“The Harvesters” image – courtesy of artist Erin Currier (@erincurrierfineart www.erincurrierfineart.com) – depicts three Coalition of Immokalee Workers leaders: Gerardo Reyes Chavez, Nely Rodriguez, and Lucas Benitez.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) began as a small group of Florida farmworkers fighting against abuses in the field, wage theft, and forced labor. Eventually, realizing structural change had to come from the top, the CIW campaigned against some of the most powerful corporations in the food industry. After decades of rallying consumers, students and church groups, they were able to negotiate enforceable standards to safeguard farmworkers’ rights.

At the EcoFarm Conference, Arty Mangan of Bioneers interviewed three CIW leaders who shared the horrific conditions that farmworkers endure and how the CIW was able to make real change in the daily lives of those who grow and harvest our food.

Gerardo Reyes Chavez has been a farmworker since age 11. He works with consumer allies in the CIW Fair Food Campaign, educates farmworkers on their rights, and helps investigations of abuse and modern-day slavery.

Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, a former NY State Supreme Court Judge, directs the Fair Foods Standards Council, which monitors and enforces the Fair Food Program’s agreements between agricultural workers, growers and corporate buyers to ensure human rights for farmworkers.

Greg Asbed, a former farmworker, is the co-founder of the CIW, a human rights strategist and principial author of the Fair Food Program. Asbed was chosen as a MacArthur Fellow in 2017 for “transforming conditions for low-paid workers with a visionary model of worker-driven social responsibility.”

ARTY MANGAN: What was the turning point for each of you to get involved in this work? What drew you in?

GERARDO REYES CHAVEZ: While working in the fields in Mexico, I heard that there was work in Immokalee, Florida. So I went there thinking that I would work, save money and support my family. But I didn’t expect to see all of the situations of abuse against farmworkers. My friends and I were taken advantage of by the crew leader. He didn’t pay us for two weeks of work. That was how we were welcomed to Immokalee. We had asked for a little bit of money just to buy utensils and basic staples to cook instead of buying the food from his sister-in-law, which was making us sick. He didn’t like that so he fired us and didn’t pay us.

Because of that, we ended up with no home, no money, no job, and we didn’t know anybody.  Then I met two workers who were part of the second case of modern-day slavery that the Coalition Of Immokalee Workers (CIW) helped bring to justice. They became my roommates and told me their stories. I learned very quickly about all the abuses against farmworkers working in the agricultural industry in Immokalee – wage debt, sexual harassment, violence in the fields, etc.

They introduced me to the CIW. I went to a meeting and met Greg, and I met Lucas Benitez and other colleagues. At that time they were planning a 230-mile March for Dignity, Dialogue and a Fair Wage for farmworkers from Fort Myers to Orlando, to the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, carrying a paper mâché Lady Liberty that is now sitting in the Smithsonian on permanent display in Washington. That was my entry point.

And after I learned about the general strikes that took place in the ‘90s – there were three of them, 3,000 workers each time, the march against violence, hunger strikes, all of those things – I knew that that’s where I wanted to be. So I got involved.

LAURA SAFER ESPINOZA: I was a judge in New York State for 20 years, and moved to Florida in 2010, after retiring from the bench. I was working for the US Department of Justice, teaching in Latin America, and one day, on NPR, I heard a program talking about situations about 30 miles from my doorstep of modern-day slavery and, in fact, hearing federal prosecutors call Immokalee ground zero for modern-day slavery. Like many people of my generation, I was aware of the situation of farm workers from the early campaigns in California in the 1970s, centered in California. That news echoed across the country. But this was 40-some-odd years later, and to hear that this was still happening seemed incredible and horrendous.

I looked into who was doing something about the situation and came across the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. So I showed up offering to volunteer a couple of days a week. But they had just gone through 10 years of incredible sacrifice on this campaign for fair food and were at the point where the entire Florida Tomato Growers Exchange agreed to come into what was to become the Fair Food Program after nine participating buyers had signed legally binding agreements with the Coalition. The CIW told me they didn’t need a volunteer, what they really needed was someone to direct a statewide monitoring organization.

That really wasn’t in my retirement plans, but they pointed out that they had worked for 20 years to arrive at this point, and if things weren’t set up properly, it would be worse than if they had never started, because people would have no belief in it. Then they pointed out that the 30 years of my legal career had probably just been intended for this one moment when I would come across their path. That was 12 years ago. They are really consummate organizers.

ARTY: Gerardo, perhaps people are aware that farm workers suffer poor working conditions and sub-poverty wages, but to hear about modern-day slavery is something I think is unfathomable for most people. What are the conditions in the field that CIW works to change?

GERARDO: When you go to the fields, you wake up around 3:30, 4:00 a.m. to get ready to go to a center location in town in the parking lot or La Fiesta Tres, which is a Mexican store. That’s where the farm labor company bosses gather to get workers. Farmworkers get there by walking or riding bikes because wages are so low they can’t afford transportation. The wages paid are basically the same for the last 30 years, so we have to walk because of that poverty.

If you were lucky to find a job, you get on the bus that takes you to the fields. There they make you wait for hours. And you can’t complain, because if you complain, then you won’t have a job the next day. So for the time you wait, you are not getting paid; then you start working. The typical day could be between 10 to 12 hours working in the fields.

This is an industry where it is mainly men working in the fields. But for very few families, it was especially difficult because they have to take their kids to the home of somebody else who would take care of them and bring them to school. By the time they come back home, they have not been able to see their kids during the light of day. And sometimes their kids are already asleep. So, that’s like a typical day of work.

Within that workspace, the crew leaders pit the Haitian, Mexican and Guatemalan workers against each other to push them to work faster. With the low wages, you have to really be pushing yourself in the fields to be able to make ends meet, to pay rent and to try to save some money.

People are living in overcrowded mobile homes because that was a way to try to save money. So sometimes people are living with 8, 10, or sometimes even 15 other workers, paying exorbitant rent for a small place.

And there were beatings in the fields that happened very often. Before the Coalition started in ’93, seven to ten cases were reported to Rural Legal Services. And there was an estimate that for each case, there were seven to ten situations of violence that were not reported because of fear of reprisal. When the Coalition started, it helped to reduce a little bit of that, but it still continued to happen.

The goal of the CIW was to be able to sit at the table with the growers to talk about how to work together to eliminate all of that from the industry, but during the ‘90s, the industry wasn’t ready to sit at the table. After the hunger strike by six workers in Immokalee, a grower was asked by another grower, “Why not sit at the table?” He said, “I’m going to put it to you this way: A tractor doesn’t tell a farmer how to run his farm.” That was basically the way in which the entire industry was looking at the workforce, not as human beings but simply as tools for the job that were disposable like a tractor.

That’s what led us to think about what we should do to force the industry to hear what we have to say, and to sit and talk about a different way of doing things.We knew that we needed more power to be able to do that, so we started to analyze the market to understand who the big buyers of tomatoes were.

The Packer [a major produce industry magazine] mentioned that Taco Bell had connections to many of the farms where abuses were happening. After several attempts trying to communicate with Taco Bell, we decided to start a boycott against Taco Bell. We wanted them to sit with us to discuss an agreement on conditions to purchasing and the implementation of a list of rights including a code of conduct. We were also asking for a penny per pound increase for tomato pickers.

LAURA: At the time, tomato pickers were earning 45 cents a bucket for 32 to 36 pounds of tomatoes, meaning that you have to pick essentially over two tons of tomatoes in a day to make minimum wage, if your hours are actually counted for minimum wage, which as he described, they had many people waiting hours and hours before going in the field, and that time was never on the clock. So it was massive wage theft and underpayment.

In the cases of forced labor, the CIW didn’t start out to be an organization that would investigate forced labor. They were organizing against abusive conditions in the field and for decent wages. But in doing so, CIW uncovered cases of forced labor, people who were indebted and being held against their will. And so they became the pioneers of investigations into those cases, and ultimately received a presidential medal as a result of their extraordinary efforts to combat human trafficking. It was not the original intention, but it was a very prevalent situation that impacted networks of hundreds of workers at a time.

ARTY: You used the words forced labor, and we also used the language of modern-day slavery. Can you unpack that a little bit so people understand what was going on? And also, did it expand beyond Florida?

LAURA: I can give you the legal definitions, but Gerardo lived and witnessed the situations.

The legal groundwork is people were being held against their will and forced to work through violence, or threats of violence, or psychological coercion, having their documents withheld, having their families threatened, and certainly not being paid adequately for their labor while this was happening. I know it sounds remarkable in the 2000s, however, there were actually situations of people being held against their will, being beaten, held behind electrified fences, and taken from one state to another. These were multi-state networks that the CIW investigated. One of their first cases became the seminal case that helped to motivate the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

GREG ASBED: That’s the legal framework today. At the time when we started with US vs. Miguel Flores, which is the first one of the two seminal cases in the birth of the modern anti-forced labor movement, there were no laws like that. They were using the 14^th Amendment or whatever laws after the Civil War that made slavery illegal.

To give you the real, on-the-ground worker experience that led to that, the CIW was starting to organize in Immokalee. People would come together every week and have meetings to talk about the problems they faced as farmworkers, and some leadership was starting to emerge. In the Guatemalan community there were leaders who were deeply connected to the world of recent Guatemalan refugees because a lot of people were coming from Guatemala for political and economic reasons. At the same time, people from Haiti were leaving their country after the overthrow of a government that was popularly elected.

The people from the Guatemalan community were coming to the meetings and talking about a particular crew leader or pair of crew leaders – Miguel Flores and Sebastian Gomez – who were bringing people over from the border. Back then it was referred to as being coyotes. They were bringing over van loads of people and creating crews of hundreds, but they were treating people absolutely horrifically. They were threatening to cut their tongues out if they talked to the police; they were holding young women and taking them as their slaves, essentially, not to work but for sex, and just treating people horribly.

The CIW was starting to come together. We were starting to hear about that more and more. And then summertime came and people went north into South Carolina from Immokalee to get work. But a group of people who stayed in Immokalee decided to go follow up and see if they could find out where Miguel Flores and Sebastian Gomez were working.

We went to a labor camp and some people came up to us and said, “Can you help us get our last check from another employer? We’re working at this labor camp now, but we lost our last check at the last place.” We said, “Yeah, we do that all the time.” We asked what happened. They said, “Well, the police came in the middle of the night, and so we left quickly.” And then we asked, “Why did the police come?” “Well, our boss, Miguel Flores, shot one of our friends in the stomach because he was telling us all that we don’t have to work like slaves, not in this country. In this country, we can work where we want to. And he shot him. And then the police came, so we took advantage of that and took off.”

That led to the investigation that led to the case US vs. Miguel Flores. Those are the conditions behind what workers themselves call slavery. There’s some debate at higher levels in this world about whether slavery’s the popular term, but if you ask the people who actually experienced that, when your friend gets shot for saying we don’t have to work like slaves, that’s the word people use, they say, “I feel like I’m being treated like a slave.”

GERARDO: The agricultural industry has much more abuses than any other industry that create an atmosphere in which modern-day slavery can flourish. So for us, it was also a question of changing those conditions, creating something to be able to basically eliminate the oxygen for those kinds of extreme abuses to continue to happen.

GREG: We became well known for discovering and helping to investigate major forced labor prosecutions. But we also realized that that wasn’t a solution; we could chase these things forever; even with a successful prosecution somebody else would fill the void. And so we weren’t satisfied with that as success. Success had to be stopping them from happening altogether, and that’s what eventually led to the Fair Food Program.

ARTY:  There was a key shift in your strategy from attempting to get change from the middle of the system – the labor bosses and farmers – and realizing that wasn’t where the leverage was and pivoting to put pressure at the top of the system. I think that was a brilliant move.

GREG: If you take 10 years to make it happen, I’m not sure how brilliant it is. [LAUGHTER]

When you’re working in a field, you see what’s in front of you; you see the crew leader, first and foremost.

GERARDO: And that’s all you think about.

GREG: That’s your world. And then if you expand it, you think about the farm. But actually, in the farms where people work in Immokalee, you never see the owners.

GERARDO: You would see them sometimes flying over, but you didn’t get to actually meet any owner of the company.

GREG: So for people who work in the fields, it’s very difficult to see beyond that. But, for example, if you’re loading 18-wheelers with melons all day long, and if you pay attention, you hear where those trucks are going. You learn that they’re going to Walmart and to places like that. So then you start to connect the dots.

You realize how powerful those companies are. You realize that there is an immense power at the top of that system. What farmers can pay farmworkers is actually limited by the price they receive. So if we were looking for a structural change that can actually be sustainable in terms of raising wages and improving conditions, it’s going to start at the top. That’s the analysis that got us there, eventually. Like I said, it took us a long time and a lot of sacrifice to actually do it.

But every single step of the way was closer toward realizing that the answer’s not inside of the farm gate, but outside of the farm gate.

LAURA: It was also realizing that ultimately consumers were going to be the final destination for those crops. And that they were going to help the farmworkers to turn this around by telling buyers what they wanted to see in terms of the working conditions for the produce that they were buying.

Many people were active in the ‘70s, and boycotted grapes and lettuce, but this is an evolution of that, and a more powerful leveraging of that buying power at the top of the supply chain, driven by a consumer alliance with farm workers.

GREG: Yes, a more sustained leveraging.

LAURA: Because the goal of it was to arrive at agreements that would be broad, and cover not employer by employer but an entire industry.

GREG: It sounds idealistic to say that consumers are at the top of the market, and literally they are, but if we all make individual decisions about what we’re going to buy, it’s not going to add up to real power. The collectivized purchasing power is with the corporations. And the more restaurants or the more grocery stores that they have, the more power they have in the market.

But we were actually able to collectivize the purchasing decisions of enough consumers through this tireless organizing that we did for another decade, that we were able to take that itemized market of individual consumers and make it act collectively to move corporations so that they in turn exercised their collective leverage and changed conditions in the field. So Taco Bell stopped making farmers poor. Taco Bell started making farmers a little bit better off.

ARTY: And then came the legal structure of the Fair Food Project.

LAURA: Yes. The legal structure – I can say this since I had nothing to do with designing it – is brilliant and also elegantly simple. The buyers commit to pay a premium for their produce, which is destined to supplement workers’ wages with a small percentage that goes to the farmer themselves to mitigate against any increased payroll taxes or administrative costs that they might have in managing the premium, and they also commit to purchase preferentially from growers in good standing in the program, meaning that they’re in compliance with the program’s code of conduct. So good conduct is rewarded by the market.

If there are offenses, we understand that nothing is perfect when you start, and all can be remediated if there is goodwill on both sides. We have a very incremental and gradual and collaborative approach toward compliance, but without cooperation, nothing gets done. So if that point is reached, then the buyers have an obligation to cease purchasing from any operation that’s suspended from the Fair Food Program.

So it rewards good practices and it sanctions the worst practices. There is zero tolerance for offenses such as forced labor or systemic child labor, or an operation ceases to cooperate with the program. And that’s been a tremendous incentive for improving everything that Gerardo was describing at the beginning, everything from dangerous health and safety conditions, to sexual harassment, to physical violence, to discrimination and, of course, forced labor.

The same farms that were making headlines in The New York Times: “Slavery in the Florida Tomato Fields” are now recognized as the best work environment in US agriculture, also on the front page of The Times. So it’s a dramatic transformation brought about by those market incentives.

GREG: Interestingly, when you really think about it, it wasn’t any innovation, it was just making them honest about what they claim. The corporations were all claiming they had codes of conduct.

What’s the idea of a code of conduct? It means if I’m going to buy from you, you have to meet these standards. But if there’s no enforcement to that, then it’s meaningless. What we did was challenge the claim that the buyers only purchase according to certain standards, and made them sign a legally binding agreement to that effect. So, now we will be able to enforce the standards if they don’t. And that changed everything.

We added new standards based on what workers asked for to make the industry more fair. But essentially 95% is already existing law. Our position is to have the corporations do what they claim they are doing, and have us, as people whose rights are in question, monitor and enforce on the ground. That’s what is needed to have a much more just system.

LAURA: That’s what really had never been done before. There are a lot of certifications out there with a code of conduct that may have a once-a-year or once every two- or three-year audit.  There may be an 800 number to call or maybe a committee that is supposed to regulate things. But because this program was created by farmworkers themselves, it became meaningful.

The process includes educating workers on their rights, so people knew it was a new day. They are educated by farmworkers themselves – people who have lived their experience – and are told what to do if things did not go as everyone is now saying they should. And beyond that, they set up a whole new organization dedicated to this process, to monitor and enforce these agreements with the buyers and growers.

That was the birth of the Fair Foods Standards Council, the FFSC. FFSC audits get a snapshot of conditions, and the auditors have tremendous access. There’s been a huge fight based on cases in California for access to workers during the workday, but by contractual agreement, the Fair Food Program has that access. Two workers in the field as they work, two workers at company housing, and we interview at least 50% of workers. We have full transparency into growers’ records, their payrolls, their health and safety records. We work with them on an agreement for corrective actions for non-compliances or risks.

So we have the complaint mechanism, which is 24/7. And the investigators, the same people who go to the field, they respond to the 24/7 hotline. They carry it on their person. And so it’s always answered live, and we investigate those complaints collaboratively with the grower. But ultimately, there has to be a resolution.

I was a judge for 20 years, and I know how long a case takes to wind through the tribunals and appeals processes. We resolve about 67% of our cases in two weeks, and 80% in just under a month. That’s lightning speed. It’s good for the grower, it’s good for the workers, and it’s good for putting in place measures that’ll prevent the next case because we not only want to resolve the individual case, but also want to eliminae the cause of the problem.

There is a working group that is composed of growers who are invested in the success of the Fair Food Program. During COVID, the working group created a set of prevention and response protocols. If you look at the statistics, they managed to cut in half the number of illnesses it affected and workers impacted from the general agricultural population.

We have heat stress protocols to protect farmworkers now. Heat is a serious and growing threat, especially to farmworkers.

There is an education committee. That goes to the farmworkers. And there are tens of thousands of frontline monitors of their own rights. They can be effective because they know they are not going to be retaliated against.

ARTY: Can you give an example of something that the farmworkers themselves asked for that has improved since the code of conduct has been implemented?

GERARDO: Tomato pickers were forced to overfill the buckets that get dumped onto the truck, but they weren’t getting paid for the extra amount. It was basically a 10% theft of wages. The money would eventually go into the pocket of crew leader. So there was a lot of violence. There were workers who had their foreheads split open when the dumper threw the bucket back at them if the dumper thought the buckets weren’t overfilled enough. So eliminating over-filling of the buckets is a way to strip the power of the dumper and the crew leader, and has mitigated instances of violence.

GREG: Establishing that was important for our community. All the conversations with the farmworkers to create the code of conduct helped create a needed picture of all the abuses. In that process, we put all the ideas together, and the Fair Food Program is the end result. What it contains comes directly from those conversations.

LAURA: The workers knew the source of abuse that they were suffering, but in terms of how to make real changes on the ground, we needed the knowledge and the input of the farmers themselves. It was in conversation and collaboration with growers that the fill-to-the-rim standard (not overfilled) was created.

GREG: To help operationalize the standard, we had three or four of the biggest growers in the Florida tomato industry in the CIW office, in the office of a group that they refused to recognize for 20 years. This was the first time that we collaborated, actually worked together toward one solution. We were able to agree on a standard that created more fair conditions for farmworkers, and that was efficient for the growers’ production, as well as reduced violence in the fields. 

LAURA: Implementing these changes by recognizing that collaboration was going to be the key to success, CIW gained this tremendous power. I worked for 30 years [as a NY State Supreme Court judge] in an adversarial system, and this is not that. During an investigation of a complaint, there is a constant back and forth with the grower until we arrive at the findings and what we are going to do about it. That can only happen because now everyone respects confidentiality, everyone respects the right of workers not to be retaliated against. And if there is retaliation, as there were many attempts of that in the very early implementation days, it doesn’t work because we will know about it, and the power of the market stands behind the enforcement. So it is very effective.

And now our growers don’t have major Department of Labor judgments. There aren’t forced labor cases. You’re not having EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] cases brought for sexual harassment, or class action cases. I would say that we have become the best insurance policy that growers could have.

Many growers came to the table out of a desire to do the right thing, to do the right thing for the soil, to do the right thing for the Earth, to do the right thing for the people they work with. This program recognizes good practices. You don’t have to start out with bad practices to join the Fair Food Program. In fact, our expansion is happening with growers knocking on our door. For the first time, we have emails wanting to find out more about a worker-driven responsibility program. We did not think in 2011 that we would see that.

ARTY: It’s seen now not as punitive, but rather as an asset.

GREG: All of the certification programs start from the idea that there is a human rights crisis to be addressed in agriculture and it has been since time immemorial. That problem can have two consequences: suffering for the humans whose rights are in question; and for the employers and corporations who sell the products harvested by those humans, there is a public relations problem that harms their reputation.

The reason the Fair Food Program is different from other codes of conduct is because it’s worker driven. This is the only program that starts with the humans, whose rights are in question, being the ones who created the standard. Quite naturally, their solution goes toward ending human rights violations. Whereas all the other programs are managed either by the corporations or by the farmers.

When it is the employer or the buyer establishing the code, the focus is on stopping the reputational harm, not on stopping the human violations. When it’s the humans who suffer abuses, it’s about stopping the human rights violations. The funny thing is, one of those two solutions solves everybody’s problems because when you stop the human rights violations, the reputational harm stops too. But when you only focus on reputational harm, the human rights violations continue, and that’s the difference, and that’s what makes this uniquely successful, and that’s what’s driving the paradigm shift over time. But it’s huge industry involving billions of dollars. With that infrastructure built around the old paradigm, shifting it takes take time.