Coalition of Immokalee Workers

CIW signs an agreement with the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange (2010), leading to the creation of the Fair Food Program ProPublica: “(T)he gold standard for preventing worker abuse is the Fair Food Program”

Last week, we shared with you the news that the largest modern-day slavery prosecution in U.S. history, dubbed “Operation Blooming Onion,” had just wrapped up. In updating you with the latest developments in that case, which the CIW uncovered over a decade ago and helped federal authorities investigate, we also reflected on the importance of preventing the kind of abuses that occurred within the Blooming Onion operation — forced labor, sexual violence, wage theft, threats, and retaliation — before they ever have a chance to take root.

This week, for our final post in this year’s Sustainer Drive, we want to share a feature-length piece from ProPublica that approaches the problem from the perspective of prevention, and to let you know how you can help be a part of the solution.

After reporting extensively on Operation Blooming Onion and the workers who suffered under that sprawling criminal conspiracy, ProPublica reporter Max Blau set out to answer a deceptively simple question: How can any of us know whether the fruits and vegetables in our grocery carts were harvested by workers whose fundamental rights were protected?

His search led him to the Fair Food Program — a program that has demonstrated how the kinds of abuses in Blooming Onion can not only be remedied after the fact, but prevented in the first place. Below are some excerpts from the ProPublica story:

My Maddening Quest to Find Out if Blueberries Come From Farms Where Workers Were Harmed

“Over the past year, I’ve reported at length about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America.

I haven’t stopped thinking about how they suffered. Their wages were stolen, guns were pointed in their faces, and one woman I met was held captive, raped and nearly killed.

As I wrote those stories, there was something else I couldn’t stop thinking about — something I keep thinking about: Whenever I go to the grocery store, I have no easy way of knowing if the fruits and vegetables I put in my cart are part of the problem I’ve documented…

That case, which I wrote about at length, revealed that thousands of foreign farmworkers had been illegally charged fees by labor contractors to work in the U.S. Some were forced to pick crops for little to no pay in what prosecutors described as a form of modern-day slavery.

This wasn’t the first case of the abuse of farmworkers at the hands of labor contractors. Or the last. Many of these harms might have been prevented if the workers had received the protections they were promised by the U.S. government. And there have been no substantial reforms to address the abuses, either…

I spoke with experts to see if there are ways for consumers to know if the people picking their blueberries are being mistreated.

Those experts, who study farm labor conditions and food supply chains, said the gold standard for preventing worker abuse is the Fair Food Program. Under the program, supermarkets and other corporate buyers commit to paying a little more for produce — a cost so negligible, at a few pennies per pound, that one expert said it shouldn’t drive up prices.

For those few pennies, grocers get crops from farms that offer their workers stronger protections.

Fruits and vegetables from those farms are labeled with a green sticker of a woman holding a basket of tomatoes. The stickers give consumers like me a clear indication that the workers who picked that produce were treated fairly.

When I’ve found these tomatoes in my grocery stores, they don’t cost measurably more than others without the label.

Dozens of farms have signed on to the Fair Food Program, and participation in it has been shown to prevent abuse in the fields.

But only a few small blueberry farms participate in the program.

Until that or something else changes, consumers will know virtually nothing about the farms their blueberries come from. And they won’t be able to make choices that could make a difference in the lives of the people who pick them.”

The question ProPublica leaves us with is the same one that has driven the CIW’s work since the launch of the Fair Food Program nearly two decades ago:

Now that we know how to prevent these abuses, how do we make those protections available to every worker who needs them?

The Fair Food Program has already demonstrated what prevention looks like in practice. But for true prevention to become a reality across U.S. agriculture, the Program must grow dramatically — reaching countless more farming operations, crops, and communities, and ultimately protecting hundreds of thousands more workers every year.

The need to scale is only becoming more urgent by the day. Outside the protections of the Fair Food Program, workers remain vulnerable to the very abuses documented in Operation Blooming Onion. To make matters worse, the growing pressure on the country’s existing immigrant worker community is driving more and more growers across the country to turn to the H-2A “guestworker” visa program to recruit farmworkers, a program with a long and documented history of labor abuse and the same program the Blooming Onion ringleaders exploited to control and mistreat thousands of workers over nearly a decade. As the risks facing workers multiply, the life-saving protections of the Fair Food Program — protections created by workers themselves and backed by real, enforceable consequences — will only become more essential.

And that is why your support matters so much.

Monthly gifts help ensure that the FFP’s protections can reach more workers, on more farms, in yet more distant corners of the agricultural industry from Florida to California.

Today, the Fair Food Program is like the earliest days of the electrical grid in this country. In those early days, the electric grid, in the rare community where it existed, worked beautifully and transformed everyone’s lives, from great industries to the smallest households. But it only covered a small percentage of the entire population, and great swaths of the country remained in the dark. With time, significant resources, and great effort, however, a mass electrification movement was mounted to bring the miracle of electric light to homes across the country, and a social and economic revolution ensued.

The Fair Food Program today covers tens of thousands of farmworkers in 23 states, which sounds great… until you realize that those tens of thousands are only a small part of a population estimated to be more than one million across the country. And, yes, just like electricity, where the FFP operates it transforms everyone’s lives — from the individual farmworker to the grower and even the billion-dollar retail food giant alike. Indeed, like the electrical grid, the Fair Food Program is a shared infrastructure that operates in the background to meet everyone’s needs, ending labor abuse for workers, eliminating regulatory and reputational risk for growers and buyers, and providing ethically grown and harvested produce for consumers. It is a true miracle, one that transformed fields that federal prosecutors famously dubbed “Ground Zero for Modern-day Slavery” into what human rights experts called “The best workplace environment in American agriculture” on the front page of the New York Times in the space of just three years.

But as it was with electricity in the early days of the last century, the challenge before us today isn’t inventing the FFP; it’s building its protections out so that its life-changing power can be experienced by everyone, on every farm, big or small, in every corner of the country. We stand on the doorstep of great change, but we are not there yet.

So, as we close this year’s Sustainer Drive, we are asking you to help us take the next step. If you are not yet a Sustainer, become one today. If you already give monthly, consider increasing your sustaining gift.

The solution to human rights abuse exists. Together, we can make sure it reaches the hundreds of thousands of workers who still need it.

Together, we can complete the human rights revolution in the fields that started in Immokalee 30 years ago this year.

Become a Sustainer today.

A photo submitted to the court by federal prosecutors as evidence in the ongoing “Blooming Onion” prosecution shows a shrine to the Santa Muerte found in the home of Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr., a farm labor contractor convicted of Conspiracy to Engage in Forced Labor and sentenced to 30 years in prison earlier this year. La Santa Muerte, or the “Angel of Death”, the skeletal figure located in the middle of the photo and shown here holding a scythe, is known to be widely celebrated by violent narco-traffickers in Mexico. Forced labor convictions are cause for celebration, but alone they cannot end modern slavery. Together, with the Fair Food Program, we can prevent the next slavery operation.

This summer, federal prosecutors concluded the criminal forced labor case known as Operation Blooming Onion—the largest modern-day slavery prosecution in the history of U.S. agriculture.

But while the convictions mark an important victory, they also leave us with an urgent question: How many more trafficking operations are still out there, hidden in far reaches of our food supply chain today?

According to federal prosecutors, the Blooming Onion conspiracy exploited tens of thousands of farmworkers for more than a decade. The ringleaders maintained their power to abuse their workers and steal their wages through the repeated use of violence, threats against their families, and involuntary confinement. One woman was held in sex trafficking for two years, and two workers died from heat exhaustion while trapped in the operation.

The case began in 2015, when the Coalition of Immokalee Workers received a call from a guestworker who had witnessed horrifying abuse while harvesting onions in southern Georgia. The worker described an operation that recruited hundreds of H-2A guest workers each year, charged illegal recruitment fees, confiscated workers’ documents, stole their wages, threatened workers and their families with violence, and confined workers who resisted.

The CIW documented the allegations and shared its findings with federal authorities, helping launch the federal investigation in 2016. Over the following years, CIW human rights investigators continued working with federal law enforcement to expose the full scope of the trafficking ring. In 2021, more than 200 federal agents executed over 20 search warrants across southern Georgia, rescuing hundreds of workers. Nearly two dozen traffickers have now been convicted.

An editorial cartoon published by the Naples Daily News in the 1990s following the successful slavery prosecution US v Cuello, one of more than a dozen such cases where the CIW uncovered forced labor operations and helped law enforcement agencies prosecute the ringleaders.

The CIW’s work in uncovering the Blooming Onion operation and helping federal authorities bring its ringleaders to justice was not a first. For more than 30 years, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has helped uncover and combat modern slavery in U.S. agriculture, assisting in the liberation of thousands of workers trapped in forced labor.

Yet, with each successful prosecution, the same conclusion only grows stronger: We cannot prosecute our way out of modern slavery. We must prevent it.

That initial realization led farmworkers to launch the Campaign for Fair Food in 2001, educating consumers about the abuses at the bottom of the food supply chain in this country and mobilizing students, people of faith, the labor community and others to call on the billion-dollar food brands to ensure their supply chains are free from forced labor and other abuse.

Throughout the 2000s, farmworkers from Immokalee and consumers from Florida to California marched, protested, and pressured brands from Taco Bell to Whole Foods to support their demands, winning agreement after agreement for “Fair Food”. With that growing market power behind the farmworkers’ vision, the CIW was finally able to launch the Fair Food Program in 2010—a unique human rights enforcement program designed to stop abuse before it happens by changing market incentives that have long rewarded the lowest-price producers at the cost of often brutal exploitation, and failed to punish abuse, even when the abuse manages to make headlines.

Today, tens of thousands of farmworkers across 22 states and three countries are protected by the FFP’s worker-led mix of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms: worker-to-worker education, a 24/7 complaint line, independent monitoring, rigorous audits, and legally binding agreements with major food retailers that create swift market consequences for human rights violations. Human rights experts have credited the Fair Food Program with effectively eliminating forced labor, sexual assault, and other zero-tolerance abuses from participating farms.

The Program is also growing. Worker organizations in industries ranging from construction and sugarcane to bananas and plant nurseries are partnering with the CIW to bring this proven Worker-driven Social Responsibility model to millions of more workers in the United States and around the world.

How you make all this possible

But whether or not the Fair Food Program—and its invaluable impact on the lives of workers and their families—continues to grow truly depends on people like you.

Every worker who learns their rights and overcomes their fear of standing up against abuse. Every complaint investigation that establishes the facts and remedies an injustice. Every new employer or corporate buyer that joins the Fair Food Program and expands the program’s power to ever more workers. Every new industry transformed by workers empowered to serve as an army of frontline monitors of their own rights.

None of that happens without your sustained support.

We are asking all who can to become Fair Food Sustainers—monthly donors who help ensure the Fair Food Program can continue to guarantee unparalleled protections for farmworkers on existing FFP farms. And we are asking all who are already Sustainers to consider increasing their commitment—to help the Fair Food Program meet the surging new demand for its services, both here in the US and around the globe.

With your support, we will not only ensure the continued growth of the Fair Food Program, but we will also keep the pressure on companies like Kroger—the food industry giant and Fair Food Program holdout that has been connected to the Blooming Onion prosecution—through the Campaign for Fair Food.

To quote Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands and the first major tomato grower to join the FFP in 2010, in speaking with the national news outlet Axios for their in-depth report on the Blooming Onion prosecution:

“If all retailers joined the Fair Food Program, the most egregious criminal behavior would end, and lesser crimes would be quickly uncovered.”

With Kroger’s massive purchasing power behind the FFP’s unique enforcement expertise, we can stop the next slavery operation in Kroger’s supply chain before it gets started… because four slavery cases in five years is enough.

To do that, we need your help.

Become a Fair Food Sustainer today.