Hard-Fought Corporate Partnerships Yield Big Results for Farmworkers

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

There is a mental exercise Greg Asbed employs as a human-rights activist to help others grasp the little-acknowledged problem that has become his life’s work.

Imagine you’re traveling a lovely country road and happen upon an idyllic farm stand laden with fresh fruits and vegetables. You make your selection and prepare to pay when a scream emanates from a truck in the field behind the cashier. A female worker is being assaulted by a supervisor.

What would you do?

“Not a single person has yet said, ‘I would go ahead and buy that fruit,’ " says Mr. Asbed, adding that he has posed the question to thousands of people over the years. Yet with nearly any fruit or vegetable picked by hand by a woman in this country, “the chances are that woman has been sexually harassed during the picking,” Mr. Asbed says. “That is something that virtually nobody knows.”

How to mitigate routine violence, intimidation, and wage theft at the ground level of the nearly $1 trillion agricultural supply chain is a complex question rendered more fraught by the near invisibility of victims. Many have little formal education, speak limited English, and lack legal documentation to work or live in this country.

But in recent years, using a worker-organizing model rooted in Latin America and forged anew in the tomato fields of Florida, a nonprofit that Mr. Asbed helped found has spurred corporate heavyweights like Walmart and McDonald’s to buy from farms that safeguard against worker abuse. The group has also prodded companies to pay $25 million and counting in additional wages to pickers.

Mr. Asbed’s organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, has transformed conditions in Florida fields from some of the worst to some of the best in U.S. agriculture, largely without government intervention. It has placed the nonprofit at the fore of a global worker-driven movement that aims to hold corporations responsible for the safety and fair treatment of laborers, from Bangladeshi garment factories to Vermont dairy farms. And it recently earned the 54-year-old Mr. Asbed — perhaps the only man with Ivy League credentials to spend 18 years picking watermelons — a $625,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius award.”

“He is certainly one of the visionaries behind the worker-driven social-responsibility model, and yet he always puts the collective first,” says Puja Dhawan, director of the Initiative to End Violence Against Girls and Women at the NoVo Foundation, a benefactor of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers since 2011. “It is deeply, authentically about worker vision and worker leadership.”

A Haitian Education

Mr. Asbed studied neuroscience at Brown University, graduating in 1985, and anticipated a career of research and teaching.

But he put off graduate school. The grandchild of an Armenian genocide survivor and the son of a Maryland county public health official, Mr. Asbed traveled to Haiti instead. He learned Haitian Creole and got involved in a unique strain of community education and collective activism among the extreme poor — an approach to social change known in Latin America as “popular education” — during a period of upheaval in that country.

At its simplest, popular education brings people together to consider their places within social and economic structures and facilitates dialogue and action to achieve change. Because the approach is used with low-literacy populations, it relies heavily on graphics, cartoons, and skits. Popular education helped advance the pro-democracy movement in Haiti, resulting in the first democratically elected president in 1990.

The three years in Haiti proved formative for Mr. Asbed, expanding his view of what was possible. If popular education could be used to better the lives of the destitute in Haiti, he thought, “then certainly here we could address some of the problems we have had for a long time that seem intractable but in fact aren’t.”

A life in a research lab was off the table.

Wage Theft

In 1991, Mr. Asbed and his soon-to-be wife, fellow human-rights activist and lifelong collaborator Laura Germino, took jobs at a legal-services office in a humble agricultural community an hour’s drive east of Cape Coral, Fla. Immokalee — it rhymes with “broccoli” and means “my home” in Seminole — has a poverty rate of 44 percent, more than three times the national rate. The U.S. Census lists its population as 24,154, although the headcount swells with seasonal farm laborers during the winter tomato-picking season.

From the outset, in their jobs as community specialists, Mr. Asbed and Ms. Germino heard stories of beatings and sexual harassment in the fields. Wage theft came in various forms.

For example, tomato pickers, paid by the bucket, were required by field supervisors to “cup” their buckets, or pile tomatoes well above the rim. That mound of tomatoes, referred to in Spanish as the “copete,” meant that for roughly every 10 buckets, workers were picking one bucket for free. The copete sparked fights in the fields, with supervisors claiming buckets weren’t sufficiently cupped and pickers balking at being ripped off.

In other instances, growers paid laborers only for the time they actually spent picking the product. So they often waited for hours on fields’ edges, without compensation, for the morning dew to dry until picking could commence.

There were familiar faces in Immokalee. Mr. Asbed and Ms. Germino’s early time there coincided with a wave of asylum seekers arriving from Haiti — the overthrow of the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide made his supporters instant political targets — some of whom Mr. Asbed had worked alongside during his time in that country.

“There were incredible community-organization educators from Haiti, Mexico, and Guatemala who were there working in the fields but who both felt the urgency to make things better and had the tools to do it,” Mr. Asbed says.

‘Back-Breaking Work’

Community members started to meet at a local Catholic church, where a vision for a worker-based movement to address longstanding human-rights violations in U.S. agriculture began to take shape. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers was formally established as a nonprofit in 1996. Early supporters included the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, and the Presbyterian Committee on the Self-Development of People. Later, the Ford, Kresge, Marguerite Casey, NoVo, Mertz Gilmore, and Hill-Snowdon foundations would also support the work.

“They were all willing to take a real risk,” says Mr. Asbed, noting that those early backers gave money based on little more than a description of the popular-education approach and with zero expectations of quick results.

Embedded in the coalition’s founding was the philosophy that any staff should be members of the community and live lives commensurate with others in Immokalee. Translation: Their compensation would be on par with that earned by pickers in the fields. No matter that Mr. Asbed and Ms. Germino both have degrees from Brown — annual wages started at $10,000.

“There is no distinction,” said NoVo Foundation’s Ms. Dhawan. “It is as a flat of an organization as I have ever seen, to be honest.”

Farm laborers were often gouged by area merchants, so one early action was to establish a cooperative where basic food and necessities could be purchased at fair prices. The coalition established a watermelon-picking cooperative, working directly with growers in states including Florida, Georgia, and Missouri. The idea was to eliminate the labor middleman and earn equal pay for equal work; if each person didn’t carry his or her weight, the entire crew would be fired.

“It is absolutely back-breaking work,” said Mr. Asbed, who picked watermelons from 1996 to 2014. “It is absurdly heavy. Difficult. And still, in some remarkable way, rewarding work.”

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Targeting Corporations

The nonprofit also organized several labor strikes and protests. Efforts in the 1990s mostly focused on growers, and there were some gains in wages. But the increases were modest and hard to come by. In the early 2000s, coalition leaders set their sights on a different link in the agriculture supply chain: corporate buyers. If the biggest food companies did business only with farms that treated workers justly, those growers would be compelled to mitigate abuse or risk losing their shirts, coalition leaders realized.

“In addition, they felt that this act by corporate consumers would also be supported and appreciated by individual consumers like you and me,” said David Wang, a former corporate executive, venture capitalist, and longtime supporter of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. “That out of common decency, a lot of common average citizens would support, and perhaps even promote, the idea that corporations should pay a living wage.”

Getting through the door at many of the country’s biggest food companies proved impossible.

“I come out of the corporate milieu,” Mr. Wang says. “If I were the guy in the corner office, I’d say who the hell is this Coalition of Immakolee Workers who’s going to tell me what to do?”

Indeed, most letters and calls went unanswered, Mr. Asbed says.

In 2001, the coalition formally kicked off its Campaign for Fair Food. Starting with a boycott of Taco Bell, owned by Yum Brands, the nonprofit began to wage public campaigns to pressure corporations into addressing human-rights abuses in the fields where their tomatoes were grown.

Where attempts at private communication and negotiation with corporations failed, those campaigns — part public education, part public shaming — proved effective. In 2005, Yum Brands agreed to pay additional wages directly to laborers picking its tomatoes and to adopt a code of conduct — developed collectively by laborers themselves — to mitigate labor abuse in fields.

In subsequent years, other companies followed, including McDonald’s, Burger King, and Whole Foods.

Today, 14 corporate buyers participate in what the Coalition of Immokalee Workers formally branded, in 2011, as the Fair Food Program. Nearly two dozen growers have signed on in Florida, but also in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey. About 90 percent of the tomato-growing market in Florida is now operating under the Fair Food Program. (See article at right to learn how the Fair Food Program functions.)

“There are all kinds of issues in the food business that need creative solutions, and the Coalition of Immakolee Workers over many years has built really the deepest social accountability program in U.S. agriculture,” says Matt Rogers, senior global produce coordinator at Whole Foods, one of the nonprofit’s earliest corporate partners.

Still Struggling

The victories continue to be hard won. While the coalition has succeeded in securing grant dollars from national foundations, it has largely been ignored by the region’s philanthropists, according to Mr. Wang, a resident of Naples, Fla., and a major donor to numerous groups and organizations.

“The fact of the matter is the make-up [of the community] is so conservative that I have personally tried but not been able to engage any of my friends on this topic, either to understand or to become a financial supporter,” says Mr. Wang, describing himself as the occasional “banker of last resort” in especially lean years at the coalition.

There continue to be major corporate holdouts. Among those the nonprofit is currently targeting for the Fair Food Program are Publix supermarkets and Wendy’s, the latter of which took its tomato buying to Mexico, where human-rights abuses, including the use of child labor, are well-documented.

Wendy’s spokeswoman Heidi Schauer said in an email that Wendy’s has a “supplier code of conduct” to ensure fair treatment of workers. She also said that Mr. Asbed’s group is trying to pressure Wendy’s to pay fees to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. “We buy a lot of tomatoes for which they don’t receive any money,” Ms. Schauer says.

The coalition also has been subject to legal attacks, including a lawsuit filed in 2011 that accused it of stealing the additional wages paid by corporate buyers to low-wage farm laborers. The nonprofit says it never touches the premium that buyers pay to participate; the money goes to growers who add it directly to laborers’ paychecks.

Enduring Tough Times

One of their gifts, Mr. Wang says of Mr. Asbed and Ms. Germino, is “that they were able to endure the days of attacks on their integrity. They were able to endure the days when the doors were completely shut against any dialogue, and endure the days when they were almost broke.”

But for all the years of toil, the results are indisputable, says Susan Marquis, dean of Pardee RAND Graduate School, who spent years researching the work of the coalition for a newly published book I Am Not a Tractor.

Once resistant, tomato growers are now enthusiastic partners, she says, and some workers have seen their yearly wages as much as double. Today, some laborers’ earnings can top $20,000 a year, according to Mr. Asbed.

Abuses including violence, sexual harassment, and wage theft have been all but eliminated. Ms. Marquis cites the much-despised “copete” as one example. In developing the Fair Food Program code of conduct for growers and corporations, workers banned the requirement to cup tomato buckets.

“By eliminating the cupping, you immediately reduce violence in the fields,” Ms. Marquis says. “You reduce beatings, throwing tomato buckets back in the workers faces. You would never come up with that standard from the outside.”

And the improvements in conditions in Florida fields have come largely without government involvement, she says, except some criminal cases the coalition helped bring against individuals guilty of using slave labor.

“That is pretty extraordinary,” Ms. Marquis says, “particularly when you look at the comprehensive nature of the program.”

MacArthur Knocks

There is an inherent tension in individually accepting a prestigious national award when the work you do is by definition collective, Mr. Asbed says.

“There is nothing in the world of human rights that you can achieve as an individual. Nothing,” Mr. Asbed says. “Because the forces that create human-rights violations are much greater than any individual. Any success, any inch of ground that we have ever won over these 25 years has been won through a tremendously broad, collective effort.”

The call from the MacArthur Foundation that he had been named a 2017 fellow came in September, when Mr. Asbed was nailing plywood to his house in LaBelle, Fla., ahead of the arrival of Hurricane Irma, he says.

Mr. Asbed says he will give the entire $625,000 prize to the Coalition of Immakolee Workers to advance its work. One major priority on the fundraising front at the nonprofit is to grow what is now a very small pool of sustaining donors, he says.

“There is nothing you could give your money to that it is better than something that stops sexual harassment and sexual assault, that stops modern-day slavery, that stops violence and wage theft, that stops these things that have been happening for generations and that continue to happen in the vast majority of fields in this country,” Mr. Asbed says.

The work yet to be done is vast, he points out. Four-fifths of women working as laborers in U.S. agriculture report being sexually harassed. Beatings are a daily occurrence.

Still, it’s a reality that can be changed. The Coalition of Immakolee Workers and the Fair Food Program now have years worth of data proving what works to mitigate abuse in labor supply chains, he says, and now is the time to expand the work elsewhere.

“You have a system designed not to create positive public relations for brands, which is what most corporate social responsibility is, but to change peoples’ lives,” Mr. Asbed says. “And it does.”

Correction: In two instances, an earlier version of this story stated that tomato pickers’ annual wages had climbed to about $16,000 since the founding of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Some workers now earn more than $20,000 a year.