Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Naples Daily News: “What began as a fight against exploitation in Immokalee’s farm fields may now be improving the health of the next generation.” Presbyterian Hunger Program National Hunger Associate Andrew Kang Bartlett: “This groundbreaking study is a powerful affirmation that dignity at work is inseparable from health and life itself.”

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.

The first article comes courtesy of the Naples Daily News, while the second is from the news service of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). 

Collier County labor program led to healthier babies, study finds

What began as a fight against exploitation in Immokalee’s farm fields may now be improving the health of the next generation.

A new study links the Fair Food Program — a farmworker-led effort created by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to enforce labor protections in agriculture — to a roughly 10% reduction in low-birth-weight babies among farmworker mothers from Latin America.

The research analyzed more than a decade of U.S. birth records from 2006 to 2018 to evaluate how improvements in agricultural working conditions influence long-term health.

Dr. Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that findings point to measurable health effects beyond the workplace.

“Low-weight births isn’t just a number on a chart that we think about, but it’s actually really, really important,” he said in an interview with The News-Press & Naples Daily News. “It predicts that child’s cognitive development over the long term of that child, implications on long-term health and long-term earnings and competitiveness in the market.”

What is driving the improvement in birth outcomes?

The study points to higher wages and changes in working conditions as benefiting birth outcomes.

Counties that adopted the Fair Food Program saw a 24% increase in agricultural worker pay, researchers found. Coupled with protections against wage theft, that increase often moves a family of two above the poverty line during pregnancy. Researchers said this financial stability helps expectant mothers have better access to nutrition and medical care.

“It’s the individuals whose wages have been depressed for so long that now all of a sudden are getting a livable or closer to a livable wage,” Rubalcaba said. “It helps alleviate some of these trade-offs that we do when considering economics of the household: Do I buy fresh foods and vegetables? Or, do I have enough money now to go get seen for prenatal care? Do I buy food or do I buy medication?”

The Fair Food Program also mandates farms to follow strict labor standards, including rest breaks in high heat, access to water and electrolytes and zero-tolerance policies for sexual harassment and abuse. Those are all factors that researchers say can affect stress levels during pregnancy.

Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice and current executive director of the Fair Food Standards Council, said those conditions can directly affect maternal health.

“The increased compensation, the respectful workplace where women don’t have to leave their dignity at the farm gate in order to earn the money that their families need — I think that’s huge in terms of having a more beneficial result for their babies and their health generally,” she said…

Born in Naples’ backyard

The program grew out of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which was founded in 1993 to fight wage theft, abuse and forced labor in Southwest Florida’s agricultural industry.

At the time, federal prosecutors described Immokalee as “ground zero for modern-day slavery” due to multiple labor trafficking cases.

The Fair Food Program launched in 2011 and established a system of worker protections backed by legally binding agreements with major buyers that require them to source from farms that meet a code of conduct.

“The Fair Food Program is a human rights transformation that was born in Naples’ own backyard. It’s now the leading paradigm of human rights enforcement in global supply chains,” Safer Espinoza said.

“That’s something that Naples residents can really be proud of, especially the ones that have supported the Fair Food Program and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers over decades.”

Could this model influence public health beyond agriculture? Migrant Justice celebrates the signing of Ben & Jerry’s to participate in Milk with Dignity protecting dairy workers

The study raises questions about whether workplace standards can shape health outcomes on a broader scale.

Rubalcaba said the research was designed to move beyond correlation and examine cause and effect.

“It provided an opportunity to identify how changes in wages and working conditions for low-wage workers impacted health outcomes. As an economist, methodologically, what we were thinking about is, we want to make these causal claims, not just associations.”

Rubalcaba suggests the program’s model could apply to other low-wage industries where workers face similar economic and environmental pressures.

How far has the program expanded?

What started on a farm in Collier County has expanded into a global effort.

The Fair Food Program now operates across 22 states and has efforts in countries including Chile and South Africa. Its model has also inspired similar programs in the garment industry in Bangladesh and Pakistan, as well as dairy farms in Vermont.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recognized the Fair Food Program as a “gold standard” for worker protections, offering financial incentives to growers who join.

Around the same time the Naples Daily News was casting a light on the FFP’s multi-generational impact, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s news service was also heralding the program transformative power. Below are some key excerpts from their own coverage, which you can read in full by clicking here.

Giving babies a better chance at life by improving farmworker conditions Study finds positive results for program with Presbyterian ties

LOUISVILLE — A program that has been protecting the rights of migrant farmworkers for more than a  decade has a new reason to be proud: Researchers have found that it’s good for infants and their hard-working mothers. 

A study in the journal Demography centers on the Fair Food Program(FFP), which was started about 15 years ago by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a longtime partner of the Presbyterian Hunger Program.

Farms that participate in the Fair Food Program agree to uphold ethical labor standards to ensure that migrant workers receive health and safety protections and fair wages. There’s a code of conduct aimed at eliminating abusive practices that workers would otherwise be vulnerable to…

Farmworkers in GA receive an on-the-clock, worker-to-worker education session

PHP National Hunger Associate Andrew Kang Bartlett was pleased to hear of the results.

“As longtime supporters of the CIW, we are thrilled to see the Fair Food Program create tangible benefits for the children of farmworkers!” Kang Bartlett said. “This groundbreaking study is a powerful affirmation that dignity at work is inseparable from health and life itself. The research makes clear that protecting those who harvest our food is essential to nurturing the next generation and building a truly just food system.”

Safer Espinoza, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice, welcomed the results as well. 

“We were very pleasantly surprised that the research yielded such concrete, measurable results. But when you think about it, the difference in the environment that’s been created is so dramatic that it makes perfect sense this would be one of the outcomes,” she said.

“The kinds of conditions that lead to healthy pregnancies are much more present for female workers on Fair Food Program farms than outside the program,” she added. “For starters, as the researchers found, their income is better, so they’re not subject to wage theft. They receive the Fair Food Program premium, so they’re able to feed themselves and their growing families better. And then everyone knows that working in less dangerous conditions, free of sexual harassment, free of verbal harassment, free of threat of violence and general worry about retaliation if you enforce or attempt to enforce your rights under the law — all of that makes for so much less stress and healthier pregnancies all around…” read more

While the PC(USA) article begins with the proposition that the Fair Food Program “has a new reason to be proud,” the truth is that the entire Fair Food Nation has reason to celebrate the extraordinary findings of the UNC and Indiana University public health research teams. Tens of thousands of farmworkers who fought to win the right to serve as frontline monitors of their own rights over the past 25 years. Hundreds of thousands of consumers — students, people of faith, labor and community allies, and more — who joined farmworkers from Immokalee in marches, fasts, and boycotts in communities across the country. Together, they helped make real a new kind of food system: Fair Food.

Together they — or perhaps better said, together we — built a movement capable of taking on one of the most powerful industries in the world and achieving changes once thought impossible: helping to end generations of modern-day slavery, sexual harassment and assault, dangerous working conditions, wage theft, and discrimination in the fields. The remarkable findings of this groundbreaking public health study are just the latest evidence of the profound impact that struggle has had on workers’ lives and on their families and their communities.

So wherever you are today, take a moment to recognize what you have been part of: an unprecedented movement for justice led by workers who had endured exploitation and abuse for generations, but who stood up and fought for their rights, their dignity, and their futures. And by winning not only new rights, but the power to help monitor and enforce those rights in the fields, farmworkers and their allies have measurably improved the lives of workers and their children alike in ways no one could have imagined back in 2001 when the boycott was launched and the cry first went up in Immokalee, “Taco Bell makes farmworkers poor!”

Check back soon for more news from the Campaign for Fair Food and the expansion of the Fair Food Program.

Farmworkers and allies march through Palm Beach in 2023, celebrating the Fair Food Program and calling attention to extreme human rights abuse that continues to occur outside the FFP, including modern-day slavery and sexual violence. The center-piece of the march was a papier-mâché globe depicting the world of protections inside the FFP, and the dark and opaque world of violence and abuse beyond the reach of the FFP. Lawsuit alleges extreme abuse, yet again, on fields beyond the Fair Food Program’s Presidential Medal-winning protections;  How much longer will Fair Food Program holdouts Kroger and Publix continue to turn a blind eye, refuse to join only social responsibility program proven to end abuse?

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. The lawsuit was filed under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1581 et seq. (TVPRA), and the North Carolina Human Trafficking Law, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-43.18 et seq.

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.

We will share those details below. First, however, we wanted to provide some context to understand just how unconscionable the grocery giants’ ongoing refusal is — especially given the leadership of companies like Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Giant, Stop & Shop, and Fresh Market, all Fair Food Program Participating grocers that have put the power of their purchasing orders behind the protection of workers in their supply chains for years.

A brief history of two Fair Food Program holdouts

This case marks the fourth time in five years that Kroger has been linked to allegations of labor trafficking and extreme abuse in the fields. In 2021, an investigation from the LA Times revealed Kroger to be buying tomatoes from a Mexican farm subject to a Withhold Release Order (WRO) from the U.S. Government due to indications of forced labor, and in early 2023, the Department of Labor publicly outed Kroger as a buyer of watermelons harvested by modern-day slaves. Shortly thereafter, Kroger was linked to Maria Patricio, one of the lead defendants convicted in the “Blooming Onion” human trafficking ring. The CIW uncovered the ring, the largest modern-day slavery operation in US history, and the connection to Kroger was laid out in an investigative report in the journal The Lever.

As the London-based Business and Human Rights Resource Centre put it after the Blooming Onion case was connected to Kroger in 2024:

… The question before Kroger — its executive leadership, its board of directors, and its shareholders — is simple: Is having a case of modern-day slavery almost annually over the last 4 years an acceptable level of risk for Kroger, as long as the produce continues to arrive on shelves at the right time, in the right quality, and at the right price?  

If the answer to that question is yes, then Kroger needs to break its silence and own the outrageous failure of its social responsibility approach so consumers can know the company’s true thinking when it comes to the human rights of the men and women who pick its produce.

But if not, then Kroger needs to join the Fair Food Program — the universally-recognized gold standard for preventing forced labor and protecting fundamental human rights in corporate supply chains today — without further delay…

As for Publix, its refusal to join the FFP in the face of nearly annual modern-day slavery prosecutions in Florida’s fields goes even further back. In December of 2010 — shortly after the Fair Food Program was launched at an historic press conference announcing the new partnership between the CIW and the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange — Publix spokesperson Dwaine Stevens told The Bulletin, an Alabama newspaper, when asked if Publix had any intention of joining the promising new initiative:

“We don’t have any plans to sit down with the CIW,” Publix’s Media and Community Relations Manager Dwaine Stevens said, also citing that the company sells around 36,000 products in the stores and it cannot get involved with each product’s labor issues. “If there are some atrocities going on, it’s not our business. Maybe it’s something the government should get involved with.”

That statement — “If there are some atrocities going on, it’s not our business” — didn’t sit well with the growing consumer movement supporting the CIW’s Campaign for Fair Food at the time. Rabbi Bruce Diamond penned a powerful call to action for people of all faiths in the Fort Myers News Press in light of Publix’s cruel indifference, accompanied by a guest editorial cartoon drawn by Casey N. Kindle, a Southwest Florida Fair Food activist:

Publix’s stone wall starting to crumble

Jon Esformes, operating partner of the family-owned Pacific Tomato Growers — one of the largest growers in the nation — quoted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous dictum, “In a free society, few are guilty, but all are responsible,” when he announced an agreement with the 4,000-member Coalition of Immokalee Workers to implement a penny-a-pound raise for the workers and to improve their working conditions. (“Tomato grower, harvesters strike historic accord,” Oct. 14)…

… [Stevens’ statement is] a far cry from the idea that “in a free society, few are guilty, but all are responsible,” and the principle of fairness to working people that is shared by all the world’s great religions…

For sure, a coalition of subsistence workers taking on America’s largest privately owned supermarket chain seems a daunting if not impossible battle.

But men and women of faith know that when are you on the side of the angels, nothing is impossible!

Today, 15 years later, the Fair Food Program has built an unrivaled track record — not only remedying abuses from sexual harassment to forced labor, but preventing them altogether. In light of that success, the continued refusal of retail giants like Kroger and Publix to use their purchasing power to protect farmworkers in their own supply chains is simply unacceptable.

Details of the class action lawsuit Screenshot from the initial complaint, with highlights

The working conditions at the Jackson Farming Company farm as described in the court documents are both deeply troubling and all too common outside the protections of the Fair Food Program. Below is an excerpt from the class action lawsuit, which was filed on April 17:

“Plaintiff and his co-workers worked at Jackson’s Farming Company of Autryville pursuant to temporary foreign worker visas, called H-2A visas. First-time employees were charged an illegal recruitment fee to be put on the list to work for Defendants Alvino Avilez and Avilez & Sons Harvesting, LLC (“Avilez Defendants”), and all employees were charged fees throughout their travel to the U.S. Once the employees arrived in North Carolina, the Avilez Defendants confiscated their passports and Social Security cards with the explicit goal of keeping them from leaving their employment. Rodriguez Luna and his co-workers also experienced a number of wage violations while working in North Carolina. 

Rodríguez Luna and his co-workers were not timely reimbursed for the costs of their visas, travel to and from North Carolina, or associated costs, as required by the H-2A visa program. Defendants did not pay workers at the promised H-2A wage rate, and they created false payroll records purporting to show that the workers were properly paid. The Avilez Defendants also deducted money from the workers’ pay for their Social Security cards. When Plaintiff Rodríguez Luna suffered a work-related injury, Defendants sent him back to Mexico and did not give him his final paycheck.”

Farmworkers with the class action lawsuit further allege that the farm labor contractor being sued also threatened workers if they tried to leave before their contract ended.

The lawsuit is filed on behalf of all farmworkers who were brought to the U.S. by one or more of the Avilez Defendants to perform agricultural work at Jackson Farming Company under H-2A contracts, who performed work during the ten-year period immediately preceding the date on which this action was filed. This could mean well over 100 farmworkers were subjected to comparable conditions to those alleged in the initial complaint, since the Avilez defendants have handled the H-2A petitions for Rodney Jackson, President of Jackson Farming Company, since 2019, with each petition requesting dozens of seasonal workers to harvest a variety of crops.

The farm itself is no stranger to allegations of abuse. Its founding President, Brent Jackson, weathered multiple lawsuits from farmworkers, including one from 2003 where a farmworker suffered a heat stroke so severe that it left him in a permanent “vegetative state.” In the present day, 22 years later, conditions do not appear to have significantly improved on the farm. According to the newest complaint, one farmworker “fell ill while working due to the heat. Because of this he was sent back to Mexico. Other workers who were impacted by the heat were sent to rest in a bus in the field that lacked air conditioning. Those workers were not paid for the rest of the day.” 

Kroger and Publix linked to Jackson Farming Company 

Kroger, through its regional subsidiary Harris Teeter, has itself stated that customers looking to buy produce from Jackson Farming Company can find it on their shelves today. Harris Teeter’s own website indicates they source sweet potatoes, cantaloupe, strawberries, broccoli, and melon for Jackson Farming Company. Meanwhile, the plaintiff in the civil suit alleges he was made to harvest melons, sweet potatoes, and broccoli on both his 2024 and 2025 H-2A contracts. 

Further, a North Carolina Department of Agriculture post from 2020 profiles Jackson Farming Company and states that consumers can find their crops in Harris Teeter and Publix. Because the civil suit’s time span includes those farmworkers with Jackson Farming Company during the 2020 harvest season up until 2025, there is a risk that crops harvested under conditions of extreme abuse have, for at least half a decade, been bought by both Kroger and Publix, and sold to unsuspecting customers.

At the same time, Brent Jackson — founding president of the company and a North Carolina state senator — sponsored legislation that would have weakened workers’ ability to sue for retaliation.

By contrast, farms participating in the Fair Food Program operate under what The New York Times has described as the country’s “best workplace-monitoring program,” where strong anti-retaliation protections are rigorously enforced and workers themselves serve as frontline monitors of their own rights.

Additionally, on the website for Publix, customers can currently buy George Foods-branded petite microwavable sweet potatoes. George Foods is one of the brands of sweet potatoes marketed by 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. 

In light of these apparent connections to the class action lawsuit out of North Carolina’s fields, the question before Kroger and Publix is simple: How many more farmworkers in their supply chains must be subject to outrageous farm labor abuse before they join the Fair Food Program, the only human rights program proven to prevent it? 

A farmworker takes a break to drink water. Fair Food Program farms comply with mandatory heat stress protections that include the provision of water, electrolytes, rest breaks, training, and the ability to stop work and seek medical treatment without fear of retaliation. The Washington Post called the FFP’s standards “America’s strongest workplace heat rules” in a 2024 front page report. 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.

We’re excited to share the article in full with you below. If you’d like to read the article on The Packer’s website, click here.

New Research Links Better Pay and Safer Conditions to Healthier Babies A peer-reviewed study finds that infants born to farmworkers on Fair Food Program farms are 10% less likely to be born at a low birth weight.

A peer-reviewed study published in the journal Demography has found a direct link between participation in the Fair Food Program and improved birth outcomes for farmworkers. Infants born to farmworker mothers on Fair Food Program-certified farms were 10% less likely to be born at a low birth weight.

Low birth weight, the Fair Food Program notes, is closely linked to perinatal mortality, cognitive development, chronic disease risk and more.

Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says low birth weight is a good marker to track, as it’s a sensitive indicator of the “health spillover” for both mothers and infants.

“We do show that mothers are getting healthier,” he says. “Their health, in terms of gestational diabetes and hypertension, [is] improving.”

Quantifying the Health Spillover

Birth weight, which has already been measured and validated through public health research, would also be a way to quantify how the Fair Food Program influenced maternal and infant health outcomes.

“It’s not just the income; it’s all of these other things that go along with that,” Rubalcaba says, noting that improved working conditions create a positive health spillover that extends beyond the individual.

“When you’re healthy, you don’t have to worry about your child being malnourished,” he says. “When you don’t have to worry about the things that we take for granted on a day-to-day basis, you’re able to focus on the things that make you productive.”

Rubalcaba says this spillover effect continues beyond just a nuclear family and into communities.

“The community is thriving as a result of the efforts, at least, in my opinion, in my survey of the data, and the fact that we were able to see a result in publicly available data, in the birth records data, was pretty remarkable,” he says.

Moving Beyond the Paycheck

While the data is remarkable, the three drivers of these health outcomes — safer conditions, higher wages and reduced stress — manifest in personal ways for the workers.

Wage premiums and stricter enforcement against wage theft for farms in the Fair Food Program raised worker incomes by 24%. Legal protections against sexual harassment, forced labor and verbal abuse helped decrease maternal stress levels. The program’s focus on safety standards also helped to reduce physical strain and environmental hazards.

Workers clock in with a timekeeping system–a mandatory feature on Fair Food Program farms that ensures workers are paid for each minute they work

Laura Safer Espinoza, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice and executive director of the Fair Food Standards Council, says the study’s outcome highlights the strong correlation between improvements in overall working environments and increased birth rates.

Safer Espinoza says more than $50 million has been distributed to workers on Fair Food Program farms. What’s more remarkable, she says, is that retailers and brands have pledged to support this program.

“They have agreed to commit their market power and put those purchasing practices to work to incentivize good practices at the bottom of the food supply chain,” she says.

More Than Just Better Pay

Safer Espinoza points to other successes within the program that speak to the broader themes of family. These include requiring workers to be paid at call time, which she says resulted in later starts.

“For the first time, workers who were called to the field at a later time were able to eat breakfast with their children. They were able to walk their children to school,” she says.

As researchers surveyed workers in Immokalee, Fla., about the benefits of the Fair Food Program, it wasn’t only better pay; it was more family time, says Safer Espinoza.

“Families reported that their children were healthier and happier, and parents were delighted to be able to have that precious time with their children in the morning,” she says. “And that’s simply because the law was being enforced.”

Safer Espinoza says this study shows tangible benefits when women working on Fair Food Program farms earn more through increased pay or the elimination of wage theft. She says eliminating sexual harassment and verbal abuse reduces stress and tension, too.

“When mothers can work and expectant mothers can work in an environment where it is safer, where they are treated with more respect, where they don’t have to be fearful and stressed every day, this is the proof that it makes a huge difference,” she says.

And she says the study’s results aren’t necessarily an expected outcome that she and the Fair Food Standards Council members thought would happen on participating farms. She says the survey’s results show a greater impact on the Fair Food Program. 

“We were not necessarily thinking, ‘This will increase birth rate and be transformational across generations in the way that it obviously is and has been proven to be,” she says. “It will make a huge difference for the children who are born to workers on Fair Food Program farms. They’ll be healthier and have better futures, and that’s something that I don’t think was necessarily contemplated when we set out, but it is a very beautiful result of this collaboration.”

A New Standard for Growers Lucas Benitez with John Esformes, CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers DBA Sunripe Certified Brands as the CIW and Pacific agree to join forces to launch Fair Food Program in 2010

Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands and the first grower to join the Fair Food Program, says he’s proud of how his company has become an employer of choice thanks to the positive culture created on his family’s farm. He says a couple of years ago, when he was on a panel about labor shortage with then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, he had to say that he had no trouble recruiting and retaining workers as an employer of choice.

“That spoke to over a decade of bridge building and creating what we call a safe and fair work environment where everybody understands their rights, everybody feels safe and making complaints, everybody feels like the company is open to evolution, and that’s been the history of the relationship with the coalition,” he says.

And that’s truly what workers want, Esformes says.

“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,” he says.

And this study, Esformes says, helps highlight the intangible benefits from creating this type of workplace culture quantitatively.

“People tend to be evidence-based and need that evidence to convince them to keep doing something,” he says. “We didn’t need that for ourselves. For us, we knew what was happening. But in the meantime, it’s good for the general population to have a greater understanding of the efficacy of this type of program and its impact on the community.”