co-ops.

By 

Scott Sherman

August 22, 2012


A man holds up coffee beans above a basket for roasting at Giang Lo Duc coffee shop in Hanoi August 7, 2012. Reuters/Kham

On May 20, the country’s oldest “fair trade” coffee company, Equal Exchange, purchased a full-page color advertisement in the Burlington Free Press. It was an open letter to the CEO of the Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee company, the world’s largest buyer of fair trade–certified coffee. “We wish to congratulate you for your past deeds,” Equal Exchange wrote, “but now urgently request that you withdraw your support for the certification agency Fair Trade USA…in light of its unilateral decision to change the rules of fair trade.”

 

Equal Exchange’s advertisement drew public attention to an unfolding schism in the world of fair trade coffee. The current feud, which has been gathering steam for years, erupted in September, when Fair Trade USA—the US affiliate of Fairtrade International, which governs the global fair trade system and sets labeling and production standards from its home base in Bonn, Germany—announced its decision to end its affiliation with the parent body. In fair trade circles, this was a high-level divorce, and it reverberated widely. FTUSA, which is based in Oakland, also declared that it would certify coffee produced on plantations and by independent smallholder farmers—a significant departure from a system that restricts accreditation to coffee grown on democratically run, farmer-owned cooperatives, of which there are 360, mostly in Latin America.

FTUSA’s president and CEO, Paul Rice, is blunt about his reasons for exiting the international system. In a May interview with the blogger Julie Fahnestock, Rice depicted the movement as doctrinaire and hostile to innovation. “If fair trade continues to [exclude] the poorest of poor,” Rice said, “it’s really on moral thin ice.” He went on to say: “Don’t we want to democratize fair trade? Don’t we want fair trade to be more than a white, middle-class movement?” As for innovation, Rice declared, “Everyone is innovating. Look at Apple, everyone…. It baffles me that somehow innovation in our movement is unacceptable.”

Fair trade leaders are pushing back. In a message posted on the Coffeelands blog, which is hosted by Michael Sheridan of Catholic Relief Services, Jonathan Rosenthal, a co-founder of Equal Exchange, wrote: “If you choose to look at who is making this decision to radically change the imperfect tool called fair trade, you might admit that it is nearly totally driven by well intentioned white folks in the US with lots of money and big dreams.” He concluded, “This feels like a move right out of the colonial playbook.”

Fair trade coffee has been a valuable experiment, one that has brought concrete benefits to hundreds of thousands of farmers. But it rests upon a fragile foundation, and the corporate embrace of the concept could undo decades of work by activists, consumers and farmers: democratically run, farmer-owned cooperatives may be unable to compete with corporate-sponsored plantations. “The fair trade model provided some protection from the unequal conditions of the open market,” says Nicki Lisa Cole, a sociologist at Pomona College who has studied fair trade. Welcoming large-scale plantations into the model “re-creates the problematic conditions for small producers that spurred creation of the model in the first place.”

* * *

There is no standard historical account that explains the rise and consolidation of fair trade. In an essay he wrote for a recent collection titled The Fair Trade Revolution, Rosenthal traces the concept back to a handful of idealists, inspired by English Quakerism, who launched “Free Produce Initiatives” in 1790 to sell slavery-free cotton and fruit. The Fair Trade Resource Network, a nonprofit educational organization, credits Edna Ruth Byler, who imported needlecrafts by low-income women in Puerto Rico in 1946, as the principal fair trade pioneer. The first fair trade label, Max Havelaar, was created in 1988 under the auspices of the Dutch development agency Solidaridad. Fair trade–certified coffee (from Mexico) soon appeared on the shelves of Dutch supermarkets. Today, Britain is the world’s largest market for fair trade products; the Netherlands isn’t far behind. Fair trade sales in South Korea and South Africa are growing rapidly. In 2011, global consumers spent $6.6 billion on fair trade–certified products. Coffee represents the largest segment of the market, but one can also purchase fair trade tea, sugar, bananas, cocoa and wine, among many other items.

But what exactly is fair trade? As Equal Exchange wrote in its advertisement: “The objective [is] to remove the exploitation from international trade and build a new system to ensure fairness and market access” for small-scale farmers and workers. A milestone was achieved in 1997 with the founding of Fairtrade International in Bonn, which served to unify global fair trade organizations under a single rubric and a single labeling system. Under this regime, producers in developing nations receive a minimum price—a safety net to cushion farmers and producers against market fluctuations—as well as a premium, a separate payment (for example, 20 cents per pound for coffee) that workers and farmers can invest in environmental, educational or infrastructure projects. The Fair Trade Resource Network estimates that more than 1.4 million people in more than seventy countries directly participate.

In the realm of fair trade, Paul Rice has been a controversial and dynamic presence. “Paul is not afraid to think and act on a big scale. That’s one of his great gifts,” says Jonathan Rosenthal, who has known Rice for decades. “And he’s willing to cut any corners to get there. That, to me, is one of his great faults.” Educated at Yale, Rice moved to Nicaragua in 1983, when the Sandinista revolution was in full bloom. He stayed for eleven years, living for most of that time near the Honduran border. In a recent phone interview, he told me that he worked in the fields, helped to create the country’s first fair trade cooperative (PRODECOOP), trained farmers and managed aid projects. Rice was guarded discussing his experiences in Nicaragua, but his old friends (including Rink Dickinson, co-president of Equal Exchange) insist that he was utterly committed to the revolution and even risked his life for it. Indeed, some of Rice’s friends—including the young American engineer and solidarity activist Ben Linder—were murdered by the US-backed contra rebels. Rice downplays his youthful leftism, saying only, “I’m not going to talk about the Sandinistas. I was committed to social justice, and still am.”

In 1994, Rice left Nicaragua and enrolled in the MBA program at the University of California at Berkeley. Four years later he helped to found Fair Trade USA, which was originally a project of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minnesota. (The IATP strongly opposes Rice’s new initiative to certify plantations and small farmers.) The Ford Foundation, which gave FTUSA $1 million in its early years, also provided it with a long-term, low-interest loan of $2 million. In subsequent years Rice worked indefatigably to build the fair trade brand—not only among consumers, but also among corporate and business leaders. As a result of its partnership with FTUSA, Dunkin’ Donuts uses 100 percent fair trade–certified beans in every espresso drink it sells. Today, Fair Trade USA, which is a 501(c)(3) organization, is robust: it works with 740 companies, including Starbucks, Costco, Sam’s Club, Whole Foods, Ben & Jerry’s and Green Mountain Coffee. In 2010 the organization earned $6.7 million in certification fees, an income that many nonprofits would envy.

* * *

For a long time, Rice has felt constrained by the rules of the global fair trade system. At a conference in Boston in 2003, he was booed for suggesting that plantations should be incorporated into fair trade. He believes the current model is antiquated and inefficient, and that opening the sector to corporations will usher in a rising tide that will lift all boats. “We’re all debating what do we want fair trade to be as it grows up,” Rice told William Neuman of the New York Times in November. “Do we want it to be small and pure or do we want it to be fair trade for all?” “For Paul, it’s all about volume,” says Jonathan Rosenthal. “And that means getting the big guys on board.”

It’s a strategy that raises many questions and warrants close scrutiny. Owing to the limited global market for fair trade coffee (which accounts for about 4 percent of coffee exports to developed nations), the 360 farmer cooperatives sell only a portion of their crops—estimates range from 30 to 35 percent—to fair trade networks; the rest is sold to commercial networks at commercial rates. In my interview with Rice, I asked him why he wasn’t focused on perfecting the current system—which would mean bolstering the farmer co-ops by raising the percentage of coffee they sell to the more equitable fair trade networks—instead of bringing in new supply networks from plantations and small farmers.

Rice’s response was that large coffee companies are determined to mix beans from plantations and fair trade farmer cooperatives in order to label the resulting blend “fair trade.” In order to do so, plantations (Rice prefers the term “estates”) must be brought into the fair trade system through the back door by certifiers like Fair Trade USA—which, since its break from Fairtrade International, is free to do as it wishes. Explains Rice: “The fair trade default response to this was, ‘Can’t you just take the estate coffee out and replace it with co-op coffee?’ Well, that, my friend, is the height of arrogance.” Arrogance toward whom? Toward the professional roastmasters at the major coffee companies: “They’re like alchemists, and they are masters of their universe,” says Rice. “No one tells them how to put together the perfect French roast.” Rice poses a question: Should a roastmaster “listen to some NGO dude who tells him to rejigger his business and re-engineer his blends? No.”

* * *

The response from the fair trade activist community has been fast and furious. Equal Exchange has been at the forefront of the charge, in ways both strategic and pedagogical. The company’s full-page ad in the Burlington Free Press, which urged Green Mountain to stop doing business with FTUSA, was a quixotic attempt to deprive Rice of his biggest customer. Equal Exchange says Green Mountain is FTUSA’s “largest single source of revenue and a critical pillar of support.” (A Green Mountain spokesperson told me that the company will maintain its ties to FTUSA.) Equal Exchange is also circulating a petition in support of “authentic fair trade,” which at press time had garnered more than 8,000 signatures and backing from 550 organizations. (Like many in the fair trade activist community, Equal Exchange is worried that consumers will be misled by a “fair trade” seal that masks corporate involvement; hence its desire to highlight farmer co-ops.) Meanwhile, Rice is circulating his own petition in support of his initiative, which is called “Fair Trade for All”; signers include John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, and Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers of America.

Much of the anger directed at Rice emanates from his unilateral decision to exit the global fair trade system, which prides itself on its democratic, inclusive structure and its historical roots on the left. Indeed, fair trade producers will soon occupy half the seats on Fairtrade International’s rulemaking general assembly. (Rice’s split with the parent organization has been messy: Fairtrade International claims that FTUSA still owes $1 million in membership fees; Mary Jo Cook, chief impact officer of FTUSA, says the fees were too high and that “our fees for 2011 are still under discussion.”)

Rice’s critics say they were taken by surprise when FTUSA left the parent organization: Merling Preza, who helped to found PRODECOOP along with Rice, told Coffeelands blogger Michael Sheridan, “It hit us like a bucket of cold water.” Says Matt Earley, co-founder of the cooperatively owned wholesaler Just Coffee in Madison, Wisconsin: “The way that FTUSA did it was absolutely undemocratic, and it just flies in the face of what we all consider a broader fair trade movement.”

For Rice’s critics, extending certification to plantations and small farmers is tantamount to a betrayal of core principles. “Cooperatives cannot compete with plantations on the economy of scale,” says Earley. “They can’t compete with them in terms of what they are paying their workforces.”

Rice insists that he cares deeply about the fate of the 360 farmer cooperatives. “I am not going to be the guy who abandoned co-ops,” he told Sheridan. Rice’s effort to expand the fair trade model is currently limited to three pilot projects—two of which, in Colombia and Costa Rica, involve small farmers who are not in cooperatives, while the third, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, involves an estate. Rice is quick to defend that estate, Fazenda Nossa Senhora de Fatima, which has between seventy-five and 110 workers on 568 acres. “It has two amazing owners who are pioneers of organics,” he says. “Those owners have demonstrated a deep commitment to sustainability and to their workers. Fazenda is a natural fit for us.” (Rice is planning other pilot projects as well.)

Moreover, Rice has rolled out a proposal to protect at least some of the co-ops that could suffer under an expanded system that includes corporations and plantations. It’s called Co-op Link, and the goal, he says, is to fortify some of the larger cooperatives—the ones that are likely to sell beans to Green Mountain, Starbucks and Costco. Several of these projects are under way in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and over the past five years, Rice has assembled powerful institutional actors to co-sponsor them: the US Agency for International Development, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Kellogg Foundation, the World Bank and Walmart. But what about the 300-plus farmer co-ops that are not a part of his Co-op Link scheme? Rice doesn’t say, though he admits that many of them are in precarious shape.

Not everyone in the fair trade world is resolutely opposed to expanding certification to plantations and small coffee farmers. Some prominent fair trade actors—who won’t speak on the record—share Rice’s concern for the millions of small farmers whose beans cannot be certified because they are not organized into cooperatives. But those same people are skeptical about Rice’s ties to large corporations, and they recoil from his sharp-elbowed tactics and relentless demeanor. Their skepticism is warranted: in his zeal to push ahead, Rice has sent misleading signals about his timeline, implying that his pilot projects are simply experiments and that they’ll be monitored and assessed by various stakeholders. “I think it will work, I hope it will work,” Rice told the blogger Julie Fahnestock. “But if it doesn’t work, we won’t continue it.”

But Rice is moving fast, and the train has left the station: Whole Foods is already purchasing beans from FTUSA’s Brazil pilot project for one of its espresso blends. (Rice hastens to point out that Whole Foods is paying the fair trade premium, which he says enabled Fazenda’s workers to obtain dental and eye care recently. Indeed, FTUSA insists it will uphold the Bonn standards in terms of a minimum price and premium paid to farmers.) Green Mountain Coffee, which prides itself on its social and environmental responsibility, has adopted a more cautious approach: it, too, will buy beans from the pilot projects but, in the words of its fair trade coffee buyer, Ed Canty, the company won’t label the beans as fair trade–certified “until we have evaluated the impact of these pilots at origin.” That is to say, until the dust from the current brawl has settled.

* * *

Some fair trade experts, such as the Washington State University sociologist Daniel Jaffee, see parallels between the organic agriculture movement of the 1960s and ’70s and what’s taking place in fair trade today. In both cases, standards were lowered or altered to pave the way for corporate involvement. Jaffee notes that what happened to organic agriculture is “a cautionary tale of label dilution and corporate capture,” and it could happen again to fair trade coffee.

Observers predict a protracted struggle ahead. “I don’t see Fair Trade USA caving in,” says Michael Sheridan, whose Coffeelands blog has become a vital forum for discussion on this topic. “It is very committed to its ‘Fair Trade for All’ vision. I don’t think surrender is in Paul’s DNA.” Equal Exchange and its allies are also determined to press on and articulate why they believe a model built on democratic, farmer-owned cooperatives is vastly preferable to one based on privately owned plantations.

The current controversy amounts to a “battle over the soul of the seal,” says Jaffee. Indeed, shoppers will soon be confronted with a plethora of labels. In the past, there was a single certification label for fair trade coffee in the United States, that of FTUSA. Soon there will be at least four labels (and possibly more): Fair Trade USA’s; a label that Fairtrade International has introduced into the US marketplace; a label from the Institute for Marketecology in Switzerland; and a “small producer’s symbol” organized by the Mexico City–based nonprofit FUNDEPPO, which represents the old-line cooperatives in the fair trade system, and which Equal Exchange and other progressive companies have agreed to use.

Further splintering the fair trade coffee scene in the United States is the rising number of progressive companies that have chosen to bypass certification altogether. Some are building their own fair trade brands and posting the relevant information—about the prices they pay and the co-ops they work with—on their websites in an effort at transparency.

Matt Earley and his colleagues at Just Coffee in Madison ended their relationship with FTUSA in 2004: “We saw almost all of this coming nearly ten years ago—the pandering to corporate coffee, them wanting to change their rules to dumb down standards in order to get the big boys more involved.” Earley is fervently devoted to fair trade, but he’s decided to do it on his own terms, outside the certification model. His website lists eighteen coffee cooperatives with whom he has a business relationship. Among them is the Yachil Xolobal Chulchan cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico, which has 1,552 members in seven autonomous municipalities run by the Zapatista revolutionary movement, and which has endured repression at the hands of government security forces and paramilitary groups. Just Coffee pays the cooperative $3.03 a pound for its beans—nearly double the floor price guaranteed under the fair trade system. “We are committed,” Earley says, “to paying farmers a better price than they would receive almost anywhere else.”

In solidarity with the farmer cooperatives, Earley has also decided to embrace the small producer’s symbol—yet another reminder that politically conscious consumers had better scrutinize the fine print on the label. A precarious but worthy experiment is now under threat. Bring your reading glasses to the supermarket.

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Scott Sherman Scott Sherman is a contributing writer to The Nation and the author of Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library (Melville House, 2015).


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In New York, Farmworkers Rally for 1 Cent of Dignity

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has won battles with McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Chipotle, and Taco Bell. Is Wendy’s next?

By 

Daniel MoattarTwitter

November 18, 2015

Nelson Peltz takes his morning coffee in a mug marked “Cash Is King.” He’s worth a hair under $2 billion—he spent a quarter-million of them on VIP treatment at the second inauguration of George W. Bush. He calls himself an “activist investor,” and his firm, Trian Partners, is known for its deep involvement with the companies it buys. “I don’t know if just making money,” he once remarked, “is a great achievement.”

He doesn’t want to pay another cent for his tomatoes.

Since 1993, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a farmworker-organizing foundation, has struggled for workers’ rights and dignity in Florida’s tomato fields. In the last 10 years, they’ve racked up a remarkable string of successes with big buyers in the food industry, from fast-food conglomerates to national retail fronts. They rallied Monday outside Trian’s corporate headquarters to ask its boss for a different kind of activism: support for a one-cent surcharge on each pound of tomatoes bought by Wendy’s, where Peltz—its former CEO—chairs the Board of Directors.

Through the Coalition’s Fair Food Program (FFP), the additional penny paid per pound goes directly to tomato pickers; according to the CIW, the program has paid $20 million to workers since its establishment in 2011. The FFP has also established a binding code of conduct with participating retailers, which requires them to buy from tomato growers in good standing with the coalition. Labor practices are monitored by a third-party council.

“If they had any smarts at all, they’d sign on to the Fair Food Program like anyone else. The costs are negligible,” says Bruce Nissen, director of research at Florida International University’s Center for Labor Research and Studies. “One by one by one, all the major food purveyors, these fast-food chains, and now institutional food service, are joining the program. Most CEOs, most leadership in these organizations, they’ll express opposition at the beginning, but by the time the campaign has been going on for a certain while, they just start to make a rational calculation: What are the costs, what are the benefits?”

For the workers of Immokalee, the benefits beggar belief. Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a farmworker and 16-year member of the coalition, estimates that more than 90 percent of Florida pickers now benefit from its efforts. In other industries, those improvements might have come from a collective-bargaining drive—but farmworkers are legally ineligible for conventional union protections, thanks to the farm lobby’s political clout.

Through CIW’s alternative tactics, including consumer boycotts of companies who refuse to sign on to the FFP, Florida pickers now work more humane hours, with access to shade and clean water in the fields. Above all, they can file grievances against crew bosses and employers responsible for abusive work conditions, including sexual harassment, once a standard feature of the job. In the past, says Reyes Chavez, complainants would be fired on the spot.

Wendy’s is the fifth-largest fast-food chain in the country; numbers one through four signed on to the compact years ago. The coalition has won workers’-rights battles with, among others, McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Chipotle, and Taco Bell—the latter agreement was struck with the whole of Yum! Brands, Taco Bell’s behemoth parent company. Even Walmart, the famously intractable provider of always-low wages, readily signed on to the FFP in April of last year.

As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart’s agreement helped take the CIW past Florida for the first time in its history. This year, the Coalition is expanding into five states where agricultural laborers still encounter the brand of brutality they once did throughout Florida: Georgia, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and Virginia. This is organizing at its best: making a straightforward premise—basic dignities for farmworkers—inseparable from a demand as simple as fractionally higher costs for tomatoes.

The CIW turned its attention to Wendy’s three years ago, and its leadership has been as unresponsive throughout as it was at Monday’s event. Wendy’s claims it already pays higher prices for better tomatoes, but the CIW maintains that higher-quality fruit doesn’t necessarily mean better treatment of pickers.

“The status quo has been to always push prices down and maximize profit in the supply chain,” says Reyes Chavez. “When that’s the only interest that you’re pursuing, the way to do it is to pressure your suppliers for lower costs. Trian Partners has played key roles in the development of the image of Wendy’s. They’re driving improvements in how Wendy’s does in the public eye. I think they can do exactly the same thing to improve the brand—to add the value of social responsibility.”

That’s what brought Reyes Chavez and about 100 others to Park Avenue on Monday night.

Rallying for Change

On a skyscraping Midtown block thick with corporate logos, this building is unmarked. The only lettering is its address: 280 Park Avenue. Nelson Peltz’s offices are here in the Trian Partners headquarters, a faceless, nameless fourteen-story slab. The lobby is all white marble: marble flooring, marble walls, and a marble mezzanine where black-suited men—all men, during the hour the Coalition is there—ride the escalators silently in twos and threes.

“This is the time to show them,” Reyes Chavez tells the crowd through a megaphone. “You, in this moment, are letting them know that we are watching them, too.”

The CIW has partnered with students and clergy since its early days. At this rally, its delegates march with allies from T’ruah, a rabbinic human-rights organization, and longtime supporters from the Student/Farmworker Alliance. Both have played key roles in the Wendy’s campaign. Their action, which sets off from a Wendy’s franchise near Grand Central Station, takes the marchers past outlets of fast-food chains that have signed the CIW’s agreements in past years. By now, for the coalition, almost any commercial corridor looks something like a workers’ rights hall of fame.

Now they’re standing in the shadow of the Waldorf Astoria, an icon of the luxury that shapes this swath of New York. In front of these buildings, it seems irrelevant that burgers are the engine of Trian Partners’ investment income. In fact, there’s something crass about the idea of burgers in front of its steel-marble-glass panorama. But food is passing in and out nonetheless, as helmeted deliverymen vault off mopeds and cross by suited security to drop takeaway bags at the building’s front desk.

Outside, the gathered marchers rotate through a half-dozen chants in Spanish and English. Prominent cardboard tomato-shaped signs read UNIDOS and DIGNIDAD. Many of the protesters wear Wendy’s iconic red pigtails, including one rabbi in a prayer shawl and a Fair Food Campaign T-shirt; on him they’re reminiscent of Orthodox Jews’ biblically mandated earlocks. He punctuates the chants with blasts of the shofar, a ram’s-horn trumpet used in Jewish prayer. T’ruah (its full name includes “The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights”) is named for one call of the shofar, the nine staccato pulses that signify redemption and forgiveness in the jubilee year.

The Fair Food supporters draw honks of support from the street when they unfurl an oversize banner on the sidewalk. They span generations: the youngest are babies, some in strollers. The oldest include a white-haired man who has spent the better part of his life in Florida’s tomato fields. They are circling beside the banner with handmade signs, most in the shape of tomatoes, and chanting under the close eye of four armed New York City cops.

Three men stand indoors on the mezzanine, watching expressionlessly.

“We’re going to share a story,” Reyes Chavez calls out. “This story is intended to show where we are coming from.” Before he can get far, the NYPD cuts him off—the Fair Food supporters are being ordered off the steps outside the building, and down to the street below. Passers-by are taking pictures, and the cop thinks marchers are complying too slowly: “Is there a problem with the order?”

There isn’t. Reyes Chavez and others regroup on the sidewalk. “One day,” he says, “the workers had an idea.” Spread out in a line, the marchers stretch along half the block. “The year was 1993. One company of tomato growers wanted to pay less than the minimum wage.” Each sign bobbing in the crowd is distinct: One penny more; Dignity; Freedom; Fair Food now.

“The workers said, no. We’re not gonna take that. We’re gonna fight back. That was the first time. Today, workers have rights. Rights like shade and clean water.”

What’s Next for Wendy’s?

If the Coalition’s track record is any indication, Peltz had better get to the negotiating table. The Fair Food Program started with the fast-food sector’s biggest tomato buyers, and it hasn’t shied from challenges since. It has succeeded with larger enterprises than Wendy’s and deeper opposition than Wendy’s is likely to mount.

“They have never wavered from their commitment to building worker organization in the Immokalee community and in the fields,” says Nissen. “They’re in it for the long haul. There aren’t any flashy organizers being parachuted in. These are people who live there in Immokalee and have stayed there for decades continuing to build that organization.”

Fourteen corporations are already operating within the Fair Food Program, and the CIW owes much of that success to the market savvy of the approach it’s now leveling at Wendy’s. By going directly to large buyers, and by levying allies in the religious community and on university campuses, the Coalition has put highly public pressure on corporations like Wendy’s and its predecessors in the FFP—which, on top of Walmart, recently added Chipotle to its list of signatories.

That its demand of one penny per pound of tomatoes yields such radical improvement in fields highlights the poverty of workers’ pre-CIW treatment. “We wouldn’t have permission to go to the bathroom, or to take a break or a sip of water,” says Nely Rodriguez, a Coalition staff member and organizer who helped lead Monday’s rally. “We were in the fields from 7 am to 8 pm, working long hours in the sun without any access to shade or to bathrooms. What we’re asking for is for Wendy’s to use its market power not just to demand tomatoes at low prices and high quality, but to require non-participating farms to respect the human rights of farmworkers…. so that we can have higher wages, better working protections, and basic respect in the fields.”

Public pressure is the CIW’s best route to that respect. Immokalee workers can organize in a limited sense, but they will never be eligible for full protection under the National Labor Relations Act. The Fair Food Program, as a result, represents an innovative end-run on regressive state and federal labor laws.

“Like most farm workers, those around Immokalee face low wages and difficult working conditions,” says Jack Fiorito, professor of labor studies at Florida State University. “Florida has no agricultural labor relations law framework, and agricultural workers are largely on their own in their efforts to improve pay and conditions.”

In light of that isolation, the coalition’s victories are remarkable. It’s not a union in the legal sense, but its dedicated members often refer to themselves as organizers. Reyes Chavez has been present at every Immokalee Workers action since he joined in 1999, a different era for Florida’s farmworkers. Among the striking changes of the years since, one stands out to his colleague Nely Rodriguez: Today, there’s a far greater proportion of female pickers in Immokalee. Their conditions have been, if possible, even harder than the men’s to bear.

Women in the Tomato Fields

The coalition sees the institution of grievance procedures, particularly sexual harassment protections, as among its most important achievements. Despite crushing hours and low pay, Rodriguez recalls, “What was worst was the environment that we had to work in. It was an environment where we as women were constantly humiliated. Harassment on the part of bosses, crew leaders, and even our coworkers was very common.” The Fair Food Program has funded and enforced transformational change in that regard.

Throughout the 1990s, before winning major successes, its campaigners engaged in marches and hunger strikes against abuse in the fields. Many among the coalition’s longtime organizers, men and women, remain fully employed as pickers. “The thing that’s really changed thanks to the Fair Food Program is the education that we give,” she says. “We as workers conduct worker-to-worker education sessions on the field and in the workplace. Things that we cover face-to-face with women are how to report sexual harassment and how to identify sexual harassment.”

But Rodriguez is clear that the primary benefits of CIW-led reforms for women and families come from economic justice and humane treatment on the job. “This program, and these changes, have really changed the lives not just of women workers but workers in general on the fields. For example, we no longer have to start going to work at four. [Company buses] bring us to the fields about 30 minutes before we start picking. This is time for moms to be with their kids—to make breakfast for them, to take them to school—and these are things that really didn’t happen before.”

Rodriguez, who has now been with the coalition for seven years, is a leader at Monday’s event. She is speaking to demand una vida digna—a decent life—from Peltz and the board he chairs. “We’re going to the offices of those men, up there, who won’t look at us,” she tells the marchers. “We’re here after three years of knocking on the door of Wendy’s. What does he do? He hides in his office. That’s their common response: to hide behind their doors and ignore their social responsibility.”

“We’re going to keep fighting,” Rodriguez continues, “so that one day, he comes to Immokalee and says, alright, we’ll work with you.”

The Tomato Rabbis

Peltz just might. In recent years, Immokalee has become a major destination for corporate representatives and activists alike. T’ruah, the organization partnering with the CIW, has sent so many delegates to meet Southern Florida’s pickers that they’ve earned a nickname: the tomato rabbis.

“The longer we’ve been working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the more I learn from them,” says Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, director of programs at T’ruah and another key leader at the rally. “It’s taught us to ask questions in different ways, to say, how do we make sure that our human rights campaigns are led by the people who are affected by them as experts?”

Kahn-Troster herself is deeply knowledgeable about the human-rights issues—particularly the abusive labor practices—entailed by tomato growers’ demands on their workers. Wendy’s, she informs me, has substantial control over how those growers go about meeting their bottom line.

Peltz “is an incredibly important businessman. The way he’s able to shape corporations that he’s a shareholder of is remarkable,” she says. She’s thinking in particular of his time at Pepsi and DuPont, corporate interventions where Peltz, as investor, mobilized to retool the companies’ inner workings. “We know that he is powerful enough that if he wants the change to happen, it does, in the corporation. That’s why our messaging to Wendy’s asks, If not now, when? It’s important for Mr. Peltz and for Trian to see the coalition of supporters who are demanding change.”

“I don’t think they know what they’re up against,” Nissen says of Wendy’s. “The CIW just does not give up. It’s not one of those flash-in-the-pan things where if they ride it out for six months, it’ll go away. They’re some of the most impressive social-justice fighters and activists that I’ve ever seen in my life. I think they prove that David can beat Goliath.”

Before CIW delegates rise to speak, Rabbi Kahn-Troster leads the assembly in an opening prayer. After Rodriguez and Reyes Chavez, Jaime, a Walmart associate, stands up to express solidarity and invite participants to a Black Friday rally on Walmart’s own labor practices. Several supporters had marched as families; two hours in, as the action comes to a close, a mother tells her daughter, “Someday, when they do the right thing, you’re gonna be able to say you went to the protest.”

 

(Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article stated that farmworkers were “legally enjoined” from establishing unions. While they are ineligible for protections from retaliation under the National Labor Relations Act, they are legally able to form unions.)

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