The failed grower certification program, Socially Accountable Farm Employers (SAFE), is an example of what happens when corporations, suppliers and other “stakeholders” build social responsibility schemes that deliberately exclude workers. SAFE, now dissolved, illustrates how social responsibility programs without real worker participation and enforcement mechanisms backed by market power are not only incapable of identifying or redressing significant abuses, but are ultimately unable to achieve even their true (though unstated) goal of protecting brands and suppliers from reputational harm. Ineffective at both ending human rights violations and the public relations crises sparked by those violations, these schemes cannot withstand public scrutiny and will increasingly lose ground to the proven Worker-driven Social Responsibility approach.
Workers harvest tomatoes near Immokalee, FL. Photo credit: CIW.
For decades, retail food corporations extracted below market-cost tomatoes from their Florida suppliers with no questions asked about the conditions in which farmworkers labored. That changed decisively in March, 2005 when Yum! Brands, then owner of Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Long John Silver’s and A&W, signed a ground-breaking Fair Food Agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). This agreement was forged after four years of a consumer/farmworker campaign that drew public attention to farmworkers’ poverty wages and exploitation – including forced labor – at the base of Taco Bell’s tomato supply chain. Through the Fair Food Agreement, Yum! Brands legally committed itself to paying a penny-per-pound down its supply chain to increase the wages of farmworkers harvesting for Taco Bell’s suppliers and to sourcing only from those Florida growers who complied with the Fair Food Code of Conduct, which farmworkers designed. As the Lakeland Ledger reported on January 26, 2006, “Vegetable growers and other restaurant chains knew the Bell deal, the first of its kind, tolled for them.”
A few weeks later, representatives of the restaurant industry and Florida growers met to devise how they would prevent the new Fair Food approach from spreading while simultaneously protecting their brands. Chief among them were the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association (FFVA) and McDonald’s, the fast-food giant that CIW had announced as the campaign’s next target.
This conversation gave birth to Socially Accountable Farm Employers, a grower-controlled monitoring initiative that would audit and then certify those Florida farms that passed as “free” of labor exploitation. Retail food corporations would, in turn, show their customers that they were socially accountable by purchasing from farms certified by SAFE.
The mission of SAFE could have been taken from almost any CSR program for suppliers. SAFE’s mission read, “SAFE certification signifies that a producer has complied with all applicable laws and regulations governing employment in the jurisdiction in which the company operates.”
SAFE’s standards, limited as they were, were to be audited by a third party, Intertek. Intertek was a provider of the traditional “snapshot” audit, an approach to monitoring that is generally incapable of uncovering clandestine abuses such as forced labor or identifying abuses that occur at times other than when audits are happening. Considering what was then the endemic nature of human rights abuses in the Florida tomato industry and the sheer magnitude of acreage that needed to be monitored, certifying any farm as “free” of exploitation as a result of passing these time-delimited, high-level audits was effectively a hollow claim that would collapse under any concerted scrutiny.
It would only be a matter of time until the next serious abuse came to light. Undaunted, McDonald’s PR firm, CBR Public Relations, constructed a website and SAFE went about incorporating itself and setting up a board that would provide public credibility. The head of a charitable organization that provided childcare to farmworker children – and that was financially supported by the FFVA – was tapped to humanize and legitimize SAFE as good for workers even as the director admitted to the press that, “As far as she knows, no farmworkers were involved in writing the code.”
Consumer pressure from the campaign led McDonald’s to sign a Fair Food Agreement with the CIW in April, 2007. Burger King, however, as the next target of the CIW’s campaign, picked up the mantel of SAFE and endeavored to use it as insulation against Campaign for Fair Food. But in a tragic irony, on the same day in November 2007 that Intertek certified Burger King’s Florida tomato suppliers who participated in SAFE as “free” of slavery at a press conference held in downtown Immokalee, just blocks away a dozen workers, who had been held against their will and forced to labor in the fields of two of SAFE’s grower members, were telling their horrific story of enslavement to Collier County law enforcement. The case would become US v Navarrete.
Two years later, when the US Department of Justice successfully prosecuted the case, and after Burger King, Subway, Bon Appetit, Compass, Sodexo and Aramark had joined Yum! Brands and McDonald’s in signing Fair Food Agreements with the CIW, the power of legally binding agreements was demonstrated. The inability of those two SAFE growers on whose farms the enslaved men had labored to continue to sell those major Fair Food buyers compelled those growers sign their own Fair Food agreements with the CIW. By November 2010, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, whose members produce over 90 percent of Florida’s tomatoes, had itself signed a Fair Food Agreement with the CIW, giving birth to the Fair Food Program. SAFE was then dissolved.