Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR): A new idea for a new century... Worker-driven social responsibility puts workers first when addressing human rights in corporate supply chains…  If you are even a casual reader of this site you know this:  The Fair Food Program has effected unprecedented change in Florida’s fields since it was implemented across 90% of the state’s tomato industry in 2011.  It has eliminated or greatly reduced longstanding abuses from sexual harassment to modern-day slavery, added over $14 million in Fair Food Premiums to farm payrolls, and earned the praise of human rights experts from the White House to the United Nations.  It has been called “one of the great human rights success stories of our day” in the Washington Post and “the best workplace monitoring program… in the US” on the front page of the New York Times. But even some of our most loyal readers might not know the “secret” behind the Fair Food Program’s success, even though the answer is deceptively simple: The Fair Food Program is a workers’ rights program that is designed, monitored, and enforced by the workers whose rights it is intended to protect.  In the Fair Food Program, workers are not just at the table, they are at the head of the table.  And because workers are the only actors in the supply chain with a vital and abiding interest in seeing that their rights are effectively monitored and enforced, they have, in the case of the Fair Food Program, constructed a system that actually works.   In short, the Fair Food Program is a truly new and distinct form of human rights program that can be called Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR).  And thanks to the workers’ leading role in designing the program, its structure and function stand in stark contrast to the traditional corporate-led approach to social responsibility, known by its acronym CSR, as do its results.   What follows is a quick look at the differences between WSR and CSR along several key dimensions of social responsibility.  The conclusion of that comparison is inescapable: If a human rights program is to be effective, the humans whose rights are in question must be key players in — the subjects, not the objects of — the design and implementation of the program.   It starts with how the problem is defined: Public relations crisis (CSR) vs. Human rights crisis (WSR)… We have established that the fundamental difference between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) — the difference from which all other distinctions logically flow — lies in the question of who is at the helm.  Does the corporation whose supply chain is riddled with human rights violations drive the program, or do the workers whose basic human rights are being violated on a daily basis?... Don't miss the rest of today's reflection on Worker-led Social Responsibility at the CIW website!