photos: Sarasota Magazine
Beau McHan,
Harvest Manager, Pacific Tomato Growers on the FFSC auditors: “They’re extremely
thorough. Other auditors or inspectors might just poke their heads in, but
these guys talk to pretty much every worker. Then they check their records with
our office.”
In a must-read, well-written, wide-ranging article published in this month’s
issue of Sarasota Magazine, entitled “A Sarasota Organization Brings Hope and
Justice to Florida’s Tomato Fields,” freelance journalist Philippe Diederich
takes a close look at the Fair Food Standards Council, the third party
monitoring body for the Fair Food Program, and comes away impressed.
The article begins with a compelling depiction of the problems that had faced
farmworkers in Florida’s tomato fields before the Fair Food Program:
Ten years ago, at the age of 22, Julia de la Cruz
left her home and family in the mountains of Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest
states. She hoped to make enough money working in the tomato fields of Southwest
Florida to continue her studies and perhaps one day become a doctor. Instead she
found herself trapped in a world of poverty and fear, where swaggering bosses
bullied and abused the workers they employed.
“I’ve seen crew leaders keep workers’ paychecks.
There was a lot of robbery,” she says. Some beat the workers and a few even held
them captive. Women, especially, suffered at the hands of the leaders, who would
harass them and sometimes demand sexual favors in exchange for giving them
easier jobs. [...]
[...] It goes on to tell the story of the Campaign for
Fair Food and how the success of that campaign gave birth in 2010 to the Fair
Food Program and the Fair Food Standards Council, interviewing harvesting
supervisors from Pacific Tomato Growers, the first company to sign a Fair Food
agreement with the CIW, for their impressions of the Program and the
FFSC...
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