Talk Poverty, a project of Center for
American Progress, runs great read on the Fair Food
Program…
Moyers & Company also picks up article analyzing worker-led approach
that drives success of CIW’s Fair Food Program…
Over the past generation, Corporate Social Responsibility programs (a field known by the acronym “CSR”) – based on a mix of corporate-drafted vendor codes of conduct, voluntary compliance, and periodic auditing – have been embraced and promoted by large corporations looking to blunt increasing public scrutiny of inhumane labor conditions in their suppliers’ operations. Yet today, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on CSR initiatives around the globe, non-compliance with basic labor and human rights standards is still rampant, and in many industries the norm.
Driven by the persistence of humiliating, dangerous, and exploitative conditions in workplaces from the fields of Florida to the sweatshops of Bangladesh, workers themselves have begun to redefine the terms of social responsibility. This new approach posits a way forward in which independent worker organizations take a leading role in the drafting of new labor standards, and in the monitoring and enforcement of those standards, empowered by the purchasing power of corporate buyers that support the new standards through binding agreements with the worker organizations. This worker-led model of social responsibility — or “WSR,” to coin a term — differs from the traditional CSR approach on several levels, from its underlying objectives (CSR is driven by the imperative to prevent public relations crises, while the fundamental goal of WSR is to eliminate the underlying human rights violations that provoke those public relations crises) to its governance (corporations exercise unilateral control in the case of CSR, while workers play a leading role, in partnership with corporations and suppliers, in the case of WSR).
The few WSR initiatives that exist today are new and largely still in the developmental stage. But where the WSR approach has had an opportunity to be tested, as it has in the Florida tomato industry over the past four years through the CIW’s Fair Food Program (FFP), the results have been not just encouraging, but dramatic. Talk Poverty, a project of the Center for American Progress, asked the CIW to discuss the worker-driven approach behind the FFP’s success and the results it has achieved in its first three years of operation, which we did in a short article published last week and also picked up in Bill Moyers’ widely read site, Moyers & Company.
Here’s an excerpt from the piece, but be sure to read the article in its entirety:
Over the past generation, Corporate Social Responsibility programs (a field known by the acronym “CSR”) – based on a mix of corporate-drafted vendor codes of conduct, voluntary compliance, and periodic auditing – have been embraced and promoted by large corporations looking to blunt increasing public scrutiny of inhumane labor conditions in their suppliers’ operations. Yet today, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on CSR initiatives around the globe, non-compliance with basic labor and human rights standards is still rampant, and in many industries the norm.
Driven by the persistence of humiliating, dangerous, and exploitative conditions in workplaces from the fields of Florida to the sweatshops of Bangladesh, workers themselves have begun to redefine the terms of social responsibility. This new approach posits a way forward in which independent worker organizations take a leading role in the drafting of new labor standards, and in the monitoring and enforcement of those standards, empowered by the purchasing power of corporate buyers that support the new standards through binding agreements with the worker organizations. This worker-led model of social responsibility — or “WSR,” to coin a term — differs from the traditional CSR approach on several levels, from its underlying objectives (CSR is driven by the imperative to prevent public relations crises, while the fundamental goal of WSR is to eliminate the underlying human rights violations that provoke those public relations crises) to its governance (corporations exercise unilateral control in the case of CSR, while workers play a leading role, in partnership with corporations and suppliers, in the case of WSR).
The few WSR initiatives that exist today are new and largely still in the developmental stage. But where the WSR approach has had an opportunity to be tested, as it has in the Florida tomato industry over the past four years through the CIW’s Fair Food Program (FFP), the results have been not just encouraging, but dramatic. Talk Poverty, a project of the Center for American Progress, asked the CIW to discuss the worker-driven approach behind the FFP’s success and the results it has achieved in its first three years of operation, which we did in a short article published last week and also picked up in Bill Moyers’ widely read site, Moyers & Company.
Here’s an excerpt from the piece, but be sure to read the article in its entirety:
How did a program born in the small, hardscrabble farmworker community of Immokalee, Florida become a leading model for the protection of human rights on the global level?Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to ask another question: “What if workers designed a social responsibility program to protect their own human rights?” What would such a worker-designed social responsibility program look like?...
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