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“We know from our own experience in speaking to workers and monitoring workers who come through the guest worker program that the entire system is rife with illegal recruitment fees,” said Laura Safer Espinoza, the executive director of the Fair Food Standards Council, a nonprofit organization that monitors and enforces the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program, and a former Supreme Court justice for the State of New York. “It is the norm—not the exception.”

The Fair Food Program, a solution to that kind of abuse, audits partner growers’ farms across eight states and ensures they adhere to a code of conduct, which mandates wages going directly to workers and prohibits forced labor. It also responds to a 24/7 complaints hotline.

The workers are additionally brought into the U.S. via a well-monitored “clean channel of recruitment,” Safer Espinoza said—via Mexico’s equivalent to the Department of Labor—and growers, not contractors, serve as their direct employer.

If the growers in the program run afoul of the initiative’s rules, they’re suspended from selling their produce to major buyers, like McDonald’s and Walmart. Labor contractors, which Safer Espinoza said frequently file the petitions to get guest workers, often form and dissolve companies that make it difficult for them to be tracked and held accountable.

“We’re there, we’re laying eyes on the conditions, we’re seeing the housing,” Safer Espinoza said. “No one is… follow[ing] up on what happens to these workers when they get here. You have to investigate, you have to go see: Are the people actually being taken where they said?”