Coalition of Immokalee Workers

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Coalition of Immokalee Workers

"Consciousness + Commitment = Change"

https://linktr.ee/immokalee.workers

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a worker-based human rights organization internationally recognized for its achievements in the fields of corporate social responsibility, community organizing, and sustainable food. The CIW is also a leader in the growing movement to end human trafficking due to its groundbreaking work to combat modern-day slavery and other labor abuses common in agricu

lture. The CIW works in three broad and overlapping spheres:

The Campaign for Fair Food

The CIW’s national Campaign for Fair Food educates consumers on the issue of farm labor exploitation – its causes and solutions – and forges alliances between farmworkers and consumers in an effort to enlist the market power of major corporate buyers to help end that exploitation. Since 2001, the campaign has combined creative, on-the-ground actions with cutting edge online organizing to win Fair Food Agreements with eleven multi-billion dollar food retailers, including McDonald’s, Subway, Sodexo and Whole Foods, establishing more humane farm labor standards and fairer wages for farmworkers in their tomato suppliers’ operations. The Fair Food Program

In 2010, the Campaign for Fair Food resulted in the creation of the CIW’s Fair Food Program (FFP), a groundbreaking model for social responsibility based on a unique partnership among farmworkers, Florida tomato growers, and participating buyers. Under the FFP, the CIW conducts worker education sessions, held on-the-farm and on-the-clock, on the new labor rights set forth in the Fair Food Code of Conduct; the Fair Food Standards Council, a third-party monitor created to ensure compliance with the FFP, conducts regular audits and carries out ongoing complaint investigation and resolution; and participating buyers pay a “penny per pound” premium which tomato growers pass onto workers as a line-item bonus on their regular paychecks (Between January 2011 and May 2013, over $10 million in Fair Food Premiums were paid into the Program). The FFP standards are backed by the market consequences established in the CIW’s Fair Food Agreements, in which participating buyers commit to buy Florida tomatoes only from growers in good standing with the FFP, and to cease purchases from growers who fail or refuse to comply with the Program. The FFP has been called “a brilliant model” and “one of the great human rights success stories of our day” in a Washington Post op-ed. Anti-Slavery Campaign

The CIW’s Anti-Slavery Campaign has uncovered, investigated, and assisted in the prosecution of numerous multi-state, multi-worker farm slavery operations across the Southeastern U.S., helping liberate over 1,200 workers held against their will; pioneered the worker-centered approach to slavery prosecution; played a key role in the passage of the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act; and co-founded the national Freedom Network USA and the Freedom Network Training Institute, which is regularly attended by local, state and federal law enforcement officials. The implementation of the Fair Food Program has ushered in the newest phase of the CIW’s anti-slavery efforts, that of prevention, whereby the market consequences built into the FFP, including zero tolerance for forced labor, encourage participating growers to actively police their own operations, and the worker-to-worker education program at the heart of the FFP informs and empowers tens of thousands of workers to serve as monitors to identify and expose slavery operations wherever they might be present.

06/04/2026

Just a few weeks ago, we revealed that two Fair Food Program holdouts — Kroger and Publix — have both sourced from a farming operation currently being sued by farmworkers for forced labor. Farmworker plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege a shocking pattern of human rights abuses, and the North Carolina-based farm where they say these abuses occurred, Jackson Farming Company, also has a long, publicly-documented history of lawsuits alleging similarly abusive conditions.

We asked both companies a simple question: How many more farmworkers in their supply chains must endure extreme exploitation before Kroger and Publix join the only human rights program with a proven record of preventing these abuses? But when the Business and Human Rights Centre brought these allegations directly to both Kroger and Publix for a response, they were met with deafening silence. However, Kroger’s subsidiary, Harris Teeter, has now removed most mentions of Jackson Farming Company from its website.

Silence in the face of injustice is egregious enough. But silence when presented with a practical, proven solution is nothing short of unconscionable. That silence — the refusal to accept responsibility despite the existence of an effective remedy — is what allows exploitation to continue unabated in the fields beyond the protections of the Fair Food Program. But when we meet this silence, we must get louder as we demand freedom for farmworkers. Stay tuned to take action with us!

05/27/2026

Indian Sugar Workers Alliance: “To remedy – and ultimately prevent – this outrageous exploitation, ISWA urgently calls on the global brands that purchase Indian sugar to engage with workers and collaborate in the implementation of the only internationally recognized solution to forced labour and related abuses for the most vulnerable workers in global supply chains – the Fair Food Program’s Worker-driven Social Responsibility model.”

05/17/2026

The landmark health study linking the Fair Food Program to healthier farmworker mothers and children continues to make waves across the nation!

A few weeks ago, we shared new insights from the study’s lead author on how the FFP’s comprehensive human rights enforcement may not only improve infant birth weights — a key indicator of long-term health and life outcomes — but also reduce rates of gestational diabetes and hypertension. Those findings alone are cause for celebration.

But this week, we want to share two new articles that place the study within the broader story of the Fair Food Program and the remarkable evolution from its humble beginnings in the small agricultural town of Immokalee, Florida, to becoming the new paradigm for human rights enforcement in global supply chains. That meteoric growth would not have been possible without the steadfast partnership of allies across the country — including faith communities like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), whose members have marched alongside farmworkers for decades and whose news service is now helping shine a national spotlight on the Fair Food Program’s historic gains for workers and their families.

Read more: https://ciw-online.org/blog/2026/05/fair-food-programs-transformative-health-impact-featured-in-the-news/

05/11/2026

For over a decade, Kroger and Publix, two of the largest grocery chains in the United States, have refused to join the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program, insisting — year after year, trafficking case after trafficking case — that their current vendor codes of conduct and occasional audits are sufficient to prevent the risk of extreme human rights abuses in their respective supply chains.

Meanwhile, just weeks ago, farmworkers in North Carolina filed a class action lawsuit against their employer, alleging a series of extraordinary human rights violations, including wage theft, threats, confiscation of passports, predatory recruitment fees, and the failure to provide bathrooms, drinking water, or care when workers suffered debilitating heat stress.

Following the publication of the lawsuit, and using publicly available information, the CIW has found that Kroger and Publix buy produce from the company where the plaintiffs in the lawsuit say that they worked, Jackson Farming Company.

There is only one human rights enforcement program in agriculture that is proven to end forced labor, coercion, and retaliation, and that mandates rigorous heat stress protections: the Fair Food Program.

Stand with farmworkers today and demand Kroger and Publix join the Fair Food Program! Use our digital toolkits with easy ways to contact Kroger and Publix: https://linktr.ee/JusticeforFarmworkers

04/27/2026

Produce industry journal The Packer heralds the health benefits of the Fair Food Program

Dr. Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba, lead author on study of the FFP: “We do show that mothers are getting healthier… Their health, in terms of gestational diabetes and hypertension, [is] improving.”

Jon Esformes, CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers and first grower to join the FFP: “At the end of the day, when someone shows up to do a job, they want to go to the job, do their job, earn their money, know that they’re safe and go home.”

A few weeks ago, we shared some remarkable news from the Fair Food Program with you: a multi-state, peer-reviewed public health study found that mothers working on Fair Food Program farms gave birth to healthier infants than their counterparts on non-FFP farms — a powerful reminder that when workers are protected, entire families thrive.

This landmark research — published by Duke University Press in the widely respected journal Demography — is the first to demonstrate that a Worker-driven Social Responsibility program can generate population-level public health gains by guaranteeing fundamental human rights on the job. Its findings suggest that the protections embedded in the Fair Food Program — and similar worker-driven models — can reach far beyond the workplace, functioning as targeted public health interventions in communities long exposed to extreme labor exploitation.

Today, we are proud to share a feature-length article that takes a deeper look at this study, tracing how the Fair Food Program’s worker-drafted human rights standards, backed by multi-layered monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, translate into something profoundly human: healthier families and stronger communities. The feature comes courtesy of The Packer, the nation’s leading produce industry news outlet, which has for years documented the evolution and expansion of the Presidential Medal-winning Fair Food Program.

Written by The Packer’s Produce Editor Christina Herrick, the article brings forward new insights from the study’s lead author, who explains that beyond the reduction in low-birth-weight births, the program is also linked to decreases in diabetes and hypertension. These conditions, long prevalent among farmworkers, are closely tied to birth outcomes but also carry serious, lifelong consequences of their own — underscoring how the same protections that support healthier pregnancies are improving overall health in farmworker communities. The story also features reflections from Laura Safer Espinoza, Executive Director of the Fair Food Standards Council, and Jon Esformes, CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers and the first grower to join the FFP back in 2010. At a glance, the piece offers a deeper understanding of the FFP’s win/win impact, showing how its protections safeguard workers’ health while helping participating growers recruit and retain employees by becoming employers of choice.

Read more: https://ciw-online.org/blog/2026/04/produce-industry-journal-the-packer-heralds-the-health-benefits-of-the-fair-food-program/

04/16/2026

As anyone familiar with farm labor and the history of farmworker organizing knows all too well, the recent revelations of Cesar Chavez’s crimes of sexual violence have shocked and devastated millions across the country. For decades, many drew inspiration from his leadership in winning economic and civil rights for a generation of farmworkers through the United Farm Workers (UFW).

But this news has not only shattered the image of a man long regarded as a hero, it has also forced a long-overdue reckoning with sexual violence itself, and with the unchecked power that enables it. Whether in a social movement like the UFW or in any workplace — from the fields to corporate boardrooms — abuse and exploitation take root when power goes unchallenged, and persist unless countered by structures strong enough to hold abusers accountable.

One such reflection appeared in a thoughtful article published last week in the Christian Science Monitor, titled “Cesar Chavez allegations force a reckoning: Role model or something less?“, which spends the first half of its reporting on the aftermath of the news of Chavez’s abuse and its impact on those who held him in high esteem for so long. But the reporter dedicates the second half of the piece to the subject of the article’s subtitle — “A different coalition achieves labor gains” — and it is that second half that we would like to share with you today, as it takes as its focus the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the CIW’s approach to organizing and its leadership model, and the principal product of three decades of CIW history: the Fair Food Program, a comprehensive human rights protection program that redresses the core power imbalance that has driven farm labor abuse for generations.

It is a rare report that takes seriously the considerations of how a movement is organized internally and how the decisions that shape that internal structure can be reflected in the impact of the movement in the world in which it organizes. If you’d like to read the full article, go to the CIW’s site: www.ciw-online.org — Link in bio!

04/14/2026

Sen. Cory Booker, a Yale Law School alumnus, penned a letter to Yale Hospitality, throwing his weight behind a student campaign for the University to join the Fair Food Program

In the letter, Sen. Booker writes: “As a proud alumnus of Yale Law School (Class of 1997) and a longtime advocate for a healthier and more equitable food system, I write to urge Yale Hospitality to join the Fair Food Program (FFP).”

“The Fair Food Program is widely recognized as one of the most effective human rights initiatives in U.S. agriculture. The CIW are fighting for enforceable human rights. The FFP protects farmworkers from longstanding harms such as violence and wage theft through enforceable agreements with growers and buyers, and independent monitoring through first-hand worker interviews and observation of harvesting operations. Farms that participate are audited and held accountable, while buyers—like universities and corporations—commit to purchasing only from those that meet these rigorous standards. The result is a supply chain that is ethical, transparent, and fair.”

“Yale has long been a leader in both scholarship and social responsibility. Joining the Fair Food Program would extend that leadership into the University’s food system, demonstrating that Yale is committed to protecting farmworkers and supporting responsible growers.”

04/13/2026

🎥 Join us on April 23rd to see “Without Shade, Without Rest,” a new documentary by Six Eye Films that tells the story of worker-led campaigns by CIW and WeCount to win heat protections in Florida! In just two weeks, we’re hosting the free screening from 6-8 PM at the Tampa Community Church, followed by a Q&A with worker leaders and filmmakers. All are welcome! Register now: https://actionnetwork.org/events/423-tampa-screening-without-shade-without-rest/ 🍅🪴

04/08/2026

Yale University students rally with the CIW, hand-deliver petition calling on university to join the FFP

Students at Yale University are turning up the heat on their administration to ensure that the food served at their historic university meets the highest human rights standards in the agricultural industry by joining the Fair Food Program.

Following the stunning revelation that the Ivy League school has been sourcing from produce giant Mastronardi, a massive supplier of fresh fruits and vegetables with a long public record of labor abuse, students marched through the busy streets of downtown New Haven to the headquarters of Yale Hospitality, the office that coordinates university food procurement, to hand-deliver a petition to the Associate Director for University Life calling on Yale to join the FFP as a Participating Buyer.

Two of the co-founders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers traveled to New Haven from Florida to join the spirited and colorful march — which included dozens of hand-painted signs, a papier mache puppet of the sun representing a new day for human rights in the fields, and a stilts-walker wearing a tomato cap knitted especially for the occasion — to lend their voices to the students’ growing call for food justice on campus.

04/01/2026

We’re screening Without Shade, Without Rest in Tampa this month! Join us on April 23rd at the Tampa Community Church to see this groundbreaking documentary by and learn the story of the CIW and and their powerful worker-led campaigns in south Florida. The FREE 6 PM showing will be followed by a Q&A with worker leaders and filmmakers. All are welcome! 🎥🍅🪴

Address

110 S 2nd Street
Immokalee, FL
34142

Website

http://www.ciw-online.org/

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