Leaders from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) speak at the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in a session titled “Rights Holders at The Centre: Strengthening Accountability To Advance Business Respect For People And Planet In The Next Decade.”

The panel touches on:

• The importance of the involvement of workers in developing and implementing programs meant to benefit them.
• The role of peer-to-peer education in establishing workers as frontline defenders of their own rights.
• The failures of established Corporate Social Responsibility and the auditing industry to stamp out human rights abuses in supply chains.
• The value of brands signing binding agreements with workers in their supply chains.
• Obstacles to the uptake of the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model, despite being widely recognized as “the emerging gold standard.”

Key quotes:

“You can’t solve the problem with the same kind of thinking that created the problem in the first place. We’ve seen 30 years of complete failure of the auditing system – relying on that same system to implement a breakthrough is an absurd engineering failure…” -Greg Asbed

“Why is adoption taking so long? Because there are vested interests. There are billions of dollars that go into the current CSR systems. If those billions were to go into implementing WSR programs across the globe, it would be revolutionary.

There is immense wealth at the top of every industry; the food system alone is a trillion-dollar industry. If just a tiny percentage of that wealth went to actually implement WSR, not CSR, you’d get the results that all the corporations, that everyone says they want to see.” -Greg Asbed

“A market is a hierarchical system that drives costs downward. The bigger you are, the more you can push those costs downward. For us, that was the breakthrough analysis that allowed us to see that the problems in the field were not just happening this side of the farm gate with bad bosses & growers. It was these massive, consolidated buyers who had the power to drive down prices & thus wages & working conditions down.

And WSR is able to reverse that process. Currently, in most supply chains, the cost of CSR is passed down from buyers, who are required by consumers to show some effort to do something about human rights. That cost is pushed down to suppliers, who pay the fees for audits. The audits are so ineffective however, the actual externalities, the costs of rape & sexual harassment & slavery, those are passed down on the workers. What the workers are saying in WSR is we are tired of carrying those costs.

In WSR, we don’t charge the suppliers for the audits, we go to the brands in binding legal agreements for financial support for the program. So it’s a reversal of the hierarchy to make lives better up and down the chain.” -Greg Asbed