Ben & Jerry’s churns out better work conditions
Vermont ice cream maker pledges humane conditions for migrant dairy workers
For years, Ben & Jerry’s took steps to make sure that its ice cream did not contain artificial growth hormone. The company also has a self-imposed fee on its greenhouse gas emissions.
What Ben & Jerry’s did not have was a reliable way of ensuring that the dairy farms supplying it with milk were providing humane conditions for their workers, a major issue in an industry where many people work seven days a week for less than minimum wage.
This week, the ice cream maker, which is based in Vermont, took a big step toward changing that, signing an agreement with a farmworkers’ group that establishes labour standards for the company’s suppliers in the state, and creates an enforcement strategy that encourages workers to speak up about violations.
“We love to be part of innovation,” said Jostein Solheim, the company’s chief executive.
“We believe in worker-led movements, and in bringing in dairy and doing it in Vermont.”
The agreement borrows heavily from an arrangement called the Fair Food Program that was put in place in 2011, to address troubling conditions in Florida’s tomato industry.
In that instance, Subway, Walmart, Whole Foods and other companies committed to paying an extra one to four cents per pound of tomatoes and to buying only from participating suppliers. The suppliers, in turn, agreed to pay the legal minimum wage and to ensure workers’ rights and safety. The program has been widely credited with improving working conditions in an industry where human trafficking flourished until recently. It has expanded to other crops and other states on the East Coast.
The 1,200 to 1,500 workers in Vermont’s dairy industry have been labouring under their own grim circumstances.
A 2014 survey of about 170 dairy workers in the state conducted by Migrant Justice, a farmworkers’ advocacy group, found that in addition to a scarcity of days off, workers had schedules that frequently kept them from sleeping more than a few hours at a time. Many migrants, who typically work year-round for low wages and live on the farms that employ them, also had substandard housing.
“One of the biggest issues was housing conditions, the need for workers to be provided with basic amenities, like electricity, water and housing that is free from pest infestations,” said Enrique Balcazar, a former dairy worker who has helped lead the organizing effort, speaking through a translator.
The workers tend to be living in the country illegally, making it difficult for them to speak out.
Under the program, called Milk With Dignity, workers at dairy farms that supply Ben & Jerry’s will have the right to one day off a week and will earn at least the state minimum wage, currently $10 (U.S.) an hour.
Workers will also be guaranteed at least eight consecutive hours of rest between shifts and housing accommodations that include a bed and access to electricity and clean running water.
The agreement requires Ben & Jer- ry’s to acquire its milk from farms that adhere to the standards. It will be enforced, in part, by the affected workers, who will be informed of their rights and encouraged to report violations to a 24-hour hotline.
Compliance will be monitored by a group led by a former staff lawyer at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, which will conduct audits.
Ben & Jerry’s will effectively finance the benefits by paying an undisclosed premium on the milk it buys, based on volume.
Brendan O’Neill, an organizer with Migrant Justice, praised the company.
“By signing this agreement, Ben & Jerry’s is prioritizing dairy workers as the most important ingredient in their ice cream,” O’Neill said.
Ben & Jerry’s has been owned by the consumer goods giant Unilever since 2000, but it has retained its founders’ interest in social and environmental activism.
The company said it had long had labour standards in place for its suppliers and that the most egregious abuses of workers did not occur on its suppliers’ farms. But it acknowledged that enforcing the standards had been challenging.
“We don’t see a huge gap in hardcore standards,” Solheim said, “but we see an opportunity to make it work better.”
Migrant Justice began its campaign to improve conditions for immigrant farmworkers in Vermont several years ago, not long after a worker died after getting tangled in a piece of machinery and being strangled by his own clothes.
Migrant Justice took several actions, including protests and marches, to put pressure on Ben & Jerry’s over the past two years, and the group had scheduled a national day of action for Thursday. (Ben & Jerry’s said it understood the group’s tactics but noted that it had never stopped negotiating.)
Some experts, while crediting the Fair Food Program’s achievements, have said they were skeptical about whether the model could be extended to a substantial portion of the country’s farmworkers, many of whom experience some of the worst conditions and lowest pay in the U.S. workforce.
Greg Asbed, a founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which pushed for the Florida program, said the agreement involving Ben & Jerry’s — and similar accords in other industries, like those geared toward improving safety conditions for garment workers in Bangladesh — showed that the model could be applied widely.