Vermont dairy worker on the Milk with Dignity Program: “Now that we’re in the program, I learned my rights as a worker, about raises and days off, about how we should be treated. Now we can speak freely, without fear.”
This past Wednesday, Vermont dairy workers with Migrant Justice held a press conference in Waterbury, Vermont, eager to announce some very exciting news: After its landmark agreement with Ben & Jerry’s last October, Migrant Justice – together with the brand-new Milk with Dignity Standards Council – has been hard at work turning the promises of that seminal agreement into a reality, and the initial results are nothing short of remarkable. The Milk With Dignity Program is the first full-fledged replication of the Fair Food Program model in the United States.
For hundreds of workers on over 70 farms across Vermont, the changes heralded by the creation of the Milk with Dignity Program are well underway. Wednesday’s press conference was covered in an article by the Associated Press, which described the progress of the Milk with Dignity Program to date:
WATERBURY, Vt. (AP) — A farmworker-driven agreement that Ben & Jerry’s signed last year to improve pay and working conditions of laborers on farms that provide the ice cream company milk has been successful, with 72 Northeast farms enrolled and 250 farmworkers covered, the company and a farmworker advocacy group said Wednesday.
Ben & Jerry’s signed the “Milk with Dignity” agreement last October, believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S. dairy industry. It’s based on the Fair Food Program started for tomato workers in Florida.
Ben & Jerry’s pays a premium to farmers who agree to follow certain labor and housing standards, including meeting Vermont’s minimum wage and providing workers with one day off a week, five paid sick days and five paid vacation days a year. A third party board monitors farms, takes and addresses complaints from workers and works with farms on improvements.
Ben & Jerry’s gets milk from the St. Albans Cooperative in Vermont, where 72 farms are enrolled in the Milk with Dignity program, producing milk for the company’s ice cream. That milk gets mixed with milk from other cooperative members, the company said.
Many of the farms rely on immigrant labor.
“Milk with Dignity has been the dream of farmworkers in Vermont for many years,” Enrique Balcazar, a former farmworker from Tabasco, Mexico, said through an interpreter. He has worked on four different dairy farms in Vermont. “It’s a path forward for us to have our voices recognized and to have our rights and dignity recognized,” said Balcazar who is a leader in the group Migrant Justice.
In addition to news conference in Waterbury, Migrant Justice launched the brand-new Milk with Dignity website online. The new site details the structure and function of the Program’s monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, its worker-informed Code of Conduct, and the third-party auditing of the Milk with Dignity Standards Council...
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