By Alexandra Brodsky • @azbrodsky • 10 years ago

Walmart supports the Fair Food Program

Victory to the Farmworkers sign

Photo via radgeek.com

In a rare ethical move, Walmart has agreed to join the Coalition of Immokalee Workers‘ Fair Food Program, a model for fair agricultural labor practices. The CIW wrote after yesterday’s announcement:

Today’s agreement will bring immediate and concrete benefits to tens of thousands of farmworkers in the Florida tomato industry.  Roughly 30,000 workers will benefit directly from this agreement, via the Fair Food Premium and/or through Walmart’s support for the human rights standards in the Fair Food Code of Conduct already in place at the farms where they work.  For a program like the FFP, which is fueled by the market power of its retail partners, the participation of the single biggest company in the food industry today — or in the history of the planet, for that matter — will bring about the greatest impact on workers’ lives that any individual new partner could contribute to the Program.

The FFP is a BFD. The plan raises the standard for fair labor across a range of issues: it requires pay increases, a zero tolerance policy for sexual violence, a prohibition on forced labor, workers’ rights education on farms, complaint resolution mechanisms, and site-specific health and safety committees. And however skeptical we may be of any Walmart decision, their partnership will protect thousands of people immediately and provide a platform for FFP-standards in other segments of the agricultural industry.

Alexandra

Alexandra Brodsky is a witty one-liner.

Washington, DC

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com. During her four years at the site, she wrote about gender violence, reproductive justice, and education equity and ran the site's book review column. She is now a Skadden Fellow at the National Women's Law Center and also serves as the Board Chair of Know Your IX, a national student-led movement to end gender violence, which she co-founded and previously co-directed. Alexandra has written for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Nation, and she is the co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future. She has spoken about violence against women and reproductive justice at campuses across the country and on MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, ESPN, and NPR.

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com.

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