FARMWORKERS
Bell signed on in 2005.
Since then, the four largest fast-food companies — Burger King, McDonalds, Subway and Yum Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell) have signed on to the Fair Food agreement. So have the three largest food service providers: Compass Group, Aramark and Sodexo. Now, the campaigners are focusing on the supermarket industry, including Floridabased Publix and additional fast-food chains, including Wendy’s.
Bon Appétit, a company that runs more than 1,000 cafés in colleges and corporations, including Google, signed on to the Fair Food program in 2009. Theresa Chester, the company’s vice president for purchasing, said that signing on was a matter of principle.
“Through our purchasing powers and our purchasing orders that go to the program, the issue of workers’ rights is brought to that same level of food safety,” Chester said. “Respect for workers is just as important as the food safety we bring to the table. It brings us peace of mind that our supply chain is free of those typical abuses.”
STANDARDS BEYOND OSHA
Critics of such programs call them redundant and with with expensive red tape — adding costs to businesses that will be passed on to consumers already struggling with rising food bills They argue that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration already hands out fines for unsafe working conditions, including for heat violation.
“We take great pride in training our employees, providing the safest work environment,” Nelson
Stabile, the president of the Builders Association of South Florida, told the Miami Herald in November. “We just want to make sure that we can continue raising awareness without having a situation where it’s overly punitive and there’s duplicative regulatory government in place.”
A spokeswoman for Wendy’s also told the Herald that the company is not a participant in the Fair Food Program because Wendy’s buy its tomatoes from indoor greenhouse growers — not field workers in South Florida.
“There is no nexus between the program and our supply chain,” Wendy’s wrote in a statement on Tuesday.
But farmworkers say that federal monitoring of work in the fields is sporadic at best and that the industry’s own standards are minimal. The coalition argues that other workers, including ones in greenhouses, also deserve similar health and heat protections.
Under the Fair Food program, the code of conduct that farms have to follow is extensive, covering sexual misconduct, wage theft and other common labor issues. In 2021, the code of conduct was revised to include protections from the rising temperatures — a problem that climate change is making worse.
For 46 sweltering days this summer, Miami sizzled in heat index temperatures that topped 100 degrees every afternoon. That shattered the previous record, set in 2020, of 32 days in a row above 100 degrees.
Under the program, workers are educated on heat-stress signs and encouraged to take breaks
any time they need to. Between April and November — the hottest months — the rules stiffen. Growers must provide 10-minute breaks every two hours where every single worker has to stop what they are doing. Workers also are required to get electrolyte drinks during those hotter months. That’s largely what workers were initially seeking in the Miami-Dade ordinance that is now in limbo.
Farm operators have a financial incentive to follow the rules — continued access to the biggest buyers of produce in America, said Laura Safer Espinoza, who directed the Fair Food Standards Council for a decade. The Fair
Food Standards Council is a third-party group that enforces the agreements between the workers, growers and buyers.
“The reason we can protect them from retaliation is because the grower would be suspended from the program and unable to sell,” said Safer Espinoza, who served as a New York State Supreme Court justice for 20 years. “That kind of marketbased enforcement has led to a situation where workers do raise their voices.”
The program includes several layers of oversight. Once a year and sometimes more, investigators perform in-depth audits at the farms and interview at least half the workforce. They check the worker’s time logs, pay slips and housing conditions.
But the audit is only a snapshot in time, Safer Espinoza said, which is why there’s a need for a 24/7 anonymous tip line that leads directly to Fair Food Program investigators available to talk in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.
Since the program started in 2011, there have been nearly 4,000 hotline complaints, with 82% of them resolved by the partnership of the standards council and growers within a month.
“I saw the change happen before my eyes,” said Gonzalo of the Immokalee Workers. “The crew leaders and supervisors that for many years harassed women were fired from the industry. Others who engaged in harassing comments in the field changed the way they treated us as workers and women.”
FOR ONE GROWER, A ‘MAGICAL’ CHANGE
By contrast, since 2020, OSHA has fined five Florida employers after employees died of heat illness, deaths that the agency said could have been prevented if their employers had followed “established safety practices regarding heat-related hazards.”
And while OSHA is working on a heat protection standard for outdoor workers nationwide, it could be years before the draft rule is introduced.
“Even if OSHA does somewhere down the line ultimately come up with guidelines, what will the enforcement mechanism actually be?” Safer Espinoza said. “And it’s very hard to beat market-based enforcement where everyone is motivated to comply.”
Miguel Rios, who was a regional agricultural enforcement coordinator at the U.S. Department of Labor for 27 years before stepping into a role on the Fair Food Standards Council, said all agencies struggle with solving problems quickly.
“Despite the best efforts of a lot of good people in the agency, there is simply not the resources or bandwidth to do so many things that FFP does,” Rios said.
Jon Esformes, the CEO of the Sunripe Certified Brands tomato fields in Immokalee and Central Florida, said he can’t see and monitor every corner of the field, so having a reporting system that workers feel comfortable using is the main reason that he joined forces with the coalition 14 years ago. While the company previously had a similar code, he said he soon realized that workers were scared to complain to the boss, and the audits and tip line became an important outlet.
“It was a 180-degree transformation in the relationship between the company and the people who do the work,” he said. “For lack of a better word, it was magical.”
A MODEL FOR HEAT PROTECTION
But hundreds of thousands of other outdoor workers in South Florida, including many working in the nurseries and fields of the Redland, aren’t covered by the program.
Oscar Londoño, the executive director of WeCount, a group that led the stalled grass-roots campaign for the first heat protections in MiamiDade, said the Fair Food Program shows there are avenues other than government legislation to protect workers. Groups of South Miami-Dade outdoor workers will attending the event in Palm Beach County.
“Their model shows us that the industry who have been actively lobbying against Que Calor are acting in bad faith, because we know there are already companies that can afford to protect their workers from extreme heat,” Londoño said.